That was a good finish to your season, what did you like about it?
I just thought it was really professional. There’s a lot of distractions going on, especially when you travel on your last game, and I thought we were able to control what we could control and focus on the important things. I thought our pressure around the ball was really strong. I thought we started pretty well in the contest, although stoppages got out of hand a few times, but I thought we were able to cover that with our intent and our intent to get after Hawthorn. And then we just finished off a bit better than we have been as well. We were able to capitalise off turnover. Capitalise off winning the ball back in our front half even though our defence wasn’t perfect, and I think we’ve been pretty consistent over the last six weeks with our contest and intent and the way we’ve defended the ground. What’s defined us winning or losing is being able to execute, and especially execute in our front half and I thought we were able to do that a bit better today.
What do you mean by distraction?
Well, it’s easy just to drift to next week, what are you doing for holidays, off season planning, all those sorts of things. And that just takes some of your focus away from preparation for the game. So, I thought players prepared themselves well and valued the right things during the week and really wanted to finish on a high.
Is there something symbolic about the MCG, at this time of year? Is that something you may have used with the players this week?
We value every opportunity we get to play here because you’re right. We didn’t make a massive deal out of it but we used it as a bit of motivation because we don’t tend to play here a lot. So we want to value every moment we get to play here.
You’ve got a decent record here at the MCG, you must take heart from that?
Yes. It’s always good. We feel like over the last couple of years our travel has been a strength so it’s good to play well and win here.
Your last five weeks have been solid, are you hopeful this form in the back end will be a springboard for next season?
Of course. And it’s been a part of our motivation over the last period of time is to make sure that we use it as a springboard into the off season and pre season. There’s a lot of talk around ‘you’re out of finals’ and motivation. We’ve got a really driven group who value every training session, let alone every game. So we’ve been really proud of the way they’ve driven each other and driven themselves to hit the line really strongly and use it as a platform to build into next year.
Will it burn to watch finals over the next few weeks? Are you someone that takes that in?
You have to because they’re the best teams. So you have to watch and learn and use it to shape our game in some ways. Of course it’s going to burn in some way, we didn’t want to missing out on finals when we started. So hopefully it burns everyone at the Club.
I know you said this week you won’t be super aggressive at the trade table, do you feel like the bulk of a premiership list is here at the moment?
Yes.
Tom Emmett was impressive, finding a bit of the footy, you must be thrilled?
Yes. The backend of the season we’ve been able to play some younger players, well all year really, we’ve played some younger players and we’ve found some younger players. Tommy is one, (Corey) Wagner’s come in late, even though he’s at his third Club he hasn’t played a lot of footy and he’s played really well. (Karl) Worner, (Sam) Sturt – the second half of the year he’s really taken his game forward. I don’t want to name anymore because I will forget some, but we’ve been able to blood a lot of youth this year and get games into a lot of younger players. Tommy’s come in the last couple of weeks after really earning his spot and showing he is up to the level. So it’s going to be good for our depth going forward.
Had the Brennan Cox switch up been in the works for a while, and is that your ideal forward set up?
Having the extra tall in our structure has probably been our best mix for the year. And that’s been when Sean (Darcy) has been in the ruck and Jacko (Luke Jackson) has been that player for us and he’s been able to give us a really strong contest. It just helps Jye (Amiss) and JT (Josh Treacy), especially Jye when JT is in the ruck. That’s the structure we’d like to settle on. Injuries and some unavailability and depth has probably cost that and (Brennan) Cox is one of the best intercept defenders in the comp as well so you don’t want to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ too much. If you take (Hayden) Young out the back line and Coxy out of the back line then Matty Boyd (backline coach) is knocking on my door saying ‘hey what’s going on?’. So it’s a balancing act but I thought it was an opportunity today to try him down forward and I thought he took some good marks and helped balance us up.
Forty goals for Jye Amiss this season is super impressive?
Of course. And the off season is going to massive for a lot of our players. Jye is heading into his second off season. He’s a got a really good taste, along with Neil Erasmus and Johnno (Matt Johnson) and the players I mentioned before, have got a really good taste of what it takes to be an AFL footballer and I’m really excited to see what I see from them in the pre season when they come back and next year.
You were a top 6 team last year, do you feel like you can get back there quickly?
To me it feels like we’ve stepped back to 2021. The back end of that year we were really young and we were able to get another preseason and consolidate and bounce. And I feel like we’re in that position again. We didn’t enter the season aiming to miss the finals, we wanted to build on last year but I think there’s been a lot of positives in the frustration. I think once we get back to pre season we’re going to have a really competitive squad who are going to push each other because there’s going to be a lot of players who think they’re in the round one team, and that’s going to build a desire to really improve, day-in day-out, so I’m excited for that.
Now that the season is over, do you have any idea on where the Liam Henry contract situation is at?
Nothing more than what I have commented on already. Liam knows where I sit.
