COACH Paul Roos says he balanced out the loss to St Kilda at Etihad Stadium last Sunday, after immediately thinking after the game that it was one of the more disappointing performances of the season.
Roos said as the week has progressed, in the lead-up to Saturday’s clash against the West Coast Eagles at Domain Stadium, he has looked at the loss in a measured fashion.
“As the week rolls on, you’ve got to find solutions and you’ve got to find reasons why it happened and you’ve got to address those going into next week,” he said on Roos’ Views.
“We’ve got a flight to Perth and make sure training is very, very light.
“So the disappointment of it turns into solutions and working out why it happened and then you try and address them further in the week.”
Roos said Monday’s review highlighted some specific areas, where the side let itself down.
“We started off well in the first quarter, but then we were too fumbly and ball spilled out too easily and we missed tackles,” he said.
“We really concentrated on around the contest area, but we were getting across to the players what we could control in the contested footy areas. That was the main focus of the review.
“St Kilda was better at it for longer and even when we got back to five points in the start of the last, they continued to play the way they did and we dropped off again.”
Roos said it was also about acknowledging that St Kilda was a side capable of matching it with some of the best teams in the competition, having defeated Geelong and pushing Hawthorn to three points in Tassie earlier in the season.
“In some ways our block of young players are very similar [to St Kilda],” he said.
“They’ve got Billings, Dunstan, Sinclair and McCartin’s not playing at the moment, but they do have a lot of young guys, but what they have, that we don’t have, is a group of guys who have gone through a really successful era in [Nick] Riewoldt, [Leigh] Montagna, [Sam] Gilbert, [Sean] Dempster, [Jarryn] Geary and [Dylan] Roberton. Then they’ve got [Jack] Steven and [David] Armitage.
“There are a lot of those guys who have played in Grand Final teams and that really enables them to educate their young guys really quickly. So they’re similar in some ways, but a little bit different.
“Their level of talent and performance under [coach] Richo (Alan Richardson) has been a bit underestimated. They’ve beaten Geelong and should’ve beaten Hawthorn earlier in the year, so their top end stuff is really, really good.”
