IT WAS eventful, it was stressful, but it was a win in Mathew Buck's senior coaching debut.
As a new era dawned at IKON Park on Saturday afternoon, the new AFLW Senior Coach led his team to a win, with the Blues holding on for a dramatic two-point win at the home of women's football.
With key leaders standing up and Buck's key messages surrounding pressure and contest shining through in game one, this is what he had to say.
On his first game as coach:
“I had a great experience to be honest: we’ve chased a lot since the start of the pre season in terms of consistency across our whole program and team. High performance is something we’ve gone after and I thought today we ticked a lot of boxes on regards to that: resilience is a part of high performance and it was great to get over the line in the end.
“We’ll take lots of positives out of the game and one of those will be the different scenarios we had to play out and we practice scenarios at training a fair bit, so it was good to jump in and out of those.”
“We’ve gone to work on the contest and what type of team we want to be there and how we play the contest and what our method is. Today we saw some positive results in that: we fell away a little in the last quarter so we go to work on that during the week, but overall, we’re super excited with how our players got that done”.
On the impact of senior players:
“Darcy is one the great players of the Carlton Football Club . . . it was nice to have a front-row seat to the Darcy show! They’ve put in some great work over the pre-season: one as an individual, and two to help our group get to where the group is now. So there’s no surprise to see ‘Darce’ do what they do, so hopefully we can just emulate that from week-to-week moving forward.
“Jess [Dal Pos] obviously captained the side today alongside Mimi Hill and plays a really important role for us up the ground and she was outstanding today. No one deserves it more, she’s again one of the those players who again has had another great pre-season and just turns up training after training and outs in 100 per cent effort 100 per cent of the time.
“Harriet Cordner saved us time and time again. She’s super strong in aerial contests and gives us good bounce out of our back line. That’s game one ticked off for her so she’ll feel a bit of relief with that I’m sure with missing the last two seasons, but she’s a great person and a great player and I look forward to seeing her play for the rest of the year”.
On keeping emotions in check during Gold Coast’s comeback:
“We spoke a lot today about the emotion of the game and making sure we don’t ride the emotion of the game too much. It was really important that we stick to our method and the way we want to play the game, which is nice and physical as we saw today.
“I was really proud of their whole game, and the third quarter in particular we got going with some ball movement as well which was pleasing.
“Like I said before, we do scenarios at training and we found ourselves in one late in the game. I did come down from the box and the senior players had already taken control and they were doing the things they we wanted to do late in the game to save it, so we managed to tick that off.”
On the defensive group:
“It was on our entire defensive unit to take care of the Kerryn Peterson hole. Mua Laloifi and Harriet Cordner, the very experience players in our group, took charge of it today I thought.
“I think Gen Lawson-Tavan, who came in late as an injury replacement player, was outstanding as well today. They were playing on some really good players and stood up, so it’s pleasing with the work that they’ve put in to get the reward”.
On the roles of Brea Moody and Jess Good:
“It’s a conversation we’ve had ongoing throughout the pre-season and leading into this week with Lauren Bella, who’s a terrific ruck. We knew that we’d have our hands full with her.
“We backed Jess Good in who we think is a quality ruck and that gives us the chance to play Brea a little more forward. Breann is so big in the air and she gives us a nice look down there, so it was pretty much on Jess Good to see if she could hold up: I thought Jess was outstanding today with her effort amongst a really strong midfield unit.”
On how the team adapted to the rule changes:
“We were pretty comfortable with it after the first two practice matches. We’re pretty thorough with our interchanges, we held a couple back today so we’ll have some tired players after that one but we’re fine with it.
“This is my first experience with it [shorter quarter breaks] so I’ll have to talk to the players to see how they feel physically after the longer ones”
On injuries and selection going forward:
“We got through [the match] pretty clean so we’re happy. We’ll have a couple that might be up for selection I think but that will play out during the week and we’ll go from there."
