“Essendon are in good form at the moment and playing well. They are in quite a good patch.”
“Part of it is purely having your best team on the field. Scott Lucas was missing for a couple of months and when he was out of the team they had a lesser capability.”
“They’ve got their team back together but we’ll put a pretty good team on the field too in terms of availability of players.”
“We go into the match fairly strong in terms of personnel, but you still have to turn up and do it on the day – nothing is going to ever alter that.”
On having last weekend off:
“I think it’s a good thing for the players to just have a break from the physical contact for a weekend.”
“You might argue that there should be two Split Rounds every year. I think the fact that each team has a couple of breaks at the thirds of the season is a good thing for player preservation.”
“A lot of the guys get plenty of niggles, so most players in the competition that didn’t play last weekend will feel a bit better going into this week.”
“We didn’t have anyone who was limping into the Bye last week. Frankly, if you limp on the field you can’t play really.”
On players potentially returning from injury:
“Travis Johnstone was right on the fringe two weeks ago with his hamstring, so he should be fine for this week.”
“Jason Roe will be just about ready to play this weekend but he hasn’t played much footy this year.”
On Simon Black’s groin:
“It became an issue a couple of months ago and we had to give him a couple of weekends off. I’m not saying it’s not affecting him to some degree at the moment, but it’s not affecting him so much that, for instance, he can’t train on Wednesdays.”
