WE TALK to Magpies assistant coach Paul Hudson about the loss to Hawthorn, the upcoming clash with Carlton, Alan Didak and the fitness of the squad.

After seven straight wins the team came back to Earth on the weekend. Was it with a thud or was the loss just a small hiccup?
I think it was a hiccup. I’d like to think we’ll learn from our mistakes against Carlton earlier in the year and get back to playing the way we have been. Hawthorn’s game style is obviously something we’ve got to look at next time we play them.

Was there a drastic change from that first half to the second half, or in particular that third quarter? They came out and seemed a different side, or was it you guys who had gone away from what you were doing after the break?
They obviously came out better than what we did. The area I thought that they got us was when they got the ball they kept the pressure on inside 50 a lot better than we did and they were able to run the ball out. When we were trying to kick in – that’s an area that I look at – they were very good at pressuring us and not allowing us to break the zone and get through. We didn’t capatalise on our inside 50s. I think we had 11 in there and only had two shots on goal, so those things combined was about a five-goal difference … and you find it hard against Hawthorn to peg that back.

The guys had been up and flying for seven weeks, and then they get touched up a little bit. How’s their mindset after a loss like that?
Most of the guys were pretty disappointed doing their recovery sessions and things like that but the beauty of a short week is we come up again on Friday night. We’ll have a light run again on Thursday and then tackle the Blues on Friday night, so that’s the good thing – you’re not sitting around dwelling on it for too long. It’s only a day or two, you’ve dealt with it, you move on and you get focused again.

Carlton are another one of those sides, a bit like Hawthorn, that have got a decent record against you.
We’re pretty determined to turn the table this week. We want to consolidate and try to hold onto that fourth spot and make it hard for the Blues to be down around the pack. Their objectives will no doubt be the opposite, to set themselves up and to keep us out of the four, so both sides will be looking forward to it.

A positive for the Pies is you’ll field a fairly different, and one would suspect a much stronger, side at least on paper to the one you had the last time you played them?
We’ve started to get some stability in our forward line, which is where we were really hurt against the likes of Carlton and St Kilda earlier in the year, with the personnel we had available. There’ll probably be about six or seven different … not putting down the guys we did have come in, but you can’t dismiss the experience factor.

Alan Didak has taken his game to a whole new level this year so one wouldn’t have been surprised by the close-checking he received against Hawthorn. Do you think that’s something he’s now going to have to get used to?
I think so. We had a good chat to ‘Dids’ and his form probably warranted that attention. Other sides will learn from that and he’ll know that, and there’s only one way through it. You look at someone like Dane Swan who gets closely checked week in, week out but the best remedy is to probably run them off their legs and take your chances when they present. He maybe wasn’t quite ready for it, but I think he will be this week.

You’re confident he can overcome similar tactics in the future?
Yeah, he’s a pretty determined guy and he’s dealt with that this week and put some things in place.

What about the side? You’ve got a few sore guys. How are Josh Fraser and a few of the other guys looking ahead of Friday night?
Josh did some basic skills on Tuesday and we want to give him every opportunity. The physio said we’ll leave it til tomorrow (Thursday) and see, to give him an extra couple of days, along with the other couple of guys. Nathan Brown’s got a bit of a sore knee and Presti was sore with his ribs but we’ll see how they are later in the week. You can’t make an assessment on those guys this early, so we’ve rested some other guys as well this week just to try to freshen them up. With the monitoring that we do of the players we know when it’s a good time, so we’ve given some blokes a rest.