In this week's Game Plan, Swans forward coach, Henry Playfair, talks about the forward line in the win over Essendon and facing the experienced Geelong back six...

After last weekend’s bye, we’re well and truly into the second half of the season.

During the bye week, we gave the players a few days off during the week, but once they returned to the club we did a pretty detailed analysis of a few of the important statistics in the forward line.

What we found in our analysis was that our contested possessions were a little bit down in that forward area. We know that the good teams more often than not win the contested possessions in the forward line, so we’ll be looking to work on that in the second half of the season. We also found that we need to work on our ground balls inside forward 50 as well as our front and square work, both which we have worked on at the club since last week.

Looking back at last round’s game against Essendon, I thought our forward structures were really good in the first three quarters, but the last quarter we didn’t have a big impact because we didn’t get much of the ball forward as we were defending for most of the term. Fortunately, and to the team’s credit, we hung on and brought the forwards up the ground to try and stem the bleeding.

One player who was a stand out for the forward line in the Essendon game was Lewis Jetta. Jetts has been a hugely important player all year and it’s a great credit to him. The way he attacked the pre-season has really set up his year and I think it’s been well-documented the work he did with Kieren Jack and just his dedication to all round improvement has held him in good stead. He’s been consistent pretty much the whole year and is an important player for us.

Looking ahead to Friday night’s game against the Cats, we are looking forward to a couple of big inclusions to the forward line in Adam Goodes and Ben McGlynn.

Both Goodes and McGlynn are obviously good players for us, but our strength this year has been the ability to share the load across the group. Even when Goodes and McGlynn weren’t there last game against Essendon we still have players contribute and play well, including Andrejs Everitt who got forward and used the ball well, as well as Jetta, and Sam Reid is starting to build in confidence.

Rather than one or two, it’s more about the forward six that are on the ground at the time sharing the load and working together.

Playing at Geelong in the past, I obviously know the Geelong defenders pretty well and have had another look at them some more during the week. They are such an experienced group and their average age is 28 back there and they have played a lot of footy together. They work well as a unit and have done so for a long period of time and are a hard unit to score against. Geelong’s all-round game is really impressive, and our group knows it will be a big challenge to pull their game apart and get some goals on the board.

We’re really looking forward to taking on the Cats in Friday night footy. It’s our one and only Friday night game for the season, so it’s something we’re really excited about.  We’ve talked about it a couple of times during the week and the players are buzzing about playing Friday night footy. We can’t wait to get out there.