JUSTIN Leppitsch has played down the significance of Sunday's match against Essendon, but said the Brisbane Lions expect to win and need clear minds to do so.
The Lions and Bombers are both 1-15 and enter a match that looks like a virtual wooden spoon battle despite six rounds still remaining.
Leppitsch has been under-fire in recent weeks with his job being questioned by pundits despite having more than a year to run on his contract.
All that adds up to nothing different for the Lions coach, who fronted his weekly press conference on Friday morning with a steely resolve to stick to the same plan they have all year.
"There's pressure on every week, isn't there? We're in the industry of pressure, that's what it is," Leppitsch said.
"We prepare for Essendon, give them the respect we do the opposition every week, you come with a plan you think can win and then the plan has to be executed, that's the process.
"As boring as it seems, that's what we're doing."
Leppitsch refuted it was a wooden spoon playoff, citing last season when the Lions upset finalists the Western Bulldogs in the final round to leapfrog Carlton off the bottom.
Although conceding a win over the Bombers would relieve the pressure externally, Leppitsch said that was not a part of the Lions' thinking heading into the match.
"I don't want to put any extra pressure on our players to be thinking about anything external other than our football and what they need to do out there," he said.
"We need to go into the game with clear minds and to make sure that we just need to do the job at hand, don't do anything else."
As he has through much of his troubled season, the former triple premiership star reiterated the Lions' youth and how the club was backing it to evolve over years.
He said both ends of the ground averaged less than 50 games of experience a player, and they could only improve with time and patience.
"We don't sit around in the foetal position and sit back and forth and say, 'Jeez, what are we going to do?' It's not what happens down there," he said.
"But I think the football world assume that's what we're doing, biting our nails all week.
"We just go into the game like every other week."
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