Last weekend’s loss to the Hawks down in Melbourne was of course disappointing. Looking at the game, our tackling was one area that let us down. It’s something that we do pride ourselves on and we went into the game knowing what we had to do well, but we just weren’t up to scratch in the tackling, as well as probably just our all-round effort. We had a lot of players who were well down on their best form, but at the end of the day we need a well-rounded team effort to be successful. We didn’t stem the flow, which gave the Hawks the chance to score easy goals, so that’s something we’ll work on and will go into this week’s game looking to really turn around. To lose by ten points was disappointing, but the positive out of it was that we’ve got a lot of improvement to make and our players can get better.

After the game everyone was pretty disappointed, and then after the review on Monday everyone was disappointed again, but we need to just put that behind us now. The boys trained really well on Wednesday and we’re now just focused on Essendon. After a loss, the best thing to do is just focus on the next opponent and we made sure we switched our focus to this week’s game as quickly as possible.

Essendon have won three games in a row, and have played some really good opposition in that time. They are a tough team and have some players who have been in really good form, like Jake Carlisle, who has been outstanding. They’ve got some good midfielders as well, so we know it’s going to be a tough game. They play similar to Hawthorn in that they like to possess the ball and kick it and take uncontested marks, so we need to make sure we’re better than last week.

Even with their captain Jobe Watson out of the side, the Bombers haven’t taken a backward step and have had guys like Dyson Heppell step up over the last few weeks. They’ve also got guys like Brendon Goddard and Brent Stanton who we know are pretty good, so we know what we’re going to get from them. Then they’ve got the likes of Ben Howett and Zach Merrett who have stepped up over the last few weeks and have played really well.

With a game as important as this one is, we really need all the support we can get from our fans tonight. We played in front of a huge crowd at the MCG last weekend, so it would be good to come out this week and play in front of a big home crowd at the SCG. The weather is looking good, and it’s a home game and it should be a really great game between two teams in reasonable form.