I'm new to the smart match operator, but I took a stab at it. Does this help?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

my @a = (1, 17, 4);
say "first match suceeds" if (@a ~~ 17);
say "second match fails" unless ([1, 17, 4] ~~ 17);
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