Assistant coach John Blakey explains what the forwards will need to do for the Swans to beat Collingwood next Saturday night at ANZ Stadium.

TURNING defence into attack. One of my fellow assistant coaches, Peter Berbakov, wrote last week about how important it is for our team to do that, and we also are really aware how important it is in the game plan of our next opponent, Collingwood.

We meet the Pies at ANZ Stadium on Saturday June 26 and we can’t wait because we have a lot to play for.

It’s not a stat we like to bring up, but it’s a fact that we haven’t beaten Collingwood since 2005, when we got home by a solitary point at ANZ Stadium.

That margin would do us this time too because after eight defeats in a row at the hands of the Magpies, we’ll take a win any way we can.

So how do we do it? As the coach responsible for the Swans forward line, I know it’s vital that our forwards go into the game ready to apply as much pressure on their opponents as possible.

Yes, they are there to kick goals, but equally important is their role in making sure their Collingwood opponents can’t run freely off the backline to set up attacking moves.

One of the keys for us will be to limit the run and effectiveness of Heath Shaw, the brother of our own Rhyce. He is a lynch pin for the Pies, and we will need one of our forwards to play very tight on him.

Then, as always, it’s a matter of what we make of the opportunities that come to our forwards.  Last weekend against Port we got the ball inside our forward 50m zone 51 times, about average for us.

However while we were pleased to win the game, a closer analysis showed that we failed to score from at least 50% of those forward entries.

To be really effective, we need to make more of the chances we're creating. It was a similar story the week before in our win over Essendon, where we had a massive 63 forward entries but only scored 12 goals.

I’ve been pretty pleased with the delivery our forwards have been getting from the midfielders, but we need to win more of the one-on-one contests in attack.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not complaining about two wins in a row, which have set us up nicely before this weekend’s break.

It’s just that I know we need to capitalise more from our attacking entries if we are to beat the top teams in the competition.

To be fair to the players in our forward line, it has been a challenging year so far.

The great unknown when we started the season was our attack because it had a major revamp during the pre-season.

In defence we had stability, but the forward line took on a new look, with our co-captain Adam Goodes stationed there with former Lion Daniel Bradshaw, up-and-comer Jesse White and new recruit, Ben McGlynn.

Even in the pre-season we didn’t get much chance to practise together because Braddy had his knee operation.

But he was back for round one and obviously they got off to a really good start and we had everyone up and going. Bradshaw was playing well and Benny McGlynn was flying,  but then unfortunately for us we lost those two guys to injury and that put a hole in our structure and our set-ups.

When you lose a player of the quality of Daniel Bradshaw, all of a sudden the opposition match-ups change as well, so instead of Adam Goodes and Jesse White getting the second best and third best defenders, they get the first and second, so it makes the job harder.

We had a down patch during that losing streak where we weren’t getting great results from our forward group, and Henry Playfair came into the side to give us a better structure with the three tall players.

But last week against Port we had Ben McGlynn back and we are hoping to get Daniel Bradshaw back for the Collingwood game, so hopefully we will return to the form we showed earlier in the year.

And then, when the opposition has got the headache of stopping Daniel, they’ve also got the headache of trying to curb Adam Goodes. So we’ve got some players in our forward 50 that the opposition will really worry about - and that’s the way we want it.