The man in charge of the Swans’ defensive line, John Blakey, joins sydneyswans.com.au for this week’s Cellarbrations Coaches Column and shares an insight into the challenges facing his back six ahead of Saturday night’s encounter with North Melbourne.

We come up against your old mob in the Kangaroos at Etihad Stadium. More than 12 years on, do you get any sense of nostalgia when you see the blue and white running around?

(Blakey laughs) No, not really. It has been a long time since I last played and obviously you put all your energy into the team you’re with at the time.

One of my old mates in Darren Crocker is the fill in coach at the moment so it was good to see him win last week.

But it’s important we win this week.

We’ll get to Saturday night’s clash in a moment. In last weekend’s win over the Gold Coast our first half was good, our second half not so much – what did the coaches put that down to?

Gold Coast changed its structure a little bit putting one behind the ball, but I think it was more our execution that probably let us down the most.

We had some terrible skills errors as well, everyone has skill errors so that’s going to happen, but we had a lot of them.

We also needed to work on some things structurally forward of the ball.

It was a combination of those things and when you’re 40 points up at half-time you always hope to go on and win by a lot more but it just didn’t happen like that.

Dan Hannebery and Jarrad McVeigh lead the charge, especially in the opening half. Were you impressed with how much ball they were winning?

Yeah definitely, they both had 17 possessions in the first quarter so they found a lot of the football.

Both really set us up and had a big influence winning the ball and being an influential part of our attacking moves forward.

Both of those boys were the best two players on the night.

Another Swan to impress on Saturday night was Dane Rampe. One of yours within that back six, how did you see Rampe’s game?

His last month of football has been really solid and on the weekend he had something like nine intercept possessions which means he worked hard to get across and help out his teammates.

It’s an important role he plays for us and Saturday night was probably his best game of the season.

That penetrating kick of his really came to the fore…

Dane has been working really hard on it. His kicking has probably been a little inconsistent over the last couple of years but, to his credit, has continually worked on it and it has improved.

We have to remember he has only been playing senior footy for a couple of years so his improvement has been quite significant.

How have you seen your back six’s form in the first half of the season?

I think we’ve been pretty solid – the whole group.

Obviously, Teddy (Richards) and Heath (Grundy) hold down the keys and do a really good job, week in and week out.

Nick Smith and Rhyce Shaw are always reliable while players like (Lewis) Jetta, Macca (Jarrad McVeigh) and Sammy Reid have been through there in different patches.

We have a good mix available to us which helps out the bax six significantly.

North Melbourne possesses some talented forwards – talls and smalls – who can score and cause some headaches for defenders. Our back six have quite a challenge on their hands…

Yeah, certainly. They’ve got some good avenues at goal with Ben Brown, Drew Petrie and Jarrad Waite while the speed and creativity of Lindsay Thomas, Shaun Higgins and Robbie Nahas.

It presents a good challenge for us as we know they’re quite good at scoring when inside forward 50.

We’re going to have our work cut out for us.