THE SYDNEY Swans will attempt to break their psychological shackles by “playing like kids” against North Melbourne at the SCG on Sunday, according to defender Tadhg Kennelly.

Kennelly conceded the Swans played in fear of making an error after their disappointing loss to Collingwood in round 13 and that timidity cost them dearly against Richmond, as they surrendered a 33-point third-quarter lead to lose by four points at the MCG.

The players met for three hours on Tuesday morning to dissect the game that Kennelly described as “un-Swans-like” and he said his teammates needed to back their natural games against North.

“There’s a lot of pressure on the group. Sometime people think that we’re curing cancer or we’re rocket scientists, and we’re not. We’re footballers and that’s what we need to get back to,” he said on Tuesday.

“We need to get back to enjoying football; we need to get back to playing football like we’re kids again. When players are… worrying too much about making mistakes, that’s when you make a mistake.”

However, the Swans will tackle one of their chief finals rivals without Daniel Bradshaw, Henry Playfair, Craig Bird and Gary Rohan, who have all been ruled out after a torrid weekend on the injury front.

Bradshaw is expected to miss up to three weeks with a torn hamstring, as will Bird who has suffered a recurrence of his foot stress reaction.

Rohan will miss up to two weeks with an ankle injury, while Playfair’s season appears all but over after he broke down with a cracked vertebra in his back against Richmond.

With ruckman Mark Seaby (ankle) and defender Craig Bolton (achilles) still up to a month away, Kennelly said the club’s leaders needed to step up.

He backed Adam Goodes to emerge from his form slump against North Melbourne but warned that the rest of the team needed to lift its game as well. 

“He’s a dual Brownlow Medallist; he’s got high expectations and we as a playing group have got high expectations of him. We expect Adam to play well every week and when he doesn’t, it’s hard for us to take,” Kennelly said.

“But it’s not Adam Goodes’ fault, it’s not Adam Goodes that’s the problem. It’s us as a group.

“If the distribution and the ball going into him isn’t good, it makes Adam look bad. It’s us as a midfield and us as a backline.”

As the eighth-placed Swans’ finals hopes become more precarious with every loss, Kennelly said the players had vowed to treat every remaining premiership season match like a final.

“Generally when Swans players come out and say we’re going to fight, bite and scratch to get a result, we generally do, and we haven’t the last couple of weeks,” he said.

“I’m not going to sit here and say we’re going to win the last eight weeks, but definitely every game of football we play for the next two months is a finals game of football.

“We’re playing a team who’s coming from a position with the same points as us and it’s going to be an extremely tough, hard contest on the weekend.”