HAWTHORN skipper Sam Mitchell says honourable losses such as Friday night’s 11-point defeat against the reigning premiers, Geelong, are no longer good enough for the Waverley-based side.

“Honourable losses a couple of years ago might have been acceptable,” Mitchell said.

“At this point where we are in our development, we’ve still got some young players and you can come up with as many excuses as you like as to why we didn’t win, but at the end of the day it was in our control and we just weren’t good enough.”

However Mitchell admitted that although the side has gained some encouragement from their performance, the Hawks’ standards were now set high.

“We’re in the ball park, we’re not miles off it. I think it’s funny when you lose and you read the paper and everyone says how good your effort was. We probably think we played okay but the kudos should go to Geelong. They were too good for us on the night and we made too many mistakes to be competitive and we need to improve those things… we don’t want to just mix it with the top sides, we want to beat them.”

The 25-year-old captain admitted that as a footy fan he was intrigued to see Lance Franklin and Matthew Scarlett line up on each other.

“Part of me is just a footy fan and you hope they line up on each other and you get to see how they mix it. Lance probably got on top of him for five or ten minutes but wasn’t able to convert and I thought Scarlett did a pretty good job. He’s a pretty damaging player so we were happy to keep him away from the footy as much as we can on their rebound.”

Franklin kicked 4.5 on the premiership defender and Mitchell is hoping that the Hawks’ star forward will get the opportunity to better his output later in the season.

“Who wouldn’t like to see that match up in the finals. I think it would be a very good one. I think they both had some strong parts of the game, they probably got a hold of each other at different points but I thought for the amount of time that we went in there we probably had enough chances to win the game.”

Campbell Brown was an unusual presence in the Hawks forward line against the Cats and Mitchell said that despite being a little disillusioned after the first quarter, he settled into the role well. The 24-year-old kicked two goals and three behinds.

“He said at quarter time that he may as well put his track suit on and go home because he felt like he wasn’t getting near the footy but as the game got on he got more used to it and sort of got into the game. I thought he was very, very good - - his pressure and his chasing, and his tackling along with having four or five shots on goal. He was only able to kick two but that will come.”