For the fifth time in the history of the 15-year-old league punters have been rewarded for their patience in a long off-season with a derby in the opening round to whet their appetite.
The rationale behind such a move is to kick off the competition with a bang, which is fair enough.
Australia's football market, after all, is fickle and immature and sometimes 'football' decisions are not the top priority.
However a big bang was nowhere to be seen in a stale and uneventful Melbourne derby on Saturday night that left an expectant crowd of 33,523 rather deflated.
Victory and City played too cautiously for most of the evening and the 0-0 result was the logical outcome of a contest in which neither team were inclined to have a real go and try to win it except for the last few frantic moments.
Which is perhaps understandable. Losing the first match of the season is never a good sign for any club and for this reason neither coach was prepared to take any unnecessary risks at such an early stage of the competition.
It was as if a Franco-German pact of non-aggression between City's Erick Mombaerts and Victory's Marco Kurz was put in place.
Both Victory and City would have been satisfied with the stalemate although the latter were marginally the better side.
There were only two or three decent scoring chances created by both teams and the highlight of the evening was a 'goal' scored by lively Victory winger Elvis Kamsoba that was first given then rightly disallowed for a clear offside by the VAR.
There is no doubt that the Melbourne and Sydney derbies are among the high points of the A-League calendar.
They invariably draw huge crowds and nearly always provide the type of spectacle other sports must privately envy.
There is no suggestion that the four round one derbies in Melbourne since 2012-2013 and the one in Sydney three years ago were any less patronised.
Or later derbies cannot be as dreadful as the one we saw on Saturday.
However the likelihood is that the players' conditioning and the quality of football be enhanced if the season's first derbies were staged with a few rounds under the teams' belts.
I stand to be corrected but I cannot recall a London, Manchester or Liverpool derby on match day one of the English Premier League.
Likewise in Italy's Serie A with Milan, Rome or Turin and in Spain's LaLiga with Madrid or Barcelona.
As stated before, the A-League has valid reasons for launching its competition with a Melbourne or Sydney derby that would always draw a big crowd and ideally set the tone for the rest of the season. There's not much worse than an opening round of paltry attendances that would dampen the fans' enthusiasm.
However we sometimes tend to be too paranoid about crowd figures.
Gates are very important, of course, yet a high-quality match like Friday night's thrilling opener between Adelaide United and Sydney FC would do more than anything else to sell the competition to the public.
Who would dwell on the number of bums on seats if the football is so captivating that it leaves patrons on the edge of their seats?
Not too many, I would think.
