JOSH Fraser said the Northern Blues wouldn’t shy away from Saturday's result and believed there could be “unbelievably good learning” to come out of it.
On a day where there were six players debuting in the VFL and a further two making their club debut, the Blues fell to Collingwood by 130 points.
In front of a big crowd at Preston for the first game of the season, Fraser said it was an “incredibly disappointing day”.
“We had eight first gamers for our footy club, and the exposure they got will hold us in good stead going forward,” Fraser said post-match.
“We’ve got a mix of really young players at the moment (13 players aged under-21) and some guys returning from long-term injury: there’s a chemistry imbalance there in terms of how often they’ve been able to play together.
“We’re not shying away from the result. We don’t accept it. I don’t accept it as coach.”
Full time. pic.twitter.com/aOVLcbiG6C
— Northern Blues FC (@NBluesFC) April 7, 2018
After a competitive opening quarter and a half, Collingwood took hold of the contest to run away with a big win.
Fraser said the players, coaches and club would continue to review themselves and stick to their roadmap after the opening game of the season.
“We’ll continue to challenge our contest, we’ll continue to challenge our effort if it’s not there and we’ll continue to educate to get our young players to where they need to be as quickly as possible,” Fraser said.
“We’ll keep looking into the way we’re preparing our boys but fundamentally we walk away extremely disappointed with the result yesterday.
“There were fundamental moments which we didn’t do consistently well enough.”
Fraser said the first thing to do was to roll the sleeves up in preparation of North Melbourne at Avalon Aiport Oval on Sunday.
“There’s an opportunity to get to work in [seven] days time and make a shift pretty quickly,” Fraser said.
“There’s unbelievably good learning to come out of the game today if we choose to acknowledge what happened, which we will.
“If anyone thinks we’re not hurting from this, they’re completely wrong because it’s not the sort of performance we want to attach to our football club.”