IT WAS a disappointing day for the Game Changers, failing to get over the line in their season-opener against Collingwood at IKON Park.
Senior Coach Daniel Harford spoke to the media to dissect what went wrong.
On a frustrating day in the coaches’ box:
It’s unhelpful. It’s unhelpful, goals from fifties. You put those numbers together with a 19-point margin and you end up almost even-Stevens in the end.
The scoreboard pressure that you lose and the adrenaline and the energy that they gain – you’ve just got to be disciplined and we lacked that a couple of times and it’s cost us on the scoreboard, and it’s cost us the game.
The Pies certainly had their time where they were the better team in the contest but we just didn’t allow ourselves to execute the plan that we’d set up.
On injuries to Grace Egan and Maddy Prespakis:
Grace [Egan] is getting scans at the moment – I don’t think it’s super dangerous but we’re just going to check her out so we’ll see what the outcome is in the next 24 hours.
It was just a cramp for Maddy [Prespakis], I think. She’ll be okay.
On ball movement going forward:
There’s been a conversation about that for four months. Again, the pressure the Pies put us under made us feel like we couldn’t pull the trigger on what we’ve been training to do so credit to them for that and it’s a growth area for us. We get to have a look at that and understand why that happened and what to do about it next time.
On kicking efficiency:
They had one sitting back and we couldn’t make our loose player through the middle of the ground as dangerous as their defensive player – it’s ball use going inside forward 50 but it’s also equalising numbers going forward so you’ve got some options and you’re not kicking to out numbers all the time.
Those are things that we’ve tried to train for but we just didn’t execute – I think we moved the ball too fast at times, certainly in the first quarter we just got a bit carried away with some adrenaline of game one and just kept kicking to their numbers.
Not a lot of that was by design, but the pressure of the game and the moment certainly caught us out a bit.
On leadership:
It’s more experience and understanding the moments and we’ll get better at that as the season goes longer so I’m not too stressed about that.
I’d put most of it down to their pressure and what they did to us around the contest – even in general play when they closed down the space really quickly and we just lost our nerve a few times and kicked it back to them.
It’s not too much leadership but experience living in those moments.
On Paige Trudgeon:
'Trudgey' did a hell of a job. She played on her [Sabrina Frederick] in a VFLW game at Port Melbourne through the last VFLW season and did a hell of a job on her then so I thought well, she’s done it before so she can do it again.
She’s a great kid and we’re really keen to work with her and develop her into a really good key position player. It’s a great start for her to play on a solid forward and get the job done so she was fantastic.
On Bri Davey’s injury:
We had Izzy [Huntington] last night and I don’t know the update on that but that looked pretty ordinary and then Bri late today – two of the big guns of the competition and they’ve been hit pretty early.
We don’t want to see it. It happens – it happens in men’s footy too – but at the start of the season it’s the worst possible outcome for the competition.
