COLLINGWOOD coach Mick Malthouse says simply making the top eight is no longer acceptable for his side and that the top four is now its primary focus.
> Watch Mick Malthouse address the media after the win
Speaking after the Magpies' 40-point win over the Brisbane Lions put them a game clear in fourth spot, Malthouse stressed his aim for the rest of the season was to get the double chance.
"It is no longer good enough to say we want to make the eight. The goal must be, with four [games] to go, not to lose [this] position. That in itself is the next phase," Malthouse said.
"Certainly early on, the goal for every club is to win enough games to back history and say we're close enough to making the eight and let's make sure we do something else about it."
Malthouse admitted he has had to carefully manage Collingwood's young list as September fast approaches.
> Watch Harry O'Brien speak to CTV in the MCG rooms after the round 18 win over the Brisbane Lions
"We’ve played some big ones in the last few weeks and I think that [we need] to expose (Jaxson) Barham, (Cameron) Wood, (Steele) Sidebottom, (Dayne) Beams and those sort of players to the intensity as it gets closer to the end of the season," he said.
"It is a good indicator whether they can actually stand up. Kids have a history of dropping away in the latter part of the year. We’ve looked after them. We haven’t played them every game, we’ve sent them home and given them the breaks we thought they needed and hopefully from that it will give us some players when we need them.
"We’ve got 36 players we've used and really we're not embarrassed about playing any of them. It is so important they all get exposure at some stage."
The signs looked bad for Collingwood early on when Lion Jonathan Brown booted three first-term goals after Simon Prestigiacomo went off injured from a head clash with the Lions skipper.
> Watch the team sing the song in the rooms after the win
Prestigiacomo returned to the field in the final quarter but Malthouse admits losing his key defender in the opening minutes was a big upset for his plans.
Leigh Brown was used at full-back for most of the night.
"He (Prestigiacomo) was able to come back on and that is the most significant thing. I resisted that at three-quarter-time. We resisted that. We thought we’d see how the first five minutes would pan out," Malthouse said.
"We needed to address some issues out there. (Jonathan) Brown is always hard to stop anyway but I just thought that we probably needed to have that structure in place and let it run to see if we could get better at it."
