Collingwood coach Craig McRae spoke to the media post game.
Craig,you were in the game up until about half-time but then the Giants seemed to blow you away in the third. What did you see happening?
I thought there were a couple of critical goals late in the second quarter,centre bounce goals that put a bit of a margin on. The game was pretty tight. Wasn’t as balanced on the scoreboard in particular. Gee,they played well. Looks like they improved in certain parts of their game. Contest was strong. They moved the ball really effectively. Big threats down forward so,yeah,they played extremely well.
Does it feel like it could be a bit of a reality check?
Gee,it’s early to think that but one thing for certain is that coming into the game we thought we’d improved physically and then you get here and you get reality - everyone else is improving. System-wise I thought we were off what we have been or want to be. Defensively in particular. Yeah,we’ve got to get better,don’t we?
How frustrating was it to see at times Callum Brown unmarked and he kicked a bag of goals?
That’s the way we want to play a little bit,we want to be aggressive on defence and funnily enough when we weren’t that’s when we got hurt so we learned some lessons around that. The aerial threats were a real feature. I thought the Giants’ talls influenced the game aerially. We just didn’t impact that part of the game. I thought that was really influential,yeah.
You had 60 inside 50s to 53. What do you think was going on there?
I think we didn’t connect. The stats were sad wise had opportunities to score well. But we just didn’t connect going inside 50. There is a lot of parts to that. There is chemistry,there’s roles,there’s opposition defending that part well and we were rushing to get the ball inside 50 and not being set for it so then you turn the ball over. We tried to touch on that at half-time around our connection and how we could fix that. We started the third quarter quite well but didn’t quite capitalise and they scored quite easy when they went inside 50 which was a bit of a trend.
First goal for Lachie Schultz tonight,how did he go in your system? Did you get what you wanted from him?
We are going to be rapt to have Lachie on our team. He offers ground-level support. Probably the first time we won ground ball inside 50 for a long time. Didn’t correlate to goals but he put pressure on. Bobby,Lachie and Jamie are lively for the opposition. We thought when we got the ball to ground we looked dangerous but we didn’t capitalise on the opportunities,didn’t use the right options at times. We would like to get better at that.