Mark Neeld: From a coaching point of view you always take away something from a game – win, lose or draw – to try to help improve the players. As we know St Kilda is in fantastic form at the moment and showed us a few things on Monday night that were exceptional, and there were a number of areas that our players reviewed from the game that we’re going to work towards improving.
I think from a supporters’ point of view, they can be assured that all coaching staff and all players are working towards improving our performance and getting better in some of the areas that St Kilda were clearly better at on Monday.
You’ve played the top two teams now. What about the Saints? Just how good are they?
I find it very difficult to compare teams because tactically they’re different and personnel-wise they’re different, so our game plan to beat St Kilda was different to our game plan to try to beat Geelong. To be undefeated after seven weeks it clearly means you’re in really good form. Irrespective of what round those two teams play it’ll be a great game of footy.
One positive from Monday night was you got to blood Steele Sidebottom. How did you rate his first-up performance?
He came into a midfield role and also played a little bit across half-forward. At times the ball wasn’t flowing our way as we would have liked which obviously would have made it difficult for someone playing their first game, but I thought Steele acquitted himself rather well. I think he showed glimpses of someone who’ll become a very good decision maker and a very good ball handler.
You look after the defensive group. Simon Prestigiacomo’s been terrific for you this year. He played on Nick Riewoldt on Monday. How’d you see that duel?
Well if it wasn’t for the last two goals of the game I’d say that Simon pretty much broke even with Nick Riewoldt, considering up until maybe four minutes to go St Kilda had kicked 18 goals and he’d kicked three … I believe had it been three, honours would have been even, but when a player kicks five goals they’ve probably had the better of you.
But Simon’s had a very consistent season and the way that he goes about his job and the types of opponents he can play on he’s very important for our structure.
Well this week you obviously play Carlton, who beat you both times last year. In those two games, Brendan Fevola kicked seven and eight goals. Regardless of who Presti plays on this week, he’s going to be pretty important because he didn’t play in either of those games last year against the Blues?
He will be important. At this stage of the week we’ve had discussions not so much about who the match-ups will be but more about the style of play. Irrespective of who actually gets the nod to play on Brendan Fevola … a lot of the structure will be trying to stem the flow of the footy back there, which is something we were unable to do on Monday night.
Do you look back to last year’s games and try to pinpoint why the Blues were able to get hold of you?
We’ve had a bit of a look at last year’s games but not too much. Things change within each given season and all teams have their indicators and those levels of indicators change from season to season.
For example St Kilda is setting new benchmarks defensively this year and outstripping last year, and offence isn’t such a huge thing this year. So Carlton has changed their way.
Everyone’s talking about injuries with Collingwood. Does the current situation make it tougher for the coaches to plan?
No it doesn’t. We’ve had a discussion about structure and styles of play, and then we match players to the styles that we want. Some weeks you’ve got 47 names to choose from and other weeks you don’t, and if the player’s on the injury list then he’s not even discussed at match committee because he can’t help us for that given week. So it would be a very pointless exercise for the coaches to sit around and say “what if?”.
What does the injury list and the shorter week mean?
Really what the players have done this week is they’ve had two recovery days (on Tuesday and Wednesday). We haven’t trained with the players out on the ground yet.
We’re only going to have our first training session out on the ground on Thursday outside. We probably won’t have a ‘main’ session, to use that terminology, it’ll be more touch work. All those boys that are touch-and-go for this week, will have to run a test, whenever that may be.
The AFL dictates that we have to have a squad in by 5pm Thursday, so we’ll have to find some time to put the boys through a bit of a test and see how they go. But in terms of a main outside training session, it’ll actually be hard to squeeze one in. We’ll just do a couple of light runs I’d say.
