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EMERGING
Jamison left the ground midway through the third term clutching his left shoulder after copping a heavy knock in a marking contest.
Up to that point the 21-year-old had kept Lions sharpshooter Daniel Bradshaw goalless in an effort Ratten labelled as his sides best up to three-quarter time.
While happy with Jamison’s effort, Ratten was far from pleased with his side’s first quarter.
“I think this was our worst performance, especially early,” Ratten said.
“To be blown out like that it makes it pretty hard to try and win a game of football because you’re always playing catch-up.
“I think some of our mistakes were pretty bad in the first quarter and we really got hurt from them.
“From a mistakes point of view we had mistakes we shouldn’t have had when there was no pressure.”
After quarter time the Blues matched the Lions’ 10 goals with 10 of their own but did not deserve to win the contest according to the first-year coach.
“Did we deserve to win, no we didn’t,” Ratten said.
“Maybe towards the end we had the chance to maybe put some real pressure and get the margin down to 20 points.”
While disappointed to have dropped a game to a side that went into the match with the same 3-4 record as the Blues, Ratten talked up the Lions as a genuine finals side.
“I think the Lions are just super competitive and when you’ve got a forwardline with (Jonathan) Brown and (Daniel) Bradshaw and you throw (Mitch) Clark in there as well as the small forwards, they are going to be hard to beat every time they run out to play,” he said.
“They’ll be in the eight. They are a hard AFL team and it shows with their tackling and they probably gave us a lesson with that, especially early.”
Ratten was pleased his side was able to stick to the task, as well as the performance of full forward Brendan Fevola, who scrounged a commendable 5.4 from limited opportunities.
Unlike counterpart Leigh Matthews, Ratten said the side had few problems adapting to the new interchange rules.
“I think we can get used to it fairly quickly,” he said.
