You were on the backfoot before the ball was even bounced, what’s your overall view of today?
We were really disappointed with the effort. Things were obviously going to be tough with the late outs and different things and the debutants coming in. We talked pre-game about everyone having a strong mindset and we had quite a few players who did, but nowhere near enough and in the end, when you play a side as good as Melbourne and you’ve got a few who aren’t switched on, the result is going to happen like it did. Going forward, we’re in the finals and we’ve worked too hard to put ourselves in the position to be there just to let it wilt away because of a few circumstances outside our control. We can get back in, control what we can control and push forward to make sure that we can play well because we still believe that we are capable of doing some damage in the finals.

I believe you’re the first Club in the league this year to actually have to call on a top up player. Is there questions over integrity and postponing, should this match have been looked at?
I think we’re just in those times at the moment where that has to happen. If we postpone that match today until when, the season gets pushed back, players have got work commitments as well so if all of a sudden, we push the whole season back there’s things like that to consider. We never asked for anything to be pushed back, the rules were really clear at the start of the year and as far as integrity goes, life’s not fair and this season might not be totally fair, other sides have had to deal with it at different stages and we’re dealing with it now. We won’t complain about that at all.

The girls and the coaches have been in a hub earlier this year, is there a discussion internally about trying to limit contact with other people?
We have been talking about that already for sure but as you point out it’s really difficult. The girls have already missed a heap of time away from work because of that. Employers have been very patient with that, but they also want their work done and their businesses looked after, so where people can work from home or can mitigate risk, we’re trying to do that but unfortunately in the AFLW landscape, we can’t just lock them up and tell them not to go home or not to go to work. We’re always talking about mitigating risk, but we can’t get to that absolute level. Ironically, we were safer in Melbourne when we were surrounded by COVID because we could lock ourselves away and take extra precautions.

What does next week look like for you?
(Gabby) O’Sullivan and (Amy) Franklin should be available early in the week, so they should get a full week of training. The two Antonio’s and (Emma) O’Driscoll will be very late so they will get out Friday or Saturday, and should be available with a Sunday game. Roxy Roux will hopefully be available next week and we will have to wait on Kiara Bowers but she could be unlikely.

You dropped to 5th today and that means travelling for finals, does what you’ve gone through earlier in the season put you in good stead?
We’ve got a better record on the road than at home this year, so if that’s what it comes to, we’ll be prepared for that. It will be disappointing for our fans, we love playing in front of them and we were obviously away from them for a big chunk of the year. That will be the disappointing aspect of it but we’re happy to go on the road and take on these good sides. We haven’t played well against the good sides, we’ve had a couple of excuses against North and today, but we didn’t have any excuses last week against Adelaide, so we have to prove ourselves against the good sides. If we have to do that in Victoria or Queensland or South Australia, we’d relish that opportunity. 

Dropping off late in the season has been a bit of a trend, does that dent your confidence heading into finals?
Not really, it would dent the confidence no doubt, I don’t know about the trend aspect of it. This year we just didn’t play the strong teams until later on in the year, we’re actually a very fit team at the moment and apart from our genuine injuries, we’d be in a really good spot to put out a good side. There’s no fatigue or tiredness physically so there would be no excuses from that point of view. 

Is it a bit of a nervous wait to see if Covid has spread throughout the group?
Yes, definitely. I don’t think it has, it’s not even spreading throughout the group it’s just a nervous wait from the girls at work. We know how prevalent it is in society at the moment so I’m not too worried about it spreading around the group, I’m more worried about what could happen with who gets deemed a close contact as that’s what’s brought us undone. I don’t really like taking phone calls from my players at this stage as there’s not a lot of normal conversations happening when someone rings, but that’s what we’re living in and hopefully we can get through and be relatively unscathed when we get to the big games.

Just on Tildi Sergeant, another head knock/concussion it looks like for her, how is she at the moment?
She’s pretty good, it’s just an unfortunate incident again. It’s obviously a real concern that she’s had so many. They are incidents lately that most people would have been concussed from, the one against Western Bulldogs anyone would have been concussed from that. Last week she played WAFLW and copped a few head knocks and was fine, and then today her head hit the ground as the players arms accidentally fell on top of her at the same time. Really disappointed for Tildi, I had a good chat with her and she seems fine but obviously entering concussion protocols she won’t be available either.

On Mikayla Western, pretty crazy day for her, what was her application coming into this afternoon?
She was great, she’s a really popular character in our group, she trained with us during the pre-season one session per week. She’s really bubbly and provides a lot of energy. I rang her today as she was our first choice as a train-on and she was at a university course in Dunsborough doing some training. We thought that was a bit much so we enquired about a few others but they were also in Covid protocols, so we said Mikayla's going to be our best bet. Far from ideal preparation to sit in a car for three hours, and she arrived 25 minutes before bounce down but she’s a great athlete and she bounced around, she was really good. I thought she had some really good moments and showed what she could do. It was one of the pleasing aspects of the day to give her an opportunity and she took it with both hands.