In this week's Game Plan, Swans defensive coach, Stuart Dew, talks about the key defensive points his players will focus on against St Kilda in tomorrow night's elimination final...
It’s been a long year of preparation to get to this point, starting way back in November last year. Everyone wants to play finals and we’re one of the eight teams who got in, so we’re looking forward to it. We’ve got some guys who have played a lot of finals and some who haven’t played any, so it’s going to be interesting to see how they go.
The last three weeks have been a really good effort and the team has gained some confidence. I think the results and who we’ve played don’t really matter, but building the confidence within our group is important, and we’ve got that and we’re reasonably placed.
You’d much rather go in with three wins than three losses, but I think those three wins will have minimal bearing on this first final.
We bring some confidence in from our last game against St Kilda. It was super important for us that we got that win having dropped the Richmond game - we were looking for a good response, and we got it. But this time, they’ll have a different team in, and so will we.
On Thursday we found out that Reg has been suffering from glandular fever. He hasn’t been himself for the last couple of weeks and we got the results back showing he was fairly crook. It was probably good just to get some answers, rather than him being fairly lethargic and not knowing why. He is obviously very disappointed not to be playing in this final.
With the team, it’s a big loss with Reg being our centre half-back, so someone will have to step-up and we’ve got a couple of options. Alex Johnson has stepped-up all year and has played on guys like James Podsiadly - the big 100-kilo guys - and types like Mitch Clark who play the second ruckman as well.
LRT comes back into the team, and there is also Matt Spangher who we drafted to the club as a backman.
So there are a couple of options there depending on how St Kilda line-up. The beauty of our depth is that we are able to bring in someone with the experience of Lewie who can play either forward or back.
Teddy has had a really good year and played well on Nick Riewoldt last time. As is quite often the case in Teddy’s position, a lot will rely on the amount and quality of delivery that Riewoldt gets from his midfield.
Nick Smith also did a good job for us in round 22 on the dangerous Stephen Milne. It’s hard for Smooch to take too much confidence out of that though, because when you’re playing on the small forwards, you can keep them quiet for three and a half quarters, and then in ten minutes they can kick three goals.
Nick’s a very resilient player. Earlier in the year, Eddie Betts managed to kick three goals on him in about five minutes, but after that he stuck to his task and was able to re-focus. He knows that playing on those dangerous forwards, the odds are they are going to kick goals at some stage.
He and Teddy share a similar attitude playing defensive roles. They have to be almost like a golfer - if they hit a bad shot, they have to step up and hit a better one without thinking about the bad one.
I always try and tell them to put the goals in the past - realise how they got them, but focus on winning the next contest.
With Tadhg announcing his retirement last week, it really freed up his mind to focus on the job at hand. I thought he was really solid last weekend, and it was probably his best game for a couple of months.
He moved freely and stuck his tackles, and was able to provide a bit of composure back there with the ball. We look forward to an improvement on that now that he’s got a fair bit of confidence out of last week and hopefully we can see a bit of the Tadhg of old this week.
People say we play finals-type football every round because we try and play every game on our terms.
Going into Saturday night, it’s important that you don’t go out there and try and re-invent something, or individually try and do anything extra special.
As a player, you’ve got to continue to do your bit for the team, while collectively you want to have the weight of numbers of players who are playing their role and winning their position.
That’s what we ask of our boys and they’ve got to make this game count. A lot of players go through their career without playing finals, and 22 of our guys get a golden opportunity this week, and they are looking forward to it.
