Facing Essendon this Sunday

“We’re excited about the game. They’ve clearly improved and I think it will be a big occasion. 1pm on a Sunday, Country Game at the MCG, it’s good for regional people and easier to get to the ground so we’re expecting a big crowd. I’m assuming the main reason for a good crowd at the game is because there are two pretty good teams, both in form that will put on a good show. I’m looking forward to that part of it. My take on Essendon is that they are a team with promising young talent. It can take time for young talent to develop, they seem to be maximising that at the moment. The game-style looks really solid, we’ve looked at them pretty closely over a period of weeks. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing any glaring holes in what they are doing. But that is a trend across the competition, it’s rare that you look at a team and see big holes you can exploit. It’s going to be a challenge; we’re going to have to play our best and get the fundamentals right. I think their good players are playing really well, you can see the talent but they are a young team and I assume they will keep improving.”

Bouncing Back with Three Straight Wins

“It hasn’t changed much for me; I still feel the same. The competition is a handicap, you don’t expect it to become easier each year, you expect it to become harder. I just fully expect that there will be ups and downs throughout the season. The real challenge is making sure that you don’t get too ahead of yourself when things are going well, and you don’t lose your bundle when you have the inevitable blips. Ours just happened to come in a bit of a rush at the start of the year. I think we’ve been able to achieve that balance relatively well. We’ve just got to go again. We’re not expecting that because we’ve won a few that the rest of the season will be smooth sailing, there will still be ups and downs from here.”

Sam De Koning’s Versatility

It was a proactive move; I’ve got to say I quite like the idea and Ratugolea playing back has made that more of a live option than it has been in the past. I’m optimistic that De Koning will become one of the premier key backs in the competition, he might be creeping up on that status already. That always presents a challenge when you’re taking a player away from their preferred position. Again, it is nice to have options. With Stanley out injured, it is nice to know that we’re not absolutely stuck.

Coaching Adjustments After Round Three

“We’re always tweaking things, if I suggested we were okay after the first three rounds then I misspoke. We did need to change some things and we needed to execute better. We also didn’t need to reinvent the things that we knew would work in time, and some of them were based on personnel coming back. That tends to be the art of coaching, you have to work out what needs to change and where do we need to intervene now, and what could we make worse if we change everything. That’s happened all my time in footy. One of the big mistakes you can make as a coaching group is working on something really hard through the preseason, have it not work in the first two rounds and then turn it on its head. If you look at one particular part of our game that has been good the past couple of weeks that was poor in the first three rounds, it was around the ball. Was it because [Patrick] Dangerfield has played a little bit better? Or was it because collectively, we got our method right? Even after the facts, it's hard to completely work that out. But we have been working hard on our game and we think we’ve made some changes that will improve that.”