Playing West Coast at Subiaco Oval will certainly be a challenge for the Saints this weekend. But Senior Coach Ross Lyon takes confidence from a number of successful visits to Perth in recent times.

“The challenge is to get to work and start banking four points again. The only way you can do that is getting back to improving your football and clearly we need to.

“It’s great that we can come together, under a bit of pressure, and hopefully work our way through it to get the win.”

Despite the loss to Essendon last weekend, Lyon left the match knowing that a number of key elements had improved in his side.

“Obviously we didn’t get the four points, but there are a lot of things I ticked off with our game. Contested ball, a lot of forward entries with 26 scoring shots and our clearance work were all improvements in my mind.”

With a clear understanding of where the problems surfaced in the Round 8 match, Lyon has been able to specifically highlight the areas that the coaching department will address at training this week.

“We had some significant holes with regards to some defensive aspects. I think Essendon got around 5 really easy goals, and we feel we know exactly why.”

“Ideally we would have been able to fix these issues on the day (Sunday), but Essendon certainly put us under some great pressure and we didn’t take our opportunities.”

As a key element to his current philosophy, Lyon is not focusing on the negative aspects from the weekend. Instead he is taking the positives out of the team’s recent defeats and is addressing any problems one by one with the team.

“When you get effort like we gave, it makes it easier to go away and analyse what fell down.”

“I’m feeling quite enthusiastic and vibrant about where we are heading, and am confident that we’re going to play some good footy very soon.”

As a major loss to the Saints set-up, Jason Gram has undergone surgery to repair an ongoing groin problem that has been troubling the midfielder. But Lyon doesn’t expect his recovery time to be substantial.

“It looks like he’ll (Gram) be out for around 4 weeks, as the rehab for this type of procedure is pretty quick. He is a great athlete and a diligent player, so this will give him the best chance to come back to play some good football with the Club.”

With regards to a replacement for Gram, a decision has yet to be made, but Brett Peake is one potential to step back into the side.

“(Brett Peake) is certainly in the mix, as is Jack Steven, Rhys Stanley and Robert Eddy. It’s still early in the week though so we’ll see who goes well at training and go to match committee from there.”

But with the VFL not playing this weekend, Lyon will ensure he has a number of options with him in Perth, which is likely to include numerous players from the Saints VFL affiliate side, Sandringham.

“We’ll most likely take over a big squad with us, as the seconds don’t play, so we’ll take it from there.”

“Our contests are pretty good, our ball usage is improving, but, unlike us, our defence has been pretty poor. We need to reaffirm what we’re about and what we believe.”


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