We take a look at some of the key talking points from coach Justin Leppitsch’s post-match press conference following our loss to Sydney at the Gabba on Sunday night.

Summary on tonight’s loss 21-point loss

“I’ve been happy with the effort for the past few weeks now. I’m hopeful and I mentioned it to the boys (in the post-match meeting) that we can continue with that effort, that it’s always the baseline for our performance. We’ve got that within the group at the moment, but we haven’t been able to get over the line against some pretty good opposition the last few weeks.”

Running out of legs

“I guess we’re falling away and you can see the boys are a bit fatigued out there on the field, some of them are a few pre-seasons away, you can see, from being at their best. It’s just the way it is. But, effort was good, we couldn’t quite make them hurt enough in the last quarter just with our offensive stuff but hung tough defensively. Sometimes the opposition come hard at you and you’ve got to test the mettle of your risk taking as a group. The second quarter I thought we went too far into our shells and we spoke about that at half time and the third quarter was better again with our ability to shift the ball and make Sydney defend. In the last quarter we continued to try to shift the ball, which was good, but we’d often get one kick out and look up and there were no legs coming through. We fell down mid turn over, they won clearly by six goals or so in that middle part of the ground, where we turned the ball over.

Forward line

"If you look at it simplistically, their big boys kicked six (goals), ours kicked none. If we have a nice big, solid target, it can fill the team with a lot more confidence too. We've got three there. We've got a veteran in Stakes (Brent Staker) and two young boys (Dan McStay and Jordon Bourke), but no-one yet that has been able to take the game on and deliver consistency for us in that part of the field."

Returning trio

“Having Daniel Merrett back takes the pressure off Clarkey. He was brillant tonight, his competitiveness and his thinking, his ability to help set up our boys really helped out our team defence that’s for sure.”
“I guess Rocky and Pearce were a little underdone. Pearce in the last quarter he was looking for a rest a bit, so we put him forward just to take the run away from him because he was starting to struggle a little bit. You would expect as more games go on, he’d play more midfield minutes in the last quarter and Rocky as well being able to punch through, the more minutes played. It should get better every week through our midfield with being able to run and outlast a game.”

On Darcy Gardiner’s shoulder

“He popped it (his shoulder), if they decide to put him in for surgery now, that’s his season done. Sometimes they rehab these things and continue on. That’s the process of the two outcomes, if he has surgery it’s game over, if not it’s rehab and keep going.”