Sam Mitchell is adamant his Hawks are “better” than their 67-point loss to Brisbane suggests, and has challenged his team to prove it against Collingwood next Saturday night at the MCG.
Coming up against a Lions side that was beaten by Carlton by 76 points last week, the third-placed Hawks blew the chance to show they were genuine premiership contenders, with Brisbane running rampant to win 18.17 (125) to 8.10 (58) at the Gabba on Friday night.
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“We were outclassed tonight (but) we’re better than that,” Hawks coach Mitchell said.
“Brisbane are obviously a good side. They’ve won the last couple (of premierships) and are setting themselves again, so we saw it as an opportunity to compete against the best, and we weren’t up to it tonight.
“We can execute better than that and play to a higher level, and we’re going to need to.”
And that’s as early as next week against the Magpies.
“By the end of this round we’ll be sitting third on the ladder, coming into two games to go (of the regular season) playing Collingwood on a Saturday night,” Mitchell said.
“By the time we lick our wounds and spend a couple of days being annoyed at looking backwards, pretty quickly we’ll recognise that we’re a good side and ready to move forwards.
“We’re a better side than tonight and we’ll have to prove that next week.”
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Despite the lopsided scoreline, Mitchell felt the Hawks had their opportunities to keep things tight, particularly at the start of the second half when they had four of the first five scoring opportunities but could only manage four points from them.
“If we had got a couple of those, then you can just claw your way back in but … that four-goal (Brisbane) lead became five goals after we’d controlled the game a bit,” he said.
“Reward for effort is important, but from a mentality point of view, we need to be able to perform more consistently than we did across the night.
“At half-time, we were winning the inside 50s, (and) we ended up having a pretty good clearance night against a very good clearance team, so there were some things that came out of the game that you think ‘OK, that’s something we can work towards and work with,’ but realistically, we weren’t good enough tonight … but if we played them again, does that guarantee that result again? Absolutely not.
“We’ll lick our wounds, we’ll learn our lessons, and we’ll be back.”