HAWTHORN skipper Luke Hodge says the Hawks won’t be tempted into focussing their energies solely on curbing Joel Selwood and Patrick Dangerfield on Friday night.

Appearing on Channel 7’s Talking Footy last night, Hodge said the Hawks would instead channel their efforts into the entire Geelong outfit.

“Geelong is an exceptional team, and if you hunt two players, the others will do the job. So our mindset is to hunt all the Geelong players,” Hodge said.

“Our mindset has always been to hunt the opposition. Geelong are a good team and they’ve played some good footy throughout the year, but it’s finals football and everything you do from November until now revolves around playing good footy at this stage.”

It has been a year of close shaves for the reigning premiers, with six of their wins coming by 10 points or less.

Hodge says it’s no coincidence Hawthorn have been on the winning end of those games more often than not in 2016.

“We had a history a few years ago of losing those close games, so we practice a lot, we train them a lot so it’s good to see it’s paid off and got us into the top four,” he said.

The Hawks have experienced injuries to key players in 2016, with Jonathon Ceglar gone for the year with an ACL injury and Jarryd Roughead also missing as he undergoes treatment for a reoccurrence of his melanoma.

But the three time-premiership captain says it is just business as usual at Waverley, even though the Hawks are missing some of their first-choice players.

“It’s been the same as the last few years. We’ve had consistent interruptions throughout our preparation for the last few years – if you look back to 2014, there was a space of about eight weeks where we didn’t have Mitchell, Rioli, Gibson or Lake,” Hodge said.

“Our expectation is whoever comes in plays the same role. They might not have as much talent as the person who left, but as long as they’re doing their best and doing what we expect, you’ve got to be happy with it.

“In our system we don’t care who’s in certain positions – no matter what role you’re in, you’ve got to play to that structure.”