After a spirited showing on Sunday night against the Western Bulldogs, Senior Coach Brad Scott says the signs of improvement are starting to align with increased opportunity at selection.

Speaking to media on Thursday morning, Scott reflected on the Club’s response after a difficult start against the Dogs, the benefits of growing availability across the list, and the genuine competition for spots that has emerged for the first time in more than a year. 

With Gather Round looming and key players pushing their case through strong VFL form, selection pressure is once again shaping the conversation.

All of Brad’s points from this morning’s presser are below.

Brad on… selection pressure

It’s the first time in recent memory, probably the last 18 months, that we have genuine selection pressure.

So, we’ll make some decisions this week, which unfortunately, for one reason or another, we just haven’t been able to make over the last 18 months with both form availability. 

We’ve had a really good situation in terms of availability, but also some guys in the VFL playing good footy.

We’ll make some changes and some guys, when we see them out, might feel hard done by, but we haven’t been able to have that selection pressure for a long time.

It just gives you options that we haven’t had up until now and I think it’s good for the Club and it’s good for the team.

It’s not necessarily good for the individuals that go out, but any good team always has selection pressure, and we just haven’t had that for 18 months.

Brad on… performance against the Bulldogs

The effort is hard to measure when the scoreboard’s going against you.

A lot of people say, “You just want to see competitive effort,” but what they really mean is they want to see a tight margin. Obviously, we look at it a lot deeper than that.

There was a bit of reward for the effort, turning around a 54-point deficit. It’s still a five-goal loss, but for the two and a half quarters from the back half of the second quarter onwards, we started to look like how we’ve trained.

That should give the guys a bit of belief in what we’re doing.

Brad on… Zach Reid

We got a precautionary scan, and we suspected it wasn’t anything major or anything at all, really, but with Reid, we’re always very careful.

The decision was a really hard one at three-quarter time to take him out.

We felt like we had some momentum in the game and we would’ve ideally liked to keep him going, but again, given his history, it was just a prudent thing to do.

I think he’s been up and running the whole time. It’s been a challenge to play in the last line of defence for us and it only takes a little bit of a shift in overall performance to lift.

I think you’ll find when you have pressure around the ball, your midfield contest and your clearance work are better,  your defence tends to look a lot better as well.

So, under the circumstances, he’s been playing very well regardless, but as a player of enormous capability, we just haven’t had him out there for long enough. 

We haven’t had him out there with the combination of players that we’ve liked, but we think that’ll change with Jordan Ridley coming back.

Brad on… Melbourne matchup

Melbourne are playing a fast, aggressive style and they’ve been impressive in all four games.

They’ve got high-quality players, probably the generational ruckman in Max Gawn, and Kysaiah Pickett is playing more midfield time than he probably ever has.

They’ve got real threats everywhere and they’re playing a good style of footy, but we also think if we take the second-half form from last week, we can challenge them.

Brad on… Sullivan Robey

He’ll certainly travel (to Adelaide this week), and we might make our final decision based on a final tick-off on medical availability.

It’s not a matter of if he plays, it’s when he plays.

He’s played a month of VFL footy, so we’re really happy with the block of work he’s done.

If he does play this week, that’s our five draftees all played by round five, which paints a little picture of what we’re trying to do.

Brad on… potential Tom Edwards and Nate Caddy link-up

Tom Edwards is just a very smart player. It might have seemed a bit of a risk to bring a guy back who’s been out for a year and only had one game back in the VFL, but that talks to how we rate him.

We’ve got a lot of things that we think look good, but the reality is Tom played two games and did his ACL (last year), so the cohesion and the ability of players to play together just hasn’t been seen.

We like the Edwards and Caddy pairing on paper, and we think it can work really well, but we just haven’t had it, so it remains to be seen.