Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge reviews his team’s 59-point loss to the Crows at Adelaide Oval on Friday night.
On their overall performance…
“It’s one of the worst (games) since I’ve been at the club, absolutely. We’re gutted. The Crows are very good, they competed extremely well in the air and at ground level. We obviously matched them for a little while, but to fall away so poorly is not good enough. I am and we are (disappointed)… we’re all gutted. Obviously, we don’t like to sit in the front row and witness that. We feel like we’re made of more substance, but it was too disappointing.”
On Adelaide’s dominant third quarter…
“We were beaten one on one. We allowed them to take six intercept marks inside our forward area. Our intensity level wasn’t where it needed to be, they controlled the aerial game and we didn’t use the footy well enough. We’re not going to give ourselves any pats on the back for a reasonable first half, because what happened in the second half was unacceptable.”
On their form this year...
“We’ve had some really marginal performances where we’ve questioned, and been questioned by the outside world, to what our identity is now. We had a solid (year) previously, and that grates on you. Absolutely, we need some time to make sure that quarters and halves like that just don’t happen. Again, I’ll pay credit to the Crows – they are a very difficult team to combat – especially in the current scheme of things, they’re going well. They were strong and they look good, but we should have been closer.”
On suffering a proposed ‘premiership hangover’…
“There are a lot of variables that creep in and affect performance. It’s difficult to identify what they are first, then quantify the effect that they have on your group. There’s line in the sand type experiences, and we’ve had a few already, where you say ‘that can’t look that way again’. Tonight’s second half was one of those experiences that was just too disappointing for a team and a club that’s come a long way. We don’t want to regress, but we regressed a bit.
“You’re always trying to review what you’ve done and ultimately you try and turn the metaphor around. Everyone talking about us being the hunted, but you’ve got to try and work that to your advantage and we haven’t been able to.”
On matching Adelaide’s tall forwards…
“We’ve got to live in the real world. We lack height and we’re challenged vertically. Pound for pound, we would have been a hell of a lot lighter than the Crows, so we’ve got to play a certain way to try and get an edge and we weren’t able to do that for long enough. So that’s the frustrating part. There’s no doubt that we were dominated from an aerial point of view. Some of that was us not kicking to our teammates advantage, but off their boot, they were very good one on one and we should have been better.”
