Hear from Hawthorn Senior Coach Sam Mitchell following his side’s seven-point win over the Western Bulldogs on Sunday afternoon at Marvel Stadium.
On his side’s second win of the year:
“I think the character that the boys showed was fantastic. You’re always looking for evidence that you’re on the right track and I think today, you see there’s a lot of things we’ve been working on. We've been working on momentum a lot, trying to handle it, trying to not concede runs of goals, trying to handle structural changes and we handled most of those really well today. I think when you've got players who are willing to make a change in a game, that's what we really need and we've been working enormously hard on that and today, there was some reward for effort. I think the players handled the momentum of today's game, including the first five minutes, fantastically well and that's what gave us a chance to be in the game and get the victory in the end."
On Jarman Impey's performance:
“Jarman's been amazingly consistent and I don't think anyone cares more about their teammates and how they play and the influence that they can have on others. I think if you speak to any of our players about the guys they love playing footy with or help them play better, Jarman will be close to the first name they say. I think about the players who I coach who I can rely on that will leave unconditional effort every week - it's probably him at one end of the ground and Dylan Moore at the other. They're the two guys who will leave everything out there and if they make a mistake, they'll follow up and try again. I think the other players all walk taller with those guys being around them. I think Jarman, sometimes he plays fantastically well without the offensive threat and tonight, he got the offensive threat. We love the way he goes about it, we love his defensive pressure. He runs just as fast in defence as he does in offence. His work ethic and work rate to do the little things that we value is enormous. He really leads our backline. There's bigger names than him behind the ball like Sicily or someone like Josh Weddle - the ones that everyone talks about who do the flashy things but when you see Jarman doing what he does behind the ball, I think he's one of those players that other coaches would like watching him because they can see what we value."
On James Sicily fighting through injury:
“He’s still a young man who’s new in his leadership journey and he’d been under a lot of pressure. He obviously gets a fair bit of attention from his opposition so he pops his shoulder… we leave him out there and then he hurts his ankle in the third and at three-quarter time, we’d already made our sub so I said ‘What are you thinking?’ and he said ‘I just might not be able to do a couple of things like I can keep playing but I don’t want to cost us. What about forward? I could swap with (Blake) Hardwick.’ So I basically got them together and said ‘What do you guys think?’ and then they said ‘Yeah, alright, let’s do that.’ They really drove it on their own. For Blake to then go in the back half and do what he needed to do and for James to go into the front half and do what he needed to do, I thought their level of trust in each other to play each other’s roles was fantastic. It would’ve been really easy for James to not to keep playing, his shoulder’s sore, his foot’s sore, we would’ve completely understood his decision, but his commitment to work through that and to lead the way for our other boys was first class.”
On Calsher Dear’s debut:
“He did exactly what we thought and I’m sure he’ll look at the two goals and a couple of good marks but he had four tackles as a 6’4 key forward. His ability to get after the opposition when the ball hit the ground is a big part of why we played him in this game. We knew that the aerial threat would be a challenge against the Bulldogs and so even if he couldn’t mark it, we knew his desire to put pressure on would be important and when you get four tackles out of a key forward, you take that. Obviously, the goals are great and they’ll be what everyone remembers and talks about and rightly so, but for us, we value the small things just as highly.”
Watch the full post-game press conference below.
