Hawthorn coach Sam Mitchell says his team needs to dramatically improve their centre clearance work against Geelong next round after making a “disastrous” start in that area this season.
Despite finishing in the bottom three last year, the Hawks were one of the strongest centre clearance teams in the AFL with a ranking of No.3.
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However, after getting pumped in that department by nine against Essendon in Round 1, they replicated that deficit in their 55-point loss to Melbourne on Saturday evening at the MCG.
If they’re any hope of taking down the in-form Geelong on Easter Monday, it’s a statistic that needs urgent fixing and Mitchell forecast a potentially busy night at the selection table this week.
“That’s going to be a clear focus for us is being able to sort out the centre bounces,” Mitchell said post-match.
“To be minus 18 after two rounds is disastrous and last year we were really strong in that area.
“That’s going to be a heavy focus for us. I imagine there’ll be some changes, whether that’s personnel or system or both, I’d suspect there’s going to be something different in the next time that we play.
“I think we conceded nine goals from clearance (against Melbourne and) five from centre bounce … we couldn’t halve the contest. So once we did get at a 50-50 play, get a clearance in the first quarter, they dominated that area of the ground.
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“Two weeks in a row we’ve given up enormous amount of field position through centre bounce and clearance work so that puts you behind the eight ball.”
But centre clearances were just one alarming aspect of their heavy defeat to the Demons.
The Hawks over-possessed the footy badly in the opening quarter with a whopping 53 marks for just one behind as Melbourne helped themselves to the first five goals of the match to all but end the contest at the first change.
Mitchell agreed his team were too conservative, lacked the necessary dare to win territory and described it as “not a sustainable way to play”.
“They blew us away early,” Mitchell said.
“We controlled the ball in the back half and then we had plenty of chances to go inside 50, we just didn’t take them.
“I think some of the coaching of that, we have to have an assessment. We need to look at the plan, look at why we couldn’t execute a part of it.
“Certainly the idea to take some more uncontested marks was obvious. Taking some more territory and actually looking for chances to penetrate the front half was where we fell down and fell down badly.
“We knew we needed to not cough up the ball in the back half so we decided to possess the ball a bit more, and 50 marks is a bit excessive in the first quarter.”
The midfield battle was very much like boys against men as Melbourne trio Jack Viney (seven), Petracca (seven) and Clayton Oliver (five) had 19 clearances between them while the entire Hawthorn side managed just 23.
The Demons comfortably won the clearances 35-23, contested possessions 128-116, tackles 73-50 and forward entries 55-42, and Mitchell intimated Melbourne was a team the developing Hawks aspired to emulate in the coming years.
“If you add (Max) Gawn to that (Oliver, Petracca and Viney), they’ve probably all played a minimum of 100 games together,” Mitchell said.
“The personnel that they’ve had and the consistency of performance that they have and they’ve backed those guys in when they were very young and they continue to play at a really high level for a long period of time.
“Once we look at teams like that … they back in a young group, they build with them together and then they’re able to play a lot of footy together and we’re in that process now.”
But Mitchell didn’t want his team to use that as an excuse for them to get regularly thumped by opposition teams this season.
“Coming into this season, we wanted to put ourselves in a winnable position in far more games,” he said.
“This is a nine- or 10-goal loss and we don’t want this. We want, as a football club, to move past these big losses where we’re not able to compete with sides at that level.”
Meanwhile, Mitchell confirmed Luke Breust was subbed out in the second half for tactical reasons and had no injury concerns.
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