Brad Scott has noted a young midfielder as a potential inclusion for the side leading into Thursday night’s clash against the Kangaroos.

Looking to bounce back from last week’s Anzac Day defeat to Collingwood, the Bombers have taken plenty away from their encounter with the ladder leaders, reinforcing the importance of four-quarter consistency against top four outfits.

With a short turnaround of six days awaiting his side, Scott will have to weigh up his selection options not just this week, but into the coming fortnight as a group of Dons are slated for returns from injury.

The key talking points from Scott’s round eight presser:

Scott on… forward connection

Even in training, you need players together.

We obviously really like the combination, not off in the distant future, but right now, we like the combination of Nate Caddy in there with Kyle Langford, smalls with Gresham and Kako, Menzie, these types.

We probably had a difficult decision at the start of the year when we had Peter Wright available, Sam Draper available, Nick Bryan available, Todd Goldstein available. You don't build a list looking at what your best 22 looks like and then add backups from there, you try and add quality to your list over time.

We think we've got some quality in that part of the ground (up forward), but it hasn't played a lot of footy together. We'll just keep training it and there are things that we can do in the interim.

We're not waiting 50 games to see what happens. We expect improvement on an incremental week-by-week basis.

Scott on… takeaways from the Pies 

Firstly, I thought the opposition were very good.

I mean, we’ve been pretty good in the contest and around the stoppages throughout the year but despite Goldstein's influence - I thought he was very good - we got beaten at ground level, which put a bit of pressure on us and Collingwood were a bit too good, a bit too clean, a bit too classy at different stages.

I think we're showing some really good signs in patches, but like teams that are outside the best four or five teams in the competition, the biggest challenge for all of the teams in that group is consistency of effort over a long enough period.

It's good that we could come from a pretty significant deficit and get back in front in the third quarter, but we just weren’t able to play the same way for long enough.

When you get beaten around the ball and you concede probably too much territory, too many inside 50's against a quality team, they can really open you up but I thought defensively we held up pretty well.

We had some really good performances back there and I thought we left too much to our defence, to be honest. The positive side of it is I thought we looked we looked pretty strong back there, that's a part of our game that we've been really working hard on and looking to continue to build on.

Scott on… preparing for North Melbourne

They're all exciting.

North played well on the weekend against Port and (it’s) a short turnaround for both teams, so it’s a game that we're clearly looking forward to, and I know they're looking forward to.

It should be a great contest and we're going to have to be at our best.

It's a really challenging competition that we play in. There’s small margins and every opposition we’re playing against have got capability at their best.

North are no different. They've got a lot of young talent, but we believe we do too.

Scott on… selection, potential inclusions in coming weeks

Yeah, both (Dylan Shiel and Harry Jones) are fine. It'd be sort of hard to gauge watching training today, there’ll be a whole lot of guys who are on individualised programs, but they're both available for selection.

Maybe (we’ll opt for changes this week). There were some good performances in the VFL, we left Elijah Tsatas out just from probably more of a list management perspective.

We had a short break and there's a five-day break between the VFL and the AFL game, so we just need to manage our availability there and ‘Lij’ was very unlucky to miss the last two weeks, he only went out of the side with a broken hand and others took their opportunity.

Elijah's ready to go if we choose to make a change in that part of the ground.

We expect (Matt Guelfi and Nik Cox) to play in the VFL this week. They'll train today and provide there’s no setback, they're slated to play this week so it'd be really pleasing to get them back and into some form.

Scott on… Zak Johnson’s VFL form

He’s translated his elite traits as a junior into VFL football against men.

We draft these ‘boys’ - because that's what they are, 17, just turned 18, never played against men before in their lives - and then they come into a competition of the VFL where they're playing against guys 10, 12 years older than them.

That often takes a bit of time to see the elite traits as a junior to translate into senior football, but Zak’s been able to replicate what he was doing a junior at VFL level.

We rate him really highly, but we want to bring him in what he's ready to perform at AFL level and that's probably closer than a lot of people think, but I always err on the side of making sure they're ready, but he's showing really good signs.