WITH ROUND 1 complete, all eyes turn to Friday night and the Dees' fierce clash with modern-day rivals, the Brisbane Lions.
Simon Goodwin spoke to the media in his weekly press conference detailing key ins for Round 2, selection headaches and the absence of Kysaiah Pickett.
Demon Quartet Return
“Yeah so, Steven May, Jack Viney, Bailey Fritsch and Christian Salem will all be available, which is great for us. You know, they've had a couple of weeks of training and are ready to go,” Goodwin said.
“Mayzy had that little calf that we've sort of been working through, but he's trained fully on Saturday, and we expect him to train fully today, and Viney is really started to increase his loads the last few weeks.
“So, we know the challenge that's in front of us heading up there to play against a high-quality side that did some things to us in that final that we'll be ready for. We’ve worked really hard over the summer to improve our own game in a whole range of different areas.”
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Selection Headaches to Tackle
“We're confident all those guys being available to play and it's going to give us a pretty strong selection headache,” Goodwin added.
“Yeah, we'll get a good handle on our team, make sure we train fully today and see where our squad's at after training. We've had some preliminary chats around what the team looks like, but we still haven't finalized anything.
“We'll have those chats later today as a coaching group and then we'll start to feed that information through to the players. Selection is hard at the moment, we've got some guys that are pushing and playing some incredible footy for us and they're all in really good form, so we're just going to do what's best for the team.”
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Absence of Pickett
“Oh look, I think it's obviously an incident that we don't like to see and I've got asked after the game would I speak to Kozzy about the way he played, and I’m certainly not going to talk to him about the way he plays. I love the pressure that he puts on. I love the intensity that he plays with,” Goodwin said.
“We want to play tough, but we certainly don't want them to bump in in any situation and also that they don't need to be bumping. So, you know, because he knows that he knows he's probably got it wrong.
“I think there's no one that can replace Kozzy Pickett. So, it's going to be a thing that we pick up as a team. The pressure that he puts on, there's no player that can do that, especially that I can see in the competition. So of course, we will lift the intensity ourselves internally with that team and the roles we play within that time.
“We’ve got some high-quality players coming back into our side that we know can have a big impact for us. So, we'll take those strengths to the opposition and see how we go.”
