CARLTON coach Brett Ratten has expressed his relief at the postponement of Brendan Fevola’s contract negotiations until the end of the season.

The highly-publicised talks between the two parties had stalled in recent weeks and Ratten was glad the issue would no longer be a distraction from the team’s attempt to play finals.

“It’s good that we’ve put it on hold so we can just concentrate on footy. I think it’s a good thing,” Ratten said.

“We can just concentrate on the football and let contracts take care of themselves down the track.”

Ratten’s men face a large hurdle in their run to the finals, facing a Western Bulldogs side smarting from the heavy defeat inflicted by the Cats last week.

“It will be a great challenge for our players. The Bulldogs are going to play finals and that’s where our ambitions are so we'll be trying to take them and see what we can come up with,” Ratten said of the twilight clash at Telstra Dome on Sunday.

“It’s just amazing what Geelong could do to the second-best team in the competition. They had 400-odd possessions – 130 more than the Bulldogs – and still out-tackled them.

“That ratio is amazing; the team had the footy for so long, but still out-tackled the opposition. I think we’ve seen the best team in the competition last week … but I think the Bulldogs will bounce back and come out pretty hungry and try and get that momentum back going into the finals.”

After an initial period of gloom following last week’s two-point loss to the Swans, Ratten said the mood had been lifted considerably at Princes Park with the many positives that had come out of the match.

“That we could play the Swans at their own game and be in it for such a long time was a real plus for us because previously we might have lost our way through the game, but we stuck to the task,” he said.

“Sometimes you fight the fight and you come up short. We identified a few things that maybe if we did better we would have won, but at the end of the day I couldn’t question the players’ effort and their intensity and the pressure that they put on the opposition.”

The Blues are still in with a realistic shot at playing finals this year, but Ratten said that was not his side’s primary focus.

“Our performances week to week will allow us to maybe fulfill those [finals] ambitions whether it’s this year or next year or the year after; that’s in our hands,” he said.

“As a group we’ll keep learning and growing individually and collectively and we need to do that so instead of a two-point loss we get a two-point win.

“If we win all our [remaining] games or we lose all our games I think we just need to keep improving as a team.”