ADELAIDE coach Neil Craig says Saturday night’s game against league leaders Hawthorn will be a critical one for his team – win, lose or draw.

The Crows labelled their round-four clash with Hawthorn in Launceston a write-off after they failed to deliver competitiveness and intensity.

Craig said it was vital that his team responded to that disappointing performance, which in turn would allow for a better assessment of where the Crows are at this season.

“We need to address that part of it, because if that [competitiveness and intensity] is lacking in your game, you can sit around as much as you like in our debrief on a Monday afternoon and say ‘what about our ball movement? Well we couldn’t get the ball’ or ‘we got pushed off the ball’,” Craig said.

“So, you waste your time talking about execution or ball movement because your comments always come back to, ‘how poor were we?’

“That’s why it’s always important, irrespective of scoreboard, that the competitive part of your game is always in play, so can you can actually spend some time talking about the technical aspects of your game. And we need to respond to that.”

Adelaide spent two hours behind closed doors on Wednesday working on its ball movement, which was brought undone in Launceston and Craig said would be put to the test again on Saturday night.

“Our ball movement against a side that can set a zone against us [will be tested]. We’ve been doing a fair bit of work on that over the pre-season and also in-season and we’re getting better at it, but hopefully we’ll now get to see it against a really good zoning side and see how it stands up.

“I think it’s a full house tomorrow night and we’re playing against the top team on our home ground, so that’s another experience for our younger players.

“We’ll also see how our forward line goes. It was quite productive last week against Richmond and it’s another challenge this week. Brett Burton is not there and he’s been a very good forward for us and has also been one of our senior leaders in that area.

“We’ll get a lot of information tomorrow night, win, lose or draw, which will be good for us.”

The Crows have recalled big man Jon Griffin for the Saturday night blockbuster; a decision that Craig said was not affected by the withdrawal of ruckman Simon Taylor (knee) from the Hawthorn line-up.

“We’re pretty keen to continue to give both our guys [Ivan Maric and Griffin] experience in the ruck under a whole range of conditions,” he said.

“We wouldn’t do it stupidly. If we thought it was really going to really outbalance us we wouldn’t do it, but if it could go either way, we’ll continue to do it.”