DISAPPOINTED, proud and hungry to keep progressing with the team.

Senior Coach Michael Voss shared his thoughts on the game and season following the preliminary final against the Lions, speaking on his pride in the group's ability to grow as a group and his strong belief that the disappointment of the loss will only provide further motivation for the team to keep getting better.

Here's what he had to say.

On the Blues' start to the game:

It was quite an impressive start. When you’re playing at an away venue, let alone a final, to be able to start the way we did and engage our supporters – I mean, the atmosphere was absolutely electric.

It was a pretty simple formula, really. We were ablet o get our hands on the ball and we were able to keep the ball in our half. We built pressure that way. What changed was probably that.

We lost some critical contests, clearly centre-square bounce definitely changed and changed the shape of the game a bit. That’s to be expected at this ground more than any other.

We just weren’t able to get that ascendency back. That was probably it from the first quarter to the second quarter. They took their opportunities, and we were fighting it out for the second and third.

I thought we had a good shot at it in the last, but the ball use couldn’t quite connect up quite as much as we would have liked it to late in the game when the pressure was on, and we didn’t finish our work.

On the run to the finals and running out of momentum:

No not at all.

We’ll sit with the disappointment.

If you had asked me this question 14 weeks ago, it’s probably a completely different answer. But, as the season unfolded and as our form come together, we sort of had that really collective shift together. It seemed like we could certainly compete against the best teams in the competition.

The last couple of weeks only reinforced that in our own minds. We came up here with a real goal to obviously get this job done and we’ve fallen short.

We’re extremely disappointed. We came up here thinking our best was good enough. Credit to Brisbane, they bounced after the first quarter – a side who has probably been at this a little longer than us in terms of opportunities like this. They were able to correct themselves, steer themselves, and able to turn the game around.

For a first shot at it, it’s obviously good. But I think the goal is clear for us and we’ve fallen short of it. Pretty disappointed with it.

On message to the players after the game:  

I think what’s really important is that we’re having all these great experiences together. We’ve had a lot of these great moments where we’ve learned a lot about ourselves.

I’ve talked a lot about adapting and overcoming, and we’ve certainly done that. We’ve done that as a football club.

To see how that’s transpired across the year has been incredibly impressive to watch. It’s why I loathe to share my own story because I think our story is well-and-truly enough.

We get to lean back in on that.

No matter what story I tell, and no matter what experience I can share, feeling the hurt and feeling like you’re close, and feeling like you’re getting an opportunity and feeling like you’ve had that ripped away from you – there’s no better experience than that.

What I hope it turns into, [is that] we’re a hungry football club and we’re a hungry football team.

We want to feature at this end of the season to give ourselves that chance.

On the Dunkley v Cripps battle:  

There were a couple of different battles that were pretty critical.

We’ve taken a really simple approach to the way we’ve forged the second half of the year and it’s been ‘no one man stands alone’.

Cripps doesn’t take on Dunkley, we all take him on.

It’s held us in good stead, and we’ll continue to do that. I’ll look back at the game and I’ll evaluate that in time, it’s not sort of something that I’ve not spent a hell of a lot of time on.

What I’ve been really impressed with is that our guys have really stuck to their jobs, got their jobs done and we’ve done it all together. That’s what’s moved the needle, that’s why our performances have changed.

There hasn’t been the individual talent that’s helped us do that, it’s been the collective effort. That’s what I’ve been pretty impressed with in the second half of the year.

We’ll win some contests; we’ll lose some contests. If we know we can collectively get it done, then we know that days like this can go in our favour a little more.

On having the right pieces to go further:

We have to look at what we need to take it forward. We’ve got plenty to take forward with us, there’s been plenty of that.

We also need to continue to look at ourselves and evolve.

At the end of the day, we’ve come up here against a really good football team – they’ve played in a few final series, made a prelim a couple of times and fallen short themselves.

Today, they make it through.

So, you’re continually looking at yourself to try and get better and we’ll be no different.

It’s not a conversation for now, though. There’s a lot to take forward that we will that we’ll really consolidate some of the things that we want to stand for in our identity moving forward.

We’ve got plenty of that moving forward. But we also have got to acknowledge that we’ve still got to get that movement needed to get us to the next level because today we fell short.

On the playing group and list dynamic:  

That’s the great thing about our list demographic. You go across our team, and they can stick together, and they have stuck together.

We’ve experienced some really tough adversity as a club, and we’ve been able to navigate our way through that.

We had some of that this year but, it’s been that collective movement that’s been really impressive for us.

We feel like we’ve got some really important pieces there but, obviously, we’ve still got a bit to get after.

On final thoughts on the game:   

Our ball use just wasn’t as good as it needed to be, really.

We’ll use the vision in a couple of days to absorb it a little bit as to why that was a case.

Certainly though, Brisbane they ramped it up big time. We weren’t able to work our way through that.

We absorbed it for a long time, even late in the fourth quarter – one of those shots go through and its game on. Even though we probably didn’t necessarily deserve to be in that position, it was game on.

Unfortunately, we didn’t, which is a ‘what if?’ we will continue to ask ourselves forever. The reality is that we did get some threats, we had some threatening times, but we weren’t able to put it together long enough.

That’s what finals footy and certainly these games ask of you.