IN WHAT was a narrow defeat at the hands of the Pies, Senior Coach Michael Voss thought the Blues weren't sharp enough with their execution.
Noting the over-possession of the ball and skill execution errors, Voss said they'll take the time to look over the vision and pinpoint areas of improvement, taking the feedback from their opponent in stride.
Here's what he had to say.
On the message to the group:
"It was a difficult one, we didn’t debrief it for a long time. I think this is one of the ones you take 48 hours, look at the vision, break it down, take the emotion out of it and look through the process and what we improved from last week to this week.
"There were some gains made but we also know that we have to progress in other areas. I think we’ll take some time to have a look at the vision so we can give some clarity on what we think it was."
On forward entries:
"We’ll look at the options themselves, there’s the decision and then there’s the actual error. It seemed like some of the decisions were right, but we didn’t execute it well enough and that’s probably what we need to look at."
On the disposal count:
"I thought we over-possessed it. Probably the bigger [numbers] were their tackles, the pressure that they were able to provide across the night probably forced us to over-possess it.
"We had to make some corrections about how we wanted to move the ball out of those particular scenarios and it just didn’t feel like we were absorbing that well enough, then over-possession comes into play.
"Credit to [Collingwood], they were able to force that turnover and force us to do something we wouldn’t usually do and we lost the territory battle and if you lose the territory battle against a good footy team, it’s going to be hard to win the game."
On losing the centre clearances:
"It’s been a strength of ours for the last couple of weeks, that’s one part of the game that you would like to back in that we can at least draw even. From our perspective, that’s been a real strength of our game and that’s what we have to continue to search for, we have to have balance in our game.
"I often get asked about the transition part of our game, of course we want it better. We want our stoppage game to be better too and that part was off and for us.
"They had 61 inside 50s to 38 so the supply wasn’t good enough for us tonight, but to be able to hold a side to 61 entries and get looks like that forward of the ball, that can probably go into the basket of improvement. We wanted to defend harder and we did that, but it still wasn’t good enough to get us a result."
On the surges of momentum:
"That was when we a bit more efficient with our play. That’s not just about hitting targets, its what our contest method looks like, how we take the ball away from those particular areas.
"We were able to absorb it better and as a result, we got the scoreboard ticking over and that got us back into the game. It always felt like we had opportunities to score, it always felt like that, even late, we had an opportunity to be able to get the scoreboard in our favour.
"In really tight games, it becomes about the margins, the little things, so we’ll give that the attention it needs."
On the progression throughout the season:
"We’re playing some really good footy. We also know that we’ve got to continue to progress. I talked about defence last week but we’re referring to that every week, it’s important to us every week and we’ve got to build off the back of it, because it can’t be the moving spotlight, one day its this and the next day is something else.
"We look at a balanced profile that we want in our game, we’ll continue to look at where we get progressive and right now, we are getting some good feedback off some good opponents on what we need to get to work on.
"It’s really clear for us, we’re not searching for it, it’s really clear, that our job is to make sure we execute for longer and be more disciplined for longer, do our role for longer, execute those kicks a bit more."
On Nick Daicos:
"I think very good players step up to the moment. He was fantastic tonight and we couldn’t stop his influence. We had a couple of things we were trying to do but across the whole night, we weren’t able to get it done and he stepped up in the last quarter and was able to get the ascendency and we went down in the clearance significantly."
On returning players:
"It looks like we’ll get a couple back next week with Jack Martin, Marchbank and McGovern, so there’s a few to come back over the next couple of weeks."
