After an 18-point win over Geelong, Senior Coach Michael Voss was buoyed by the belief that the victory would instil in his side.

Pleased with how his team defended - keeping the Cats to just 12 goals - Voss was most impressed by the way the group galvanised and delivered a genuine team performance at the MCG.

Here's what he had to say. 

On what the win means in the context of the season:

"It’s given hope, but the fightback has been impressive. The circumstances themselves: we didn’t find ourselves in a great spot, but it was also really clear on what we needed to do, so it wasn’t like we were trying to uncover things and flip rocks to find what we needed to work on.

"It was pretty clear that we needed to be better efficiently, so we’ve done a fair bit of work on that, just to get clearer on what that looks like for us and we’ve been able to turn that into something.

"Having some personnel back playing has helped, but also some of the method we wanted to play with, we’ve seen that more consistently over the last three weeks.

"We’ve seen the ebs and flows of the competition, we’re too ready to make judgements and it’s just about having patience and making sure you’re really thorough in everything, have humility to accept the feedback if it’s not good enough, know you have to get better, challenge hard where you need to.

"Ultimately, it’s about persistence and when you’ve got belief in what we’ve been doing, the players have shared that belief with us to keep sticking at it, it gives you confidence to keep going and keep reinforcing what we want to continue to value.

"We’re three and four, we’re fighting from a fair way back, so there’s plenty of road left. We’ve got to keep trying to find that consistency, and we’ve got a lot of encouragement out of today's game to try and put into our game moving forward."

On Harry McKay's return and subsequent performance: 

"He turned up in big moments. Regardless of what happened recently, Harry has had a terrific pre-season, he is probably in the shape of his life.

"I thought it was great to see our supporters rally behind him, which was fantastic to see, and he had a few big moments that he needed to mark for us and create a contest and finish the play in front of goal. 

"The detail that he puts in, the preparation he puts into his game, he’s an absolute pro, and he’s worked through a few things like that.

"I felt quite comfortable that in his hands, it would end up the right thing because he does put in the preparation and when the moment shows itself and it taps him on the shoulder, he’s ready for it.

"I’m so pleased he’s been able to come back, he’s a critical person to us, we love him in our team, I’m rapt our supporters were cheering him every time he was near the ball, almost willing him into it at times. It was a great energy around it."

On taking big moments: 

"We had a lot of great moments: 'Haynsey' had a number of them throughout the game, so he turned the clock back there a little bit.

"'Gov' had some really great moments, 50/50 balls, winning the ball from tough situations. 'Weiters' tackle on Dangerfield late in the game, tackles do win you matches.

"I think overall, the most pleasing team aspect of it all was that we kept a very strong offensive team to a low score, and that’s what we’ve all tried to buy into, and we’ve been able to get that done. That’s a tough ask against Geelong."

On maintaining forward pressure: 

"I had one moment where our standards had slipped in that area a couple of weeks ago, I’ve never felt like I had to walk into the changerooms and question our bloke’s effort or ask them to bring more contest or more pressure or defend harder. We’ve been doing that pretty well.

"We probably weren’t able to capitalise on it, but it has to be our standard, it has to be what we expect from one another.

"The selfless nature, the way we want to play, the pressure we put on the ball, standing up in moments when the opposition come at you and you can hold, they have to form part of our identity and fortunately, I think that’s one of the things that we’ve been able to bring every week to every game."

On the changes from early in the season: 

"I think there is a belief clearly growing about how we feel that if we play it and we play ot consistently, that it can stack up against anybody.

"We weren’t living up to that in early days, we played in patches and so that gave us confidence that if we keep going at it, almost double down in a lot of areas, knowing that if we could do it for longer, it can put us into great positions in games.

"I think what’s turned is that we’ve been able to do it for far longer than what we were...everybody has spoken about our first half and second half, but really at the end of the day, our ability to execute for longer has been the major difference in it all."

On maintaining the pressure after half time: 

"We’ll just keep validating on what is important to us and clearly when an opposition has momentum, it puts more stress on your system, it puts more of an emphasis on making sure you get your roles right in those key moments.

"We’ve felt like we’ve fallen away in those moments, but we didn’t today.

"We’re sitting there at half time and you know what Geelong are going to do: they were going to come, and they were throwing caution to the wind, and they were going to take chances.

"Fortunately, we had enough moments to get the job done."

On the contest work from the mids:

"I think you have to embrace the arm wrestle, I don’t know the game as anything else.

"You get momentum for maybe five or 10 minutes against good teams, you don’t get it for long. You have to respect that they’re going to get five or 10 minutes, but then otherwise the game lives in an arm wrestle, and I felt like for the majority of our game, our mids put their heads down and worked really hard.

"Geelong asked a few questions, they flipped the magnets a little bit and tried to provide a little bit of a challenge on that front, but we worked our way through it, and the boys were still able to give the territory needed on the game to ultimately win the game."

On Zac Williams:

"Williams is a calf, so we’ll get that scanned to see the significance of it. 

"Everyone has their own journey, their own story to tell. I spoke to him in the rooms afterwards and he’s disappointed that he can’t join us, but he’s hardly missed a session throughout the whole year.

"We’ve managed him as we would as someone with a slight history but he’s trained really well, he’s been as keen as anyone, he’s been in good form and filling a really good role for us, something a bit different and unique to him, but hopefully we’re not missing him for long.

On creating cohesion amongst the group:

"We’ve got a little bit of that cohesion at the moment, some consistency of personnel that’s been playing out there, so we’ve been able to work through some form patches with individuals, but it’s been a key priority for us to ensure they get time together.

"Our back six or seven spend time together, it’s a new back six: Jack is back there, he’s played minimal games with Weiters beside him, Haynes has come in, Ollie Hollands is new, Matty Carroll is new, we’ve had Lachie Cowan down there who is only young, but what they’ve been able to do over the last six or seven weeks has been particularly impressive.

"They’re coming together really well. Where we can, we love to have that forward line as familiar as we can week to week as well."

On his message to Nick Haynes: 

"Keep going. The pre-season, there was enough evidence to suggest that he was going to have an impact on our season.

"We look at it over time, we don’t look at it on one moment. You form that confidence, belief and trust over time and he clearly had that with our playing group and he clearly had a bad day, so how about we just stick with someone? Rather than just cast them off and spell them to the end.

"He was able to work his way through that and he’s been a really important member of our back six or seven, so I’m just pleased for him that he had some really good moments today and had a really strong game."

On Corey Durdin's specky: 

"He took a specky last week too and I didn’t realise I had a 172cm centre-half forward but he keeps catching them.

"You have permission if you keep catching them, you keep going for them.

"It was nice to see a little bit of energy for him, but jeez he can jump, I didn’t know he could do that. That was particularly impressive, especially on Sam De Koning"

On kicking goals from turnover: 

"For a team that has some offensive power, that was important. Also the looks we got on the back of it was important.

"That was a trait of ours last year, we hadn’t quite been getting exactly right in the first phase of the year but I would say that was a really key part of the game: being able to manage both sides of the ball like that and limit the opportunities Geelong were able to generate. That was a really important facet of the game."