Don’t get me wrong, all the boys have been hurting bad.
If you think it’s bad for the supporters, you should try being a player.
The worst defeats are the ones that are close losses after you’ve been in front, and we’ve consistently seen golden opportunities slip to entrench ourselves in the top four.
That bad feeling is lingering a bit longer than usual but you had to be strong enough to get to mid-week and move on.
The longer you dwell on things like the fact we could have been 12-6, the more you are living in the past, and we can’t afford to do that.
The Hawthorn game on Saturday is great opportunity to test ourselves against the best.
They’re in the top couple of teams and there is a real challenge for us to try and stop the likes of Buddy Franklin.
If you look at the positives in our team, and there are still a few, the forward line partnership between myself and Braddy continues to work pretty well.
He’s got 63 goals and I’ve got 62 for the season, which isn’t too bad.
I was asked if I was aware that we are tracking each other with our goals pretty closely each week, but I don’t think about it like that.
It’s probably more of a situation that I play further out and I try to set him up with goals as much as kick them myself.
We play a double role a bit, although he generally sticks a bit closer to goal.
I’ve sprayed my shots a bit more than he has, but I’ll have a go at him and say he has his shots closer to goal than what I do.
It’s just a really good combination.
I understand the way he works and where he’s going to lead to, and he seems to know where and when I’m going to kick it, and understands me.
It helps both our games to spread the load a bit, and we do enjoy contributing to the team that way.
It’s not just about us up forward though. We rely a lot on the blokes in the midfield to get the ball down to us quickly.
It’s important for it to come in fast because then we can use our strength and body size to do some damage.
That’s something Hawthorn do really well for Buddy Franklin.
He’s obviously blessed with amazing athletic ability – height, endurance and speed.
One area he has really developed this year is his contested marking.
Hawthorn do it very well too by getting the ball down there quickly and isolating the forwards.
I said a few weeks into the season that he potentially as gifted an athlete as has ever played the game and he could be in the top handful of players to have ever played the game by the time he has finished.
Hawthorn will have a bit more of an idea about the venue than us on Saturday, but I have good memories of the place from last time we were there in early ’04.
We had a few players out that day for a pre-season cup match but still won pretty comfortably at York Park as it was known then.
I reckon at the time I rated the surface the best in the competition.
It was nice and flat, and we had a beautiful day of about 25 degrees – everything was just pristine.
It would be nice if the weather was similar this time around. Whatever gets dished up, only one thing will make this one a good trip, and that’s a win.
