After wrapping up at Wilston Grange, we had a chat to Chris Fagan about his key takeaways from our match sim.
1. Positive signs for ball movement and scenarios
"We played the A team vs the B team tonight, which we did last week but I felt this week the A team moved the ball a lot better than they did last week.
"We tried a few things out tactically that we want to practice during the season. We changed the scoreboard at the end of the second period and made the A team chase and try and get the lead and then protect it so some good tactical lessons there."
"It was a good even performance, a lot of goal kickers, mainly due to the way we moved the ball through the middle part of the ground. We were a bit stagnant last week but we got some good overlap tonight and it gave us better entries inside 50 which was our aim."
2. Key forwards starting to gel
"It was great to see Jack, Joe and Eric play together.
"Early days, Jack got free and we weren't looking for him because we weren't used to playing with him but we had a chat about that and reminded the boys outside 50 of how good Jack is at leading at the last moment and getting some space and as a result we found him a few times."
3. Cam the Defender?
"We wanted Cam to have another string to his bow.
"He's a really good medium sized forward, he's a good powerful midfielder when we need him to be but we're just wanting to see if he can do something else and so far that little experiment is going okay."
4. The half-back selection squeeze continues
"All the defenders played well today I thought.
"We cycled through Starcevich, Rayner, McKenna, Wilmot, Rich and Keidean Coleman tonight.
"I'm no clearer after tonight, they all did well."
5. What impressed Fages most?
"The starting midfield group of Neale, Dunkley and Ashcroft were pretty impressive I thought.
"I was pretty happy with how they all worked with our ruckmen and that was the first time we've seen that because Lachie was out last week.
"It looked promising."
