Despite the Hawks falling to the Blues by five points in their final pre-season clash, the result was far from doom and gloom from the senior coach's perspective.

"We're pretty pleased with the way that we went," Alastair Clarkson said during his post-match presser.

"We controlled a lot of the indicators of the game that we like [to control], which is inside 50s and scoring opportunities.

"We applied an enormous amount of pressure to the Carlton side, [laying] 90 tackles to their 50, so we were pleased with a lot of things outside of the scoreboard.

"So we've got some things to work on over the course of the next couple of weeks to get ourselves tuned up for the first game against Collingwood, but by and large we just lacked polish in front of goal."

Watch Clarkson's full press conference here.

Read: Match report - Blues overrun Hawks