Although no longer vying for the NAB Cup, Adelaide coach Neil Craig said Saturday’s regional challenge match against Melbourne in Mt Gambier is still important.

Adelaide will play a 28 man team and Craig is looking to give the playing group valuable match practice.

“What we’ve got to be clear on now as a club is, we’re going to Mt Gambier, it’s a great game for the regional area down there but we’ve got to be really diligent as a club that we maximise based on the conditions of which it’s played,” Craig said. “Goodwin will play, Burton will start to play some football, Bernie Vince will go, young David Mackay will go, James Sellar and Kurt Tippett. And pretty much the squad that played last week as well.”

“We will want to see a really aggressive, positive attitude with the way we go about it.”

Craig said key areas needed to improve in the aftermath of Adelaide’s three point loss to Port Adelaide.

“I thought our ball movement was really poor,” Craig said. “Really poor.”

“It was stagnant, it was easy to play against, it was uncharacteristic of us for probably the last 12 months, maybe a bit longer. We think we’ve got some reasons for that – some of the personnel, some of the positioning, some of the training we’ve been doing – so we would like to see an improvement in that area.”

“We were disappointed with some of our tackling – I think our free kicks were 22 to 11, and probably the majority of that differential was caused by sloppiness. Just real (lack of) attention to detail. So we need time to get that up as well.”

Giant draftee Kurt Tippett, who has recently returned to full training following a neck fracture, will make the trip to Mt Gambier. Whilst Adelaide are trying to speed his development, Craig admitted that the injury was a setback for the young Queenslander.

“In fairness to him, we need to put as much training as we can into him, if a situation (where another ruckman is injured) happens,” he said. “We have a responsibility to do that.

“We would say (his injury has cost him) a fair bit, because we really value the work we do in pre-season (training). You’ve seen a fair bit of the way we go about it – it’s minimal regimented running, you can do that by yourself, but the sort of ball movement work and drills that we do we think are really important for all players but particularly for young players coming in to our environment. If you miss it, it is a big disadvantage. But that’s happened, so it’s not ideal for Kurt, so we have to make sure we do some good work with him now.”