IN TOUGH conditions, the Blues were able to put the foot down on the Eagles, taking home a 71-point victory. 

Senior Coach Michael Voss was pleased that his side were able to take the opportunity with both hands, getting some reward for effort for their past month of footy. 

Here's what he had to say. 

On the game as a whole: 

"I think walking in, there was always a chance there was going to be some inefficiency. As the losses build, the importance of the next win comes to the forefront of the mind.

"We were able to use the weight of numbers in the end, we look at the numbers, some of them are extraordinary the numbers we were abl to achieve across the game, I don’t think I’ve seen bigger ones in terms of contested possession and being able to transfer from end to end and some of the marks we were able to generate in the first quarter.

"To come here in the heat and manage our way through that was pleasing. We had a pretty convincing win in the end."

On Brodie Kemp: 

"Suspected achilles, so we’ll get the scan to confirm that, but when you see that action, it never looks great. We’ll get the scans to find out but he’s pretty sore at the moment.

"We had to manage a couple of little pieces throughout the game, losing 'H' [McKay] early and then we went to 'Kempy' to come into the ruck and he went down. We had to find another way to do it, so different conditions, a bit hotter than what you’d normally get this time of year but the boys finished out the game pretty strong."

On Harry McKay: 

"He’s ok, he’s obviously in concussion protocols, so he’ll be missing next week."

On returning players: 

"We have a couple of players to return. Not that ‘Pitto’ is a forward but he’ll come back as a ruckman, so he’ll be fit this week, could’ve played if there was a [VFL] game. Elijah [Hollands] has had another week of great training under his belt, Cooper [Lord] you saw come in late for Acres, he’ll be ok, just had illness that he couldn’t get up. There are a few in the mix there to return and provide the legs we need for the next game we play."

On Corey Durdin and Jesse Motlop:

If you look at the little combo they’ve got up there with 'Mots' and 'Durds', they haven’t played a lot of football together.

It’ll be interesting to look back over the last three years to see how many games they’ve played together. When you talk about small forward and the impact of small forwards in today's game, it goes a long way.

"When you’ve got some big forwards that we’ve got that draw the ball, I know where I’d like to go if I’m a small forward, you know where the ball is going. Providing that bit of speed in our front half, a bit of pressure, [Durdin] was able to hit the scoreboard today, but mainly it was through his role that he was getting done."

On the performance of the leaders: 

"We’ve had a lot of good chats in the last two or three weeks and I feel like this one was the most significant one. To the leaders' credit, really well led by all of them, we’ve got the one game away, that’s really what we’ve done here, it was the one we needed and hopefully some leverage that we can build some form off the back of."

On George Hewett and other positives from the game: 

"He’s been good. Unfortunately, when we don’t start well, it clouds good things. We’ve had a lot of good things. Whether that is our back six or seven that have been holding together really well, playing against some formidable forward lines and they’ve been able to hold up really well, we’ve had another player in that area with Matty Carroll coming into his first game, so our back six or seven have been steadily building their cohesion over the last four or five weeks.

"We’ve had some mids that have been in great form: George is one of them, he’s been fantastic, whether that’s been doing a role or doing some other things. Tom De Koning has been fantastic as well. There’s a lot of good in there but unfortunately, when you don’t win, it puts a cloud over things.

"How we’ve defended as a team again today, we defended really well. We get to build this off a bit of a solid base, because the defence has been holding up and the effort has been there, so you don’t win contested possessions and hold team to low scores then go in and accuse your team for not bringing effort, you don’t do that.

"We’ve got some things we had to work on in our game that we clearly had to get better and everyone’s seen that, but I’m not going to take away the opportunities we’re generating. We’ve been able to do that but haven’t been able to maximise that, but today we got the reward."

On the feeling post-game: 

"I don’t know what I feel, it’s not relief. It’s nice to get the win and then very quickly you can’t help but look to next week. I should be sitting here with a huge smile on my face but I’m not, so that might say something about it.

"We needed it, we got it, I’m extremely proud of our Club, of our people, because they haven’t wavered, the support has been significant, we’ve backed in our program, our environment, our training fundamentals have been really strong, so there’s no accusations there.

?What we’ve struggled to do is make sure that we transfer it and for whatever reason, that hasn’t been at 100 per cent effectiveness, but it was closer to what we expect today."

On the game review process: 

"I’m just going to sit with this for a little bit, pull apart the game and see where we get better. I think this is the process we’re in, this is what we do every single week.

"You ask me that when we lose and I feed back that we rock up Monday and find out what we did well and what we didn’t. We won today, we’ve had a really convincing win against a team that’s developing and we’ll look at it the exactly the same way: what happened in the game? What do we take out of it? What do we need to get better at? Then we put it into the next game we play."

On the outside noise: 

"I think when you’re locked in and you have a huge belief in the program that we’ve got and the people in it, I think it’s easy to keep your eyes in. That’s what we’ve tried to do and that’s what we’ll continue to do, we’ve done it previously over the last month.

"I can’t sit here and say it doesn’t have a factor, I don’t know what scale though other than to say we’ve been able to keep our eyes in and keep working away and find where we need our progressions and advancements in our team, have humility in the way we look at the game and understand we don’t have it all right - and that’s ok - but then dive into how we get our team going and how do we be a great teammate and how do we keep supporting each other.

"We got one win, I don’t want to make it bigger than that. We got it, we needed it, now we lock our eyes back in when we turn up to get ready for North Melbourne."