This week we face one of the toughest tests in football. Collingwood are the reigning premiers and a team that has been able to beat us for the past six years.

Preparing for a game against the Pies is interesting. Everyone has seen a lot of them and know how they play. They are predictable, but that is one of the reasons they are so good - because they are predictable to themselves. So this week is more about us - about our structures, about our game plan, and about our pressure.

Our defence faces another great challenge this weekend. With Travis Cloke, Chris Dawes, and Leigh Brown at times, there is plenty of marking power in Collingwood’s forward line. Some of their smaller players are good overhead marks too. In that regard, our defence will be relying on pressure from our midfield and making sure the ball is not moved easily into their forward 50.

The Pies get a great contribution from lots of players with two or three goals. Their midfielders chime in with a lot of goals, which is partly due to them spending a fair bit of time up forward, so we need to be aware of that.

We were certainly disappointed with last week’s match against Carlton. When you play the top teams, if you come out and play in 10 minute patches here and there, it’s not going to be good enough. If you don’t put in a four quarter performance top-four teams will just steam roll you, which is what happened against the Blues. It’s not rocket science, but we will take a good lesson out of that.

Sometimes you get a bit of a reality check on where you are, but I’d like to think last week wasn’t a true indication because we didn’t perform at our best. If we perform at our best, we give ourselves a chance. We’d like a real solid indicator of where we are at, but playing two quarters won’t help us do that.

Collingwood are a fantastic four quarter team and they finish their matches off well, having won 10 of 11 last quarters this year. There is a willingness to work for four quarters, and that is why they are one of the best teams.

The Collingwood group has played together for four or five years now and that is one of the things all good teams have in common. We are still working towards that with our group, and looking at our defence, the more they play together, the more they gel as a unit.  We’ve been able to introduce younger players like Alex Johnson, and he has slotted in there without much fanfare. We know he does his job every week so we will miss him against the Pies as he sits out with a minor calf injury.

We were forced to make a couple of changes for Saturday night’s match. At match committee last week there were six or seven guys who were unlucky to miss out on senior selection. Fast forward to this week, and some of those guys like Jesse White, Paul Bevan and Andrejs Everitt are getting that opportunity, which is a good reward for their form in the Reserves over many weeks.

When you play the best, you need every advantage you can get. One advantage we can use over the Pies is the support of a big home crowd. The impact a big, vocal crowd can have on the players is enormous. We saw how important it was last time we were at ANZ and overcame Essendon in the last quarter. We need everyone we can to get to ANZ Stadium and help us challenge the black and white army.