Justin, you led all game – did you deserve to win?
It’s a tough question to answer. I was really proud of our effort, we got a bad beat and that’s what footy does to you. It dishes up some bad results sometimes and asks a lot of questions about our resilience and we’re going to have to get up from this. It was a bad beat.
What do you mean by a bad beat?
You get beaten by a 50m kick, on the boundary line, after the siren, after leading all day. That’s a big hit to the players, they’re flat as but we’ll get around the, pick them up and learn from it because there’s some things we could have done a little bit better to avoid that situation.
What did you make of the down the field free kick, did you think it was there?
From what I saw, Andy Brayshaw goes to smother and makes contact (with the player). All I can talk about is Andy Brayshaw. I’m not going to sit here and talk about the umpires, but if the same situation arose again, I’d ask Andy Brayshaw to put frontal pressure on and try and smother the ball. That’s where I sit with it.
Should the free kick have been down the field given it went out of bounds?
It’s not in my decision making. What’s done is done. The game is done. The result is done. I think they did a pretty good job of giving the right player the ball, I would have been asking our players to do exactly the same thing in the same situation so the result’s done, it’s in the book and we’ve just got to move on and take the lessons.
Should Gibbons have had that kick?
Every team would’ve tried to do the same thing and they’ve probably pulled one over the umpire’s eyes, that’s ok, that’s’ footy. We’ll take it, cop it on the chin and move on, get better.
Do you feel hard done by?
No.
How do you handle it with the players post-match?
We’ll get around them and they’ll get around each other. We’ll come in Monday and review and try and take the lessons out of it. Like I said before, footy throws things up and asks a lot of questions of players and it’s how you ride the bumps and ride the highs. Our success is never going to be linear. There’s going to be ups and downs and tonight was a tough loss but we’ll take it, learn from it and next time we are in that situation we’ll be better.
Did the 5 day break get you a bit, they looked like they played with more energy after quarter time?
I thought the second quarter was ok, I thought the 3rd quarter they out worked us. A little bit was on us, I thought we lacked some composure with the footy. We weren’t able to find a mark, we called in to their turnover game and they worked harder in that period of the game and we were pretty lucky to only concede what we conceded on the scoreboard and I thought we could have handled that a lot better. I thought we created some opportunities and we just lacked composure at crucial times. Whether that’s a five-day break or just another lapse in momentum, which we’ve encountered this year, we’ll have to work through. The last quarter I thought we played with good shape, good composure and we executed pretty well. It took a goal, 50m out on the siren to beat us so, we will review it but I don’t think the five-day break was too much of an issue.
You left Fyfe forward for a long time when they were surging in that third quarter, were you just trying to give the young players the responsibility of dealing with that?
Yes. We got a few things wrong in the third which I’d like back, but we decided to put Fyfe more on-ball in the last, where he clearly had an impact. I thought he had an impact forward as well, and all game. He probably just had one of those games where it was a nearly game for him down forward. I’m loving the way he’s applying himself down forward, we created enough opportunities for our forwards with 42 inside 50’s. Whether he would’ve helped us on-ball or not, in the last quarter he clearly did so we could’ve done that a little bit earlier, but I thought he was still having an impact on the game.
You seemed to have it on your terms a lot through the first quarter, what were you thinking when you couldn’t get that scoreboard ascendancy?
It’s a tough one, in those conditions I thought we actually got a bit of scoreboard ascendancy for the conditions and we actually got some reward for effort. It was just after quarter time, in those conditions where it’s slippery, they’re guilt edge opportunities that you have to create for yourself, whether it’s a contest win or a clean take, if we could just hit those handballs and execution a bit cleaner, we could’ve created some more opportunities for ourselves. That’s something we need to get better at, even though we’ve played well the last couple of weeks we haven’t hit the scoreboard as much as we probably should and cashed in on our dominance around the ball. We’ll continue to work on that, it’s going to take a bit of time to really maximise, but we’ll work on it hard during the week and we’ll see the benefit sooner or later.
Did you get out of it ok injury wise and do you look to make some changes for Sydney next week?
We’ll have to review it, there’s some guys in the reserves pressing for selection so we’ll always have a look at that. I think we’re pretty good with injuries, we got through pretty well so that’s a bonus.
