A GAME of moments.
While Thursday night didn’t deliver the result Carlton was after, Senior Coach Michael Voss was clear on the areas his team needs to refine.
Acknowledging the increased pressure from Round 1, Voss admitted there’s still progress to be made in achieving greater consistency across four quarters.
Here's what he had to say.
On the game as a whole:
"[Hawthorn] turned up their intensity a bit, so they asked some questions, but I was still pretty happy with our fight.
"There is a fair bit of determination from our group throughout the night.
"Moments - a contested mark or an inside 50 they don’t hit, a goal we don’t quite finish, but in those games, they come down to moments. There were plenty of swings in that game, some that went in our favour and some that went in Hawthorn’s favour.
"Both teams were able to drag it back but clearly you can’t ignore they were able to execute for a bit longer at the right times, and that was the difference in the end."
On the group's reaction to the game:
"I haven’t asked them how they felt at the end except getting down to business of playing the way we want to play. The focus has been largely on how we want to play and how consistently we want to be able to apply that.
"We found a better way forward after tonight, that’s a great opposition to play against, very classy. I felt like a lot of our ‘system’ was standing up and some moments we didn’t get right."
On Harry McKay and the inclusion of Lewis Young:
"We knew early in the morning [that he was ill] but we hung on as long as we could. The decision was made to withdraw him as he wasn’t getting any better.
"I thought Lewis was okay, didn’t disrupt us, 'SOS' (Silvagni) went forward, and competed hard forward of the ball. There were a few decisions to make to go smaller forward, keep the back seven the same, SOS has been learning that role and doing a great job for us, we sort of felt like that was the least moving parts.
"Lewis lost a couple of contests early but I thought he fought back really hard and it enabled us to do something a bit different with 'Weiters', so it helped our system get set up in the way we wanted it."
On the improvements from last week:
"It’s hard to say we value process over scoreboard, and not look at process and what we want to value.
"If you look at the way we defended, we defended hard: the tackle rate was up, we defended our 50 really well, forward of centre was really strong, but we also know we have growth to go, so how do we become more efficient off those plays?
"We got plenty of looks, no question on that, but we’ve got some marginal growth to get after to be able to consistently apply a bit more often."
On Charlie Curnow:
"I think Charlie competed really well. Where he’s at, and in terms of his prep, it’s his first game coming back in. Our commentary is always around Charlie being able to compete forward of the ball.
"I think it’s up to you to decide what you want to value in Charlie: if he kicks goals, we’ve only got one focal point, if he doesn’t, then how come he couldn’t have an influence on the game? Yet he brought the ball to ground.
"For us, he’s a valuable teammate, we love having him on our team and he gave us a focal point where we needed to and he competed hard, and that’s all I’m asking as a coach. He’ll get his rewards within our system and we’ll get to have him over the next few weeks to build his game."
On staying present:
"I find it a difficult 23 weeks to be fair. I don’t walk into any game thinking there’s a winnable one in the foreseeable future. It’s just that you put your head down, keep going and we have to keep finding ways to keep getting better.
"I don’t see the point of looking past what our review looks like and I don’t see the point of looking past what next week looks like. I’m staying eyes in and look at what is in front of us."
On scoring from transition:
"[It wasn't] so much from the clearance. It was mainly in the transition. I’ve been able to make sure we’re a little more finished in that part of the game.
"Sometimes you can put the banner over the whole lot but our job is to look at the parts that will make the difference for us and for us, that seems to be it."
