Sydney Swans coach John Longmire will use this weekend’s break courtesy of the bye to fine-tune the team’s game plan ahead of next Friday night’s game against Carlton at the SCG.

Longmire said he will use this week’s training sessions to work on areas of the game he felt needed addressing after last Saturday night’s home loss to Geelong, as well as giving those players returning from injury a chance to improve their fitness base.

“From our point of view … there’s an opportunity to work on things that we need to get better at,” Longmire told sydneyswans.com.au.

“A couple of players are probably a little bit sore, so it (the break) will give them the opportunity to freshen up a bit, and also some players who are coming back from injury that played in our reserves on the weekend, it gives them an opportunity to have a really solid hit-out again this week.

“We can get some pretty serious conditioning work into those players and hopefully sharpen them up for the possibility of playing the week after.”

With no senior or reserves football this weekend, Longmire said he would use Friday’s training session to simulate match intensity. The players will then have the weekend off, and come back focused on Carlton from the beginning of next week.

“Next week is a Friday night game so we need to have the players’ minds tuned in nice and early and get stuck into the Blues next week,” he said.

“It’s a big game here at the SCG, our first Friday night game for a long period of time, so we’re really looking forward to it.”

Longmire said the young players in the Swans team would take valuable lessons out of the 27-point loss to the Cats, especially about capitalising on opportunities in the wet conditions.

“It doesn’t get any better than playing against Geelong in regards to wet weather footy at the SCG,” Longmire said.

“(It was) a nice, tight, contested game of football, and we won the contested ball count, but the reality was we didn’t take our opportunities when we had (them).

“There are 10 or 11 players (who have played) under 50 games or less and … it gives them a real opportunity to learn, but we’ve still got some way to go to get up there with the best teams of the competition.”

Longmire said he has been pleased with the Swans start to the year, with the side currently sitting in eighth position on the ladder after four rounds - one of four teams with two wins, a loss and a draw.

“I’ve been really happy with the general endeavour of the players,’ he said.

“The players have been having a real go apart from the weekend, but even at the 12 minute mark of the last quarter we were only seven points down.

“We dropped away in the last 15 minutes of the game, but apart from that we’ve been right in the hunt every game.”

Tickets to the Sydney Swans v Carlton game at the SCG on Friday April 29 can be purchased by clicking here.