Gold Coast Suns coach Stuart Dew spoke after his Club's 48-point loss to Adelaide on Saturday night ...

Where the game was lost …

We need to start games of football better than we did tonight. Our contested ball in the first half was -28, so whether you’re playing last years grand finalists or wooden spooners, it’s not going to cut it. We asked for a response at half time but really you’re trying to peg back the score, so it’s tough. We’ve got to be harder, we had a good tackle count but they broke our tackles and that was the difference in the first half.

On how much impact contested ball had …

It starts from there. And then they are able to spread. I think that when you start to lose the contest that more start to come in to try a help and then they flick it out and away they go. So that is where it begins and ends. If we look for any positives, and we’ll be clear we aren’t happy about the result at all, but asked for a response at half time and I thought that in the third quarter we hit back. We let ourselves down with a couple of late goals.

On only tagging Matt Crouch in the second half …

We were weary of the load. Coming up against Adelaide, if you put your eggs all in one bucket someone else will get away from you. Did we not go early enough? I don’t think that was the difference, I think a lot of their mids were on the ball, +10 first possession coming into quarter time. So if we think it was just Crouch then we are kidding ourselves, it was an even spread from the Crows.

On the importance of consistency …

Today we were inconsistent, first half, second half. We don’t get to play Adelaide again which is unfortunate. If we could start like that at the start then I think we’d find out how well we’d go with consistency.