You guys had a real crack today, you wouldn’t be overly disappointed with that?
We’re disappointed with the end result on the scoreboard and probably really disappointed with the second quarter, I thought that was one of our poorer quarters for the year. I thought the first quarter was fine, we played really well and then the third quarter we won the inside 50s,12 to seven so we were really happy with that and the last quarter we created a lot of opportunities to score and didn’t, so that’s the disappointing part of it. I thought our backs held up really well and I’m very proud of them.
The inside 50s could have got ugly couldn’t it?
Yes. We had 2 at half time (from the 2nd quarter) and it wasn’t so much our midfield as it was our forwards really letting us down by not coming up and putting on a contest so we addressed that by putting O’Driscoll forward in the second half and she really changed that. She competed so hard and created a bit of chaos for us which is what we needed and that created opportunities, unfortunately we just couldn’t connect inside 50 or there were chances where we should’ve used the ball a lot better and we didn’t. So that was why the scoreboard ended up like it did. But up the other end without Janelle Cuthbertson we're a key defender down and Pugh had to play well and truly out of her height and weight division but I thought she did really well and our other backs did really well as well.
So to clarify, O’Driscoll looked to hurt her hand, but was it more tactical moving her forward?
It was tactical. She’s tough. She split her webbing so she had to go down but we actually moved her forward three minutes to go in the second (quarter), so that was definitely tactical because we needed that fight in the contest down there. We trained her a fair bit forward during the pre-season. We wanted to play her more forward this year but just with our injuries in our backline we haven’t been able to do that, but today we thought we would roll the dice in the second half and we were really happy with what she showed.
You’re not the first team not to score against Collingwood, they have a good defence.
It is and they’ve got their back six who are very good, but just the way they play and the way they move the ball. We identified that they are probably the best defensive team in the way they play so we were ready for that fight and we said it could be a three-goal-each game, but unfortunately we couldn’t get the three goals to put them under any scoreboard pressure.
What did you like about today?
The fight in the second half when we got some momentum and we got the ball in our front half, we think if we can do that and we can throw in Mikayla Morrison, Mikayla Tuhakaraina up there with some really damaging small forwards then we can start hitting the scoreboard as well. So there’s a lot to like still going forward with the group, at the moment they’re not getting that lick of the ice cream, the taste of sugar for the results and for kicking goals. To their credit the whole group keeps turning up to training and trying to improve. There hasn’t been any dropping of the head. We just talked about it then, we’ve been improving every week, and today was probably a little step back, but we want to bounce back strong in the final two weeks of the season.
What do those two weeks look like personnel wise?
I’m hoping that we get a couple back. Madizen Wilkins did a good job down back for us today. We look like we got through unscathed and hopefully Mikayla Tuhakaraina could be back this week, Ebony Antonio we’re not sure and Orlagh Lally as well. So there’s a couple of tests, but hopefully we can get one or two back and get out there and have a good crack against Sydney, who were very good yesterday.
Bowers has gone over 100 tackles for the season, can you comment on that achievement?
She’s worked really hard the last three weeks to try to do the team thing and get more easy ball, but at the same time somehow she still finds a way to tackle as well. So she’s just so competitive and so good to coach because what she does is she sets the standard for our young players coming through that know they have to play footy that way. It’s not always the way with your best player that they set that standard but we’re really fortunate that she does.
She’s also leading clearances as well.
You’ll see the occasional people say she’s always second at the ball that’s why she’s leading the tackles, but she’s leading the clearances as well. She gets hold of it, she’s a very good player.
