WE’VE done all our reviewing of last week'sgame, and it was a tough to get through it. It was a terrible performance onSaturday night.
It was a good reality check for us though. TheCrows are a very good team, although they haven't been in great form, and theywere starting to get some players back. Mark Ricciuto was back and after acouple of games, found some form.
Goodwin came back into their team and Burton came back, so theywere probably a little bit closer to full strength. We got a good dose ofreality that we still have a lot of work to do, if we're going to challenge thetop teams.
I think physically, it just showed thatthey were a lot stronger around the ball. It was a wet night, it was a bitslippery, and I just thought their body strength and the way they handled thefooty was a class above what we did.
As well as they played, we played just aspoorly. We couldn't kick the footy, we couldn't grab it, we couldn't pick itup, we couldn't handball it, we were very sloppy with our disposal, and wedidn't really give ourselves the opportunity to play well and kick goalsbecause we made so many fundamental mistakes.
A reality check can be a positive thing.We've been sitting up the top end of the ladder for a big part of the year, andsometimes that can be a bit misleading. It's such an even season that you canquite easily drop from where we are to out of the eight, and teams that are outof the eight can jump in.
We understand that we're still a developingclub. We've still got the youngest list in the competition, and we've got tokeep working on improving, week in, week out.
We can't rest on our laurels and what we'vedone so far, because that's just not good enough. We haven't beaten teams thathave been good in the past couple of years like Sydneyand Adelaide,so we've got to keep working to get better.
The players were disappointed afterSaturday night. They were disappointed in their performance when we were goingthrough the game and viewing some of the missed opportunities that we shouldhave taken.
If we'd used the ball and marked cleanlyand taken the ball first grab, if we'd taken our chest marks inside our forward50, we would have been a lot more in the game.
The result says we lost by over 10 goals,but we still look at the review and take the positives out of it, and say,"If we'd done X, Y and Z to the level we know we can, we would have been alot closer".
It was a coaches' nightmare in the boxduring the game. With modern technology, you presume that when you walk intothe box at the start of the game, all the phone lines are going to be up andrunning.
What happened was we walked in and justabout sat down for the first bounce, and the phone wasn't working. All of a sudden,we couldn't communicate with the bench and the coach couldn't communicate withthe runner.
It was a major issue for the box. It didn'taffect how badly we played, but from a coaching perspective, it was veryfrustrating.
Losing Danny Jacobs and Chance Batemanearly hurt us – Bateman is one of our hardest runners, and we were one downright from the start with our running capacity.
Danny unsettled us a bit, and we werestretched. We are hoping both guys will be okay for this week.
Buddy has had some ripping games this year,but in the last few weeks, he just hasn't been able to shake his defender. He'sstill had some opportunities, but he dropped a couple of chest marks in theforward half and missed a set shot at goal.
I think everyone forgets Buddy is only 20,and thinks he's already made his name and is going to kick nine goals eachweek. He's still very young, and being a forward, his performance depends onwhat is happening up the ground.
Buddy does still get opportunities to kickgoals. Our forward generally didn't get a lot of opportunities on Saturday; Ithink we only went inside our forward line 43 times, which wasn't enough togive the forwards enough supply, but he still dropped a couple of chest marksand one overhead he should have taken.
When you're playing well, you do take youropportunities, so I don't think he's that far away from it.
The Tigers have been really competitivethis year, even though they've only one won game and drawn another. They'vebeen pretty competitive the last three or four weeks, so they are playing goodfooty and like to take the game on.
We're going to have to play a lot betterthan how we did against Adelaideif we're going to be any chance to beat them. We like playing at the 'G, andwe're hoping we'll get back into some good form this week.