In this week's Game Plan, Swans defensive coach, John Blakey, talks about the Swans defensive efforts in last week's Sydney Derby and where they need to improve ahead of facing Fremantle...

We’re now one round into the season, and from a defensive point of view I would say we’re quite happy with how our players have performed.

In our first match of the season against new Sydney side GWS, I thought Teddy Richards and Heath Grundy were fantastic down back for the team, and were able to cut off a lot of ball and intercept kicks that went down their way.

Facing a new team in round one was always going to be a challenge. We knew that they would be a young and enthusiastic group and we knew they had plenty of talented players that we shouldn’t underestimate. We put a lot of focus on young Jeremy Cameron who played at centre half-forward, and also considered Israel Folau lining up at full forward. We made sure that those guys, among others, were paid the attention that they deserved.

I thought we were really able to build on some of the aspects of our game that we were working on in the pre-season. It was obvious that our players understood each other on field together, and there was a good flow amongst players in the back half.

Due to the NAB Cup’s two player interchange rule, it was our midfielders who were rotated on and off the bench, which allowed the backline to notch up quite a bit of game time. I think that time on field together in the pre-season was beneficial, as defenders generally don’t get many rotations during the regular season anyway.

Despite winning the game by 10 goals over the Giants, there are some areas we can still tidy up, including our ball work coming out of the back half.

We know we’re going to need to work on those areas and step things up ahead of our round two clash with Fremantle next weekend. There has been plenty of talk about the Dockers playing a tall forward line, but I think we have players who can account for those positions.

Generally we think we’ve got a pretty good mix down back that can cover most of the options. Certainly from our point of view Ted Richards, Health Grundy and Alex Johnson have been doing those jobs for us and doing them well for us over the last 12 months.

We’ve also got Lewis Roberts-Thomson who can certainly go down and play as a key defender and who can also play forward and in the ruck for us. We’ve certainly got options down there if they do decide to go tall.

Obviously we’ll be watching Fremantle very closely this weekend, just as we do for every opposition, but round one is always exciting to see how teams have come out of their pre-season.

With Ross Lyon at the helm of Freo this year, we know they are likely to have a few different game plans that they will be trying to implement, so we’ll certainly be looking out for those things this weekend.