“We just didn’t play well enough today,”Clarkson said. “We just didn’t execute the skills of the game as well as we’dlike.”
“I don’t really care too much about whetherit was our worst [game this year] or not – we didn’t play well enough to winthe game of footy. We had our opportunities to do a lot better than we did.
“We just move on as quickly as we can, wedon’t lose faith in the way that we go about it and the belief that we’ve got.We’ve won 10 games of footy this year, we’ve played some good football andwe’ll bounce back next week.”
Clarkson said the goal drought from earlyin the second quarter until late in the third was the day’s most damningfeature, with Hawthorn kicking eight points and sending another four shots outof bounds on the full in that time.
“That’s very, very poor execution andconversion of the opportunities that we had,” Clarkson said.
“We had plenty and we didn’t make the mostof ours and the Kangaroos did, to their credit.”
Despite a few magic moments the matchfailed to scale any great heights, which disappointed Clarkson considering therelative ladder positions of the two sides.
“We’d hoped that both Hawthorn and theKangaroos, sides that are hoping to play finals footy, would put on a betterexhibition of the game than what was there today,” he said.
“It was second playing third. Both sidesplace a lot of pressure on the ball carrier, and we forced them into someerrors and they forced us into some errors. If you look at the clangers and theineffective kicks and handballs, they were very, very similar for both sides.
“We had plenty of opportunities, in myview, to kick goals and we didn’t. We had plenty of opportunities to hittargets and we didn’t. The Kangaroos were the same, they’d look at the reviewof their tape and say, ‘Geez, there were a lot of balls that were turned over’.
“I think if both sides are going to playfinals footy, they’ve got to play much, much better than they did today.”
Clarkson refused to use the latewithdrawals of playmakers Sam Mitchell and Lance Franklin as an excuse for thedisplay, but was looking forward to having both back in the line up for next Sunday’smatch against Essendon.
