Essendon coach, Matthew Knights says his side is looking forward to another big challenge this week when they take on ladder leaders St. Kilda.
The Bombers’ delivered their third audacious upset of the season last week and are looking for back-to-back wins come Sunday.
Knight’s believes that the key to winning the game will be matching St. Kilda in the contested areas of the game and not underestimating the multitude of talented players they will field.
“St. Kilda was a top four team last year and have taken their game to a new level this year,” he said.
“They have a lot of talent, their players are mature too- you can’t underestimate that especially with players like Goddard, Montagna, Dal Santo, Riewoldt and Koschitzke upfront and Fisher is a super player up back.
“They look very strong; their form-line for the first part of the year is impeccable, they are up there with Geelong as the best two teams in the competition.
“We run into challenges like this every week, at 4-3 we just have our heads above water with our win/loss.
“Whatever happens Sunday we are keen to play to our full potential and see what the by-product of that is.”
Knights said that for his team to walk away with a win this week, they cannot afford to drop off their aggression and intensity at the ball that they showed against Hawthorn.
“We need to match St. Kilda in attack and the contested areas. When we played at the Gabba, against Brisbane, they towelled us up in the contested ball, they were too good,” he said.
“Against Hawthorn, we were able to match players like Brad Sewell and Luke Hodge on the inside, where they are so good and we were competitive which have us the chance to execute our game plan.
“We will be concentrating on that during the week and then come out and have a real crack at them on the weekend.”
A strong performance in the VFL from Scott Lucas and promising returns from injury from Darcy Daniher, Michael Hurley and Brent Prismall means Knights will face some tough selection pressure for this week’s game and in the coming weeks.
“As we have a Sunday game we won’t finalise our 22 till Thursday. Scott went back and did himself proud, he kicked four goals but more importantly effort and movement was a lot better,” he said.
“After having a good game last week I wouldn’t think there would be too many changes to our line up. Again we’ll finalise our 22 on Thursday and that will be the first time we let the players know too.”
