Power coach Mark Williams described the club’s Round 9 game against Geelong as the worst performance in a long time. He gave credit to Geelong for their great performance and said that he was particularly disappointed the team was unable to stop the run-on from Geelong in the second quarter. Here’s a full rundown of his post-match media conference.

All credit to Geelong, they came out and smashed us, there’s no doubt about it. It was as bad as we’ve played in a long time. We’ve played really well in the wet this year but they belted us off the ball, they stopped us at stoppages, they scored from stoppages and they made us turn over the ball and kicked goals. We were really disappointed by it. We obviously spent a bit of time at half-time discussing it. It was good to be able to arrest the damage and kick a few goals in the second half but we don’t take too much out of that, but it’s certainly better than turning up your heels and forgetting the second half. It was one of the poorer games. We’ve got a huge challenge ahead of us next week with Hawthorn on fire as well.

That hardness around the footy, especially in the first half, how much did you miss a Wilson or going back even further a Carr?

We had 22 out there and so did they, so we’re not making any excuses in that regard. There’s no doubt they were much harder, much more inside and made us fumble the ball.

You say its 22 versus 22 – do you think tonight exposed what you don’t have, particularly that hardness or inside player?

A few years ago we went out of our way to get some in our side. There weren’t too many there tonight that displayed those characteristics, which was really disappointing. We failed to be able to shut down the game halfway through the second quarter, I was really disappointed with that. There are some things you can do and we didn’t do them and we’ll address that tomorrow I’m sure.

Are you worries about when the games are going against you, that some of your players go missing?

If you look at the big picture, Geelong have been playing with the same group for a fair time now and the last two weeks they’ve beaten a couple of sides from Western Australia that are doing pretty well. It might mean that they’re on the rise finally. We started the journey at the start of the year trying to be better than what we were last year, and we’re still pushing that. We know that we have a hell of a long way to go. Some of our fantastic efforts early in the season gave everyone some hope as to ‘yeah things are pushing in the right direction’ but there was never any doubt that we were going to have some tough times and that was shown tonight. Last week against Sydney, if you look at Swans beating the Bulldogs today convincingly, you see the Swans are a pretty good outfit and it was no dishonour to lose to them. Tonight, playing at home, we’d want to show a lot better than we did. The first half was particularly poor.

In view of the loss you had to Sydney, and the elements you identified, what sort a start would you have liked to have here tonight?

Well you’d want to get the ball inside-50 a lot more, you’d certainly want to win the clearances and you’d want to show a real eagerness to be able to hunt the ball and turn over the ball, to cause them to make mistakes and get something out of it, but we didn’t do that.

Where is all the promise of speed and high skills? Has that all disappeared in the last two weeks or has something else caused it to go?

Opposition have really come to play the type of game against us, and we’re battling with that at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll work our way through it. If the opposition serve up one on one trying to beat you in a particular phase of the game, then you need to really take it on, and I don’t think we did.

Mark, losing Daniel Motlop so early at the start was that deflating for the team?

He dropped a chest mark and got cleaned up, so that was disappointing. Obviously it changes a little bit of your rotations when you’ve got Fabian on the bench, there are less in the rotations that you can do, but that’s not an excuse I can guarantee you. We were really disappointed about Daniel because he’s a really important part of our side and I think he’s been playing particularly well.

Mark, what was training like during the week in regard to team confidence?

It was good.

How do you arrest the fall in confidence form here on?

That is the million dollar question. We played poorly tonight. Last week was disappointing but tonight was bad, so we’ll be straight back into it tomorrow and we’ll try and get everyone up again. Right now I can’t say I’m all that cheery about it either.

You said on Friday that we probably overrated you and after the last two weeks people will probably review where you’re at. What is the true measurement?

At the end of the year you’ll be able to judge if we improved or not – what’s the improvement in our players and can we see ourselves going forward. From 12th last year it means you have to improve significantly to be involved at the end of the year. We started brilliantly well but right now it’s a bit of a hump, but we’ll keep working on it.

Once again the opposition used more defenders against less forwards, what’s your way out of that?

It really depends what the opposition want to do with their defenders, if they want to come up on our forwards or not. Unfortunately if we have extra players around the ball and don’t get the ball or we don’t have the ball chained out with any sort of confidence or any sort of space, all you do is kick it straight back to them, so it doesn’t help. That’s what we addressed at half-time. I suppose on the other side, if you have got forwards in good form they can beat the one extra player but at the moment they’re not doing that.

Brad Symes dropped out of the side, what does he need to do?

Brad knows what he has to do. He’s working on it. I was pleased to see he got in the best players again yesterday, so that’s good, it keeps his confidence up. You have to understand there are certain match-ups that are going to be good for him, and we want him to succeed rather than fail. We’re working closely with him and hopefully he’ll be back in the side soon.

What’s happening with your clearances when Brendon Lade can dominate hits but you’re not getting the ball?

You look at who gets first possession, are the hits going to the right people, how much space those people have got, are they strong enough to be able to break free from the people that are holding onto them or are they fumbling the ball. You look at all the different aspects of it. We spend hours and hours, just like every other club, trying to analyse that and trying to get a better result from it. Early days we’ve done particularly well. Today I thought people like Surjan and Thurstans played pretty well, the ball was obviously down there often. It was nice to get Deluca into the game. I think he played 48% of the time on the ground, so after the game was lost, we still wanted to get something out of it and that was good for him.

Is it the one advantage you’re not maximizing anymore?

Oh no there’s a lot of advantages we’re not using. Obviously Broges works particularly well with Ladey, and with him injured we’ve missed that. Ottens is a pretty good player, he can run and push forward and mark the ball, and Blake I think is improving. I think Geelong are along the road and doing a pretty good job and certainly Bomber (Mark Thompson) has done a great job given the fact he was under the pump for most of last year. I’m sure he’s enjoying it.

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