VETERAN forward Aaron Davey says his three goal performance against Richmond at the MCG on Sunday has given him a “massive confidence boost”.

Speaking post-match after producing his best game this year and for some time, Davey said he was eager to build on his fine effort. 

“That’s just the standard now for myself and I’ve set that today. I can’t go back,” he said.

“My teammates need me, so I’ve hopefully got to keep producing four quarter efforts through the whole bottom half of the year.”

Davey said it had been a tough couple of years with injuries and trying to reclaim the type of form of which he is capable. 

“It’s great to hit the scoreboard – it’s something I’ve lacked over the last few years,” he said.

“But it’d have to be up there, because it’s been frustrating [with] the leg injuries.

“You lose a bit of base and fitness in the off season and I set myself for a real big pre-season this pre-season that just went, so I came into the season with a lot of confidence and I’m feeling the best I’ve ever felt in a couple of years. Hopefully I’ll just finish off the year strong.”

Davey said last week’s loss to Gold Coast was a tough to endure, but he was pleased with his team’s effort against the Tigers, although they still went down by 34 points.

“Last week was pretty disappointing to go down the way we did. We set ourselves that we just wanted to hunt and compete and try and win the contested ball and out tackle the opposition,” he said.

“We brought that - and we didn’t bring that for just one quarter – we brought that for four quarters, so that’s the benchmark now and we’ve got to build on that. We can’t sit back and get comfortable and relax.

“We’re quite disappointed we didn’t get the four points, but in saying that, you take out a lot of positives.”

Davey said the Demons felt they were still in the contest at three quarter-time, before the Tigers kicked 3.2 to 1.2 in the final term.

“We were real positive. We knew that we were in there and we had to keep going at our opponents and put them under perceived pressure,” he said.

“We saw that because they had that many rushed behinds, because of the perceived pressure.

“We felt good and we were [fewer than four goals] down at three quarter-time, but we’re disappointed [with the result]. To the boys’ credit, we really finished it off and we gutsed it out and they kicked a couple in the last couple of minutes. We’ve just got to build on it next week.”

Davey said next Sunday’s clash against Fremantle at Patersons Stadium was a mighty challenge for the Demons, but one they were looking forward to tackling.

“We’ve just got to approach [Fremantle] as we approached today,” he said.

“We’ve just got to go over there with the mindset that we want to just hunt, compete and tackle like there is no tomorrow.

“We’ll deal with this game in the next two days, and then we’ll just set our minds on Fremantle and bring that same attitude.”