THERE’S a fairly exciting feeling around the place at themoment. Two good wins against the two last premiers have made things veryexciting.
The young kids, having had a chance to play a couple ofgames last year and obviously this year with a few senior players out, haveheld us in good stead, and now we've got a big game this Friday night againstGeelong to plan for because of that.
All players want to play in big finals, and it doesn't getthat much bigger than this, other than the Grand Final.
The players are getting ready to play on Friday, and won'tbe doing too much for the rest of the week. They trained pretty well on Tuesdayat the MCG. We had a couple of guys that didn't do as much as the other guys,but that's the same most weeks.
It's hard to put a finger on whether the early plane trip onthe weekend helped the players physically or not, but I guess the research hasbeen done by previous people, so we have to rely on that.
Maybe it helped the players mentally though, as I guesshaving two seats to yourself and flying business class back probably has them feelinggood. For a big final, however, it's pretty hard to not be up mentally for thegame.
I think the blend of young and experienced players hashelped us this year. It's always good to have young kids playing, as it bringsexcitement to the team and you can get a bit dull as you get older.
The young kids make the old guys get a bit excited. I thinkit makes them remember what it was like when they were young, and theenthusiasm just breeds through the team. When you start winning games andgaining confidence, sometimes the young kids don't know what it's like not tobe confident.
In preparing for the Cats, I don't think you look so much onthe fact they had a week off. I think you can look at it two ways; we've gotmomentum and they've had a week off – I don't think it really matters.
They have been the benchmark and they've got a lot of goodplayers in the team, as the nine All-Australians indicate, but we've got tomake sure we do what we do well, and make sure we do that properly.
We only lost by 16 points in round 15 to Geelong, and Micksaid it was the worst game we'd played for the year up until that stage – Ithink Brisbane was probably worse later on – and I'm sure since then theplayers have got better and better and our team has improved quite a bit overthe whole year.
The young guys have improved as they've gotten moreexperience, and even the middle-tier players have improved a lot as well. We'rea lot better for that. We beat them by 100 points last year, and I know lastyear is a completely different, but that does give us a bit of confidence inthe back of our mind.
The week off can possibly be a dangerous thing. In 1999,Essendon had the week off and then lost to Carlton, and Essendon had 10 more scoringshots that day and still lost.
I guess it can depend on if you win or lose. At the end ofthe day, you can look back and you can always say the week off is why ithappened. If you go in mentally right and you get a bit of luck on the day, youshould be okay, but you never know.
The start this week is very important for us. We need to geta couple of goals early and get the crowd right behind us, as there will be alot of Collingwood supporters there. Their players will keep fighting allnight, which is probably a trait we've had for much of the year as well.
It will be a very intense game, because Geelong is very strong over the football.They have a lot of strong bodies; you won't see too many lighter framed bodiesthrough their midfield, so it will be red-hot around the ball.
But, we'll never give it in, so if we can get a few goals infront, you'll never know what can happen.