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WITH just one point in it at the final change, Carlton’s encounter with the Tigers at the MCG on Saturday looked set to go down the wire, but Adam Bentick says a focus on endurance is paying off for the Blues.

“We’ve been working hard on our last quarters and working hard in our last quarters,” Bentick said after the 30-point win.

“We’re always very confident that if the game is very close at three-quarter time that we can run over the top of a team.

“With the work that we’ve done with our high performance manager Justin Cordy, it’s given us a lot of confidence to be able to run out games.”

When the club’s power brokers successfully landed Chris Judd in the off-season they could not have foreseen that one of the team’s best wins would come without the new skipper.

But that’s exactly what happened as the concussed Brownlow Medallist looked on from the stands.

“It was disappointing when Chris pulled out yesterday, but we knew as a group that we had to cover his loss,” Bentick, who finished with 25 possessions, said.

“It was a sensational performance by everyone who played today; to come away with the win was a great result.

“We didn’t try and change too much, he was obviously a big loss, but we just tried to stick to our structures that we’ve put in place all week and all year and Nick Stevens really stepped up today; he had a great game.”

Bentick maintains the euphoria that followed the club’s rise into the top eight before the eventual loss to Essendon will not happen this time around despite the win putting the Blues right back in the top eight mix.

“We’re seven and seven, but we’re not really worried about finals at the minute,” he said.

“We’ve got to take each week as it comes because we put a focus on finals last week and it didn’t really pay dividends against the Bombers.

“I don’t think we got ahead of ourselves, I think the Bombers played really well last week but we had to bounce back and we did.”