For all its injury and illness concerns, Adelaide is still better equipped for this year's finals than it was going into last September's campaign, according to coach Neil Craig.

The Crows won the minor premiership with 17 wins from 22 matches last season, then lost their home qualifying final to St Kilda by eight points, thrashed Port Adelaide by 83 points and lost to West Coast by 16 points in a preliminary final at Subiaco Oval.

Now the second-placed Crows go into Saturday's qualifying final against Fremantle at AAMI Stadium with a 16-6 win-loss record, but having won just two of their past six matches and without such key players as Mark Ricciuto, Andrew McLeod, Ben Hart, Brett Burton and Trent Hentschel.

But, when asked for comparisons between last September and now, Craig said his players were still 'very confident'.

"Our playing squad is vastly different for the obvious reasons," he said. "But I know our team play is better, I know our structures are better ingrained - still not to the level we want - and the players are much more confident in the system.

"I think they're much more confident in each other to be able to produce efforts like you saw on the weekend (in the 58-point win against Melbourne). For all those reasons, we go into the game very positive and we go in with a mindset that we actually want to take them on.

"For us to be successful, it will be a matter of people sharing the workload and everyone contributing, and we have to have it that way. We've seen when we've played our best footy, we've been that way.

"When we've had less people contributing, we've been a pretty average footy side. We haven't been disastrous. We haven't been blown away, apart from West Coast, but we haven't been at the level we would want to play at."

Was the monkey still on Adelaide's back after the disappointment of last year's finals?

"Yes and no," Craig said. "To be honest, we haven't really spoken about that a lot. We were disappointed with that performance … but we weren't disastrous.

"But we get another opportunity this year under different circumstances, a different way we've come into it from a form perspective … our playing squad and profile is different … but in the end we'll be judged on a win-loss ratio and so we should be - that's what finals are about.

"We have very high expectations of ourselves of what we want to achieve. Our supporter base, our sponsors have very high expectations, which we want them to have.

"For the whole year, we're happy to be favourites. We haven't shied away from that because that's the way we want to be seen - as good as we possibly can - and we go into the game with a very positive mindset of taking Fremantle on.

"I don't want the out of (a team with) injuries playing a side that's won nine in a row. To me, that's just looking for excuses. That's not the way we go about it."

Asked what was the main thing Adelaide needed to produce against Fremantle that it didn't produce in round 19 (when the Crows lost by 15 points - 10.20 to the Dockers' 13.17), Craig said: "I think one of the standout features of the week just gone (the win against Melbourne) and the showdown match (the 14-point loss to Port) was our capacity to pressure the opposition, and get some energy back into our game and some real want, when we get hold of it (the ball) again, to run.

"That's what we need to do - make sure we maintain and play with that sort of energy, which we've been able to do for most of the year, apart from that little period where we weren't so good. That would be the main challenge for our playing group."

Asked whether Adelaide, without its three leading goal-scorers (Ricciuto 44, Hentschel 42 and Burton 39), would play more defensively or try to outscore the Dockers, Craig said: "I think our score against Melbourne (23.14) was nearly our second-highest score for the year, with the forward line structure we speak about.

"Our preferred option would be to take the game on and score rather than try to shut it down. We believe we've got a good defensive mechanism, anyway, built into our game, so we don't necessarily need to go ultra-defensive.

"But, having said that, if there was a need there to do that to try to win it, we would certainly look at that."

Craig said Graham Johncock was 'a fair chance' to oppose Fremantle's in-form small forward Jeff Farmer - 'although we've got other guys down there who could do that job'.

And he dismissed any suggestions of Fremantle being 'due to lose' after winning nine successive matches.

"To me, that's a high-performance sporting myth," he said. "What happens, of course, is that expectation builds with that, but it's not a reason to lose.

"I don't know how Fremantle will handle it. I don't know what the expectation is in Perth. I can only imagine what it would be like.

"We're not sitting here planning that this is the way Fremantle will lose. We actually have a huge respect for what Fremantle have been able to do because we were able to do it last year with 10 in a row going into the finals, so you're in good form when you do that - and that's the side we're playing against."