There is no doubt that we need to improve on the performance we produced last Saturday in Geelong. We didn’t bring the type of football that we pride ourselves on and didn’t bring our Swans’ brand of high pressure football. We missed a lot of tackles and our pressure wasn’t at the standard that we expect and it’s something that we need to get right, especially when you’re playing the top couple of teams. Obviously it was Geelong last week, who were in good form, and we meet Hawthorn this week, so we’re going to have to improve in that area to compete better.

We just think our contested footy has to improve. The sides that win finals football are the hard, contested sides and we felt that we weren’t up to the mark last week with that.

Looking at last week’s match, obviously the Cats had James Podsiadly and Tom Hawkins and the boys were under pressure down in defence with the ball coming in, but I thought both Heath Grundy and Ted Richards were strong in their key posts. Having said that, it doesn’t get any easier this week with David Hale, Lance Franklin and Jarryd Roughead - who is leading the Coleman Medal race - so we do have a challenge with their talls again this week. We’ll need Teddy and Reg to be at their best if we’re going to compete against them.

Roughead has probably had an All-Australian-type year and he’s been an outstanding player, but we know how damaging Buddy is as well. He’s one of the best, if not the best, player in the competition when he’s absolutely up and flying, so it will be a challenge.

It was also really disappointing to see Rhyce Shaw go down last week. Unfortunately we haven’t had Rhyce for most of the year and he’d only just got himself back, so it was very sad to see him suffer another serious injury. He’d just got himself up and going again and was doing a really good job for us on the wing and was sliding down back as well. He is going to be a loss because he’s just an experienced, hardened player and you need that type of player once you come into September. We’ve been dealt a few injuries this year so someone else gets an opportunity with him out of the team.

This week’s match is very important and we’ve got to get back to playing the type of football that we know stands up in finals and the type of football that we’ve played for the majority of the year. We were disappointed with last week and we need to turn that around this week to make sure we set ourselves up for the remaining weeks to come.

There is, of course, the possibility that we might meet the Hawks the following week in the finals, which is a funny position we find ourselves in. There isn’t much we can do about it so our focus in on tonight’s big match at ANZ Stadium and we’re determined to produce a strong performance in front of a big Sydney crowd.