THE NORTHERN Bullants dropped back to four wins and five losses for the season after a 46-point loss to Williamstown at Princes Park on Saturday.

Assistant coach Matthew Lappin shares his thoughts on the match and gives a summary of how some of the senior-listed players performed.

We knew we were in for a tough match against the top side going in, but we started poorly and we committed a few really critical turnovers in the first five or 10 minutes. They kicked the first three goals of the game and we played catch up from there.

We managed to get some momentum in the second quarter and went in only a goal down. We thought we were reasonably well-placed and felt pretty positive going into the second half.

In the third quarter they responded like a top team does. Their coach would have given them a rocket and they came out and blew us off the park in the third term and ended up with a pretty convincing win in the end.

Williamstown are aligned with the Western Bulldogs and they don’t have too many injuries at the moment, so they’re pretty much at full strength.

We’ll get some blokes back soon, but we have been a bit up and down this year and more down than up in the last three weeks.

There were a few positives in terms of Carlton-listed layers in an otherwise pretty poor day for us.

Darren Pfeiffer was our best player and nearly the best player on the ground. He was hard at the footy and used the ball well. A few people thought he might have been a bit stiff to drop back to the Bullants after kicking that last goal against Fremantle, but he answered in the best possible way and had a huge impact on the game and puts his hand up for senior selection again this week.

Mark Austin had another really solid game. He’s put together about five or six weeks of really good footy now, so he’s pushing for senior selection. He’s developing really well as a tall defender and the pleasing thing for him this week is that he has started to take marks inside defensive 50 which is a real positive for the team.

Joey Anderson played another solid game and competed really well. Luke Blackwell returned from injury and had 30-plus possessions so it was a good first game back for him.

We come up against Collingwood this week. We’ve played them already this year and we managed to get a win so it will be good to play them again out here at Princes Park.

We go into the game knowing that we need to win. We’ve slipped behind the ledger now at 4-5, so we need to get a win to even it up. If we want to play finals footy this year then we need to win these games.

Northern Bullants   1.2   6.4   6.7   10.9 (69)
Williamstown           5.2   7.7   13.10   17.13 (115)