Blues coach Michael Voss spoke to the media post game.

Thoughts on the game?

It was a difficult one. We didn’t debrief it for a long time. I think that’s one of the ones that you just take 48 hours, look at division, break it down, take the emotion out of it, try and look at it through process and what we improved from last week to this week. There’s some gains made, but we also know that we’ve still got to progress in a few other little areas. I think we will take the time to probably look at the vision. So we can give them the clarity about what we think it was.

Do you feel like you butchered the footy a little bit tonight?

Yeah, we did at different points in time. More probably across our half-forward line was the more costly ones, if there was. So, again, we’ll look at the options themselves. I mean, there’s the decision and then there’s the actual error. So it felt like some of the decisions seemed to be right, but did we execute them well enough? That’s probably what we need to have a bit of a look at.

Just looking at the numbers overall, you won the contested ball. You’ve won uncontested ball. You’ve broken even in most others. The big discrepancies, like the forward entries, where they smashed you, what does that say to you about how the game played out?

I thought we over possessed it. Probably the big one is their tackles. The pressure that they were able to provide across the night probably forced us to over possess it. So we had to make some corrections there about how we wanted to move the ball out of those particular scenarios. Just didn’t feel like we were absorbing that well enough. Then the over possession comes into play. That’s where I find, like, the disposal number is actually quite a useless number. But credit to them, they were able to force that turnover and probably force us to do something that we wouldn’t normally do. Then, you know, we lost the territory battle. You lose the territory battle. You lose the territory battle against a good footy team, it’s going to be hard to win that game.

Without Tom Mitchell and Jordan De Goey, it seemed like you had a real chance tonight to set your authority in the middle of the ground. How surprisingly you end up loading clearances and centre clearances?

Well, it’s been a strength of ours for the last couple of weeks. That’s one part of the game you’d like to back in that we can sort of at least draw even. But I take exception to individuals that are missing. It provides an opportunity. There’s still 18 players out there and they’re a premiership team. They’re a pretty good team. I don’t think we should disrespect them like that too much.

I’m not disrespecting them, but Mitchell and De Goey, two of the premiership players.

Correct, yes. From our perspective, it’s been a real strength of our game. That’s what we’ve got to continue to Surj for. We have to have balance in our game, you know. I get often asked about the transition part of the game, you want it better? Of course we want it better. From a results point of view and goals kicked, it was a really good phase of our game, but we also want our stoppage game to be in order as well. That part was off. For us, that lost the territory battle for us. Whatever they had inside 50s, 61 inside 50s to our 38. Just the supply wasn’t good enough for us tonight. To be able to hold a side with 61 entries, and get looks like that forward of the ball, that can probably go into the basket of improvement of... That we wanted to defend harder and we did that. But it still wasn’t good enough to be able to get us the result.