St Kilda coach Alan Richardson assesses his team’s 57-point loss to Adelaide on Friday night …

On whether the Saints were ‘ambushed’ by a Crows team keen to respond after a week of heavy scrutiny …

“They (the Crows) are a good footy team. You expect teams to respond. We’d like to think we’re a good footy team. Our want was to respond too. We’d had a couple of performances that didn’t go our way and we weren’t able to execute the way we wanted to up to the bye. We had a couple of weeks to get a few things right. Whilst they did a good job, we were equally as disappointed with certainly our start to the game.”

On where Adelaide was able to get on top …

“We just got beaten really badly around the ball, no matter where it was. The numbers look reasonable, if you just look at numbers. The clearances, they just got on top (37 – 35) if you just look at numbers. The contest, they were just on top if you just look at numbers (159 – 154). But (the difference was) how clean they were, and how they were able to get positive play out of their contest as opposed to our inability to be able to cope with their pressure.

“Their ability to mark and screen for each other. We’d do it and give away a free kick, not because it was a poor umpiring decision but just because we didn’t execute it properly. That was frustrating.”

On how the Saints need to respond next week …

“We need to respond in a really aggressive manner. We need to get some of our positive rebound going again. We’ve become a bit conservative on the back of getting on the back foot. Certainly, today we were on the back foot early. We went back into our shells and just punted all day, just kicked along the (boundary) line and played without dare.

“We got going a little bit after half-time. The rebound stuff evened up after that in terms of the numbers again, but their forwards were able to mark the ball and score. We had some reasonable opportunities to score and possibly could’ve got a bit closer even though we had such a disappointing start to the game, but we missed some pretty easy opportunities.

“Our response will need to be a holistic one. There’s not a lot going the way we want it to right at the minute, so we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

On why the Saints have fallen away after a promising start to the season …

“We were 5 – 3 (after eight rounds). This time last year, we came over here when we were 4 – 6 and got beaten by 100 points. That sounds like I’m saying that this was a better performance – I’m far from (saying) that. We should be, given that we’re a more experienced team now, we should be much better than what we served up tonight. There’s no doubt our last month … has been disappointing.”

On forward Josh Bruce being St Kilda’s only goalkicker (three) up until three-quarter time …

“You’ve got to give the Crows a bit of credit. When they’re at their best, and they’ve been at their best more often than not. What are they now, 9 – 3? They’ve played really strong footy and most of that is on the back of defending the ball in their front half, so that you just don’t get it through, and if you do get it through it’s not great quality. They were at their best in that facet of play again.

“When you don’t quite get it right early and the opposition start to score what tends to happens is you look to try and support your defence and then you lose a bit of structure in front of the ball. That happened for a big period of the game. It makes Brucey’s performance even more impressive from that perspective because he was often outnumbered.

“It would be fair to say we need other forwards to carry a bit more of the load. There’s a lot of talk often about Paddy (McCartin). Paddy had some opportunities in front of goal. I think he ended up with reasonable numbers for a key forward. I thought Paddy worked pretty hard. I thought he showed some positive signs. He, like all of our team, need to learn from this performance and improve and grow.”

On why the Saints started the game so poorly …

“At times we looked like a rabbit in the spotlight, I reckon. I don’t know whether we were just a little bit sloppy coming off the bye – we were really positive last year off of the bye against Geelong. We just weren’t quite at the level tonight.

“When I talk about playing aggressive footy, I’m not just talking about attack. That’s part of it, but aggressive footy is running back to support your mates. It’s having the courage to leave your man at the right time.

“We just had too many passengers. We relied on too few to even be competitive at times, let alone be competitive for big periods of the game.”