Hawthorn Senior Coach Sam Mitchell said he was “disappointed” with the side’s seven-point loss against Geelong on Easter Monday at the MCG.
Speaking to the media post-game, the Hawks coach spoke about the close contest and some of the key moments throughout the match.
We summarised some of the main points from his press conference below.
On the result
“Disappointed. We got a lot of things right, they’re a good side. But we got enough wrong that they deserve the win. You can’t do some of the stuff that we did today and expect to beat good sides. We’ve known where we’re at and that we need to improve to keep getting better. We feel like we are continually doing that, but the very best sides put you away when you make mistakes. We turned the ball over 10 times in our defensive 50 and we couldn’t score from our own forward 50 stoppages. There was a late part in the game where we had chances, but you’re going to have to take more chances against a quality side and we couldn’t do it.”
On the key moments
“When you play, your game style sort of relies on hitting the kicks that you think you should. The amount of times that we were caught offside because of blatant clanger errors, I mean, they’re the right errors. If you’re going to lose a game, I’d rather lose by skill error than by non-compliance with game plan or being unpredictable to your teammates. So if you’re going to lose, losing because of skill, if that’s one of the things that you’re losing, it’s probably on the better end of the spectrum. You’re not going to win a lot of games kicking the ball like the way we did tonight.”
On the close battle
“It felt like there was a lot of people here and I don’t think they went home disappointed by the spectacle. There were certainly some good one-on-one match-ups and thinking about both teams, I imagine the votes are hard to give. It was quite an even contribution, like I don’t know who our best five were or who their best five were. I think both teams had even contributions which is what the best teams generally have. We probably had a few key moments where if we could’ve taken them, we could’ve got a bit more scoreboard ascendancy but in the end, we just couldn’t quite peg it back.”
Watch Mitchell’s full press conference below.
