General News
2 June, 2022
Magpies enduring tough period
CAMPERDOWN Magpies have been hit hard by illness, injury and unavailability, but senior coach Neville Swayn says he won’t make any excuses for his side’s 116-point loss to Warrnambool at home on Saturday.
CAMPERDOWN Magpies have been hit hard by illness, injury and unavailability, but senior coach Neville Swayn says he won’t make any excuses for his side’s 116-point loss to Warrnambool at home on Saturday.
“We had some key personnel out but we don’t want to use that as an excuse,” he said.
“We were disappointing. We need to just keep working hard on the track and keep improving, that’s all we can do.”
When Swayn talked to The Camperdown Chronicle in March he was realistic about the season ahead; the Magpies had lost many players over the off-season and while they’d recruited some talent from elsewhere the focus would be on blooding youngsters.
Swayn was prepared to deal with tough patches through the 2022 but still wanted to remain competitive.
The Magpies have had a rough start to the season, winning their round one match against Terang Mortlake but only tasting victory in one other match so far.
Swayn’s main concern through this phase is to keep his players motivated and focused on progressing as a team and learning from every game.
“It’s really important that we have a good environment at training. We want the players to enjoy it and learn at the same time,” he said.
“As coaches, what we need to do is break things down so we can see improvement.
“We’re nearly halfway though the year, so the second half we can hopefully set some improvement goals and tick some boxes.
“That gives the boys something to look forward to, something to aim for.”
Swayn saw this concept in action during the loss on Saturday when, having only scored 0.2 to Warrnambool’s 12.4 by half-time, he set his players a second-half goal.
“It was just to be more accountable man-on-man, that was the main thing I spoke about, to restrict them a little bit,” he said.
“And there was improvement with that through the second half. To the boys’ credit, in the last quarter we had six of our 11 scoring shots.
“It would have been easy with that deficit just to roll over, but the boys’ effort was right there throughout the game.”
Swayn called out assistant coach and on-baller Cameron Spence as his side’s best player in the loss.
“He was clearly our best, I think he had 35 possessions,” he said.
“He was consistent all game, he did a really good job.”
Swayn hopes that his side can take the lessons from last week’s game and put them into practice when the Magpies host Hamilton this week.
“Being more consistent will be the biggest thing, we can’t give sides chances with our lapses,” he said.
“Hamilton are really tall, so they’ll probably try to stretch us. The important thing will be our ball movement when we get it, but also to try to restrict and pressure them as much as we can.
“Hopefully we’ll get two or three key players back, which will help us as well.
“If we can just be consistent and increase our pressure across the ground then hopefully we can improve with sides not kicking scores like Warrnambool did against us.”
