For the first time this season, we’ve collected back-to-back wins and we need to keep that momentum going. We thought we had a really good battle with Melbourne, who have certainly improved as a side this season. It was good to see that we could back up our performance from our win over Fremantle the week before. Once again, our pressure was good, although we probably didn’t finish as well as we would have liked. Certainly from our point of view though, it’s important that we start stringing games together. We needed to do it last week and we did, and we must do it again this week when we take on the Brisbane Lions up at the Gabba.

Our tackling has been an area we’ve been particularly happy with over the last fortnight. It’s so important to our performance and in the game against Freo we made over 100 tackles. Last week we didn’t lay quite as many, but it really is the cornerstone of our pressure. We know that if we’re tackling well then we’re turning the ball over and having entries into our forward 50. It’s really important that we continue to keep that tackle pressure up across the ground.

Looking at the defensive group, one player who has been particularly impressive over the last fortnight is Rhyce Shaw. Rhyce collected a career-high 34 touches against the Demons, and the funny thing is that it could have been more because there was a period of the game where we couldn’t get him back on the field. He sat on the bench for eight minutes, so we probably held him back, but it was a terrific performance regardless.

Certainly over the last two weeks Rhyce has bounced back to his best, and it’s great to see that after coming off a knee reconstruction. Coming back into football is always difficult and probably by his own admission, his form was down earlier in the year. To his credit, he has continued to improve week-by-week since then and we’ve seen over the last two weeks how much of a great player he is running off the half-back line. Shawy plays his 200th game this week and it’s a great achievement for him. He comes from a great football family with his father, his brother and his uncle, and it’s terrific for Rhyce to be playing the milestone game this weekend.

Another player who continues to play his role really well is Jeremy Laidler. At the end of last season, we thought it was really important to bolster our defensive stocks and we saw Jeremy as that player who could come in and play some really good football down back. Last year he played a lot of football forward for the Blues, but we knew he was a very capable backman from his previous years. He came to the club and found fitness, because he’s had a couple of injury problems over the last couple of years, and now he’s fully fit, which is terrific. He had a really good pre-season at the club and as we’ve seen, he’s slotted in really well onto the half-back line and has really added something with some of his ball use and decision making.

Looking at our opposition this week, we know the Brisbane Lions have plenty of talent in their forward 50 starting with Jonathan Brown. Browny has been a terrific player over many years for the Lions and he’s still going well. They also had big Daniel Merrett up in the forward line last week against St Kilda, which gave them another big tall target, so they have plenty of options. While their talls are impressive, they also have some exciting half-forwards with Josh Green and Dayne Zorko and a young fella Lewis Taylor.

There is no doubt the Lions have plenty of talent and even though they’ve had some defeats, they’ve lost to Hawthorn, Geelong and Port Adelaide, who are obviously sitting on top of the ladder. They’ve played some quality sides, and we saw what they did last week against the Saints, so we’re expecting a big contest on Saturday night on their home deck.