COLLINGWOOD coach Steve Symonds said he was relieved to get the win in a dour low-scoring battle between his Magpies and Geelong at GMHBA Stadium yesterday. Coming into the match, Symonds indicated that it would be a battle of the defences, and that rung true with just four behinds scored in the first half, and both ends holding firm. Eventually a Jordyn Allen would split the difference – the third goal in the game – but Symonds said the Magpies needed to make more of their early front half dominance.

“(It’s) always nice to get the win, (but) it was to be honest a pretty frustrating game,” Symonds said. “We certainly had really good dominance early on in the game and in the back-end of the game they had dominance as well so it was two defensive structures going against each other and the ball just ping ponged up the oval until basically someone got through. We’ll take away from some learnings.”

The Collingwood coach praised Geelong’s pressure throughout the 2.3 (15) to 1.5 (11) victory, saying that his side would need to adjust to that kind of pressure and make the right decisions when given opportunities to create better looks on goal.

“They’ve certainly improved, their pressure was really strong in the second half and they really started to match us in the contested ball area in the second half as well, so a couple of areas for us to work on and I just thought probably our first half in particular, I thought we played a little bit too slow and a bit too safe,” Symonds said. “We had territory dominance we just messed around, we kept hitting 40m out from goal, still too far out to score and we just didn’t quite get enough depth on it, but yeah things to work on.”

Though frustrated with the lack of capitalised chances – Collingwood kicked two goals from 24 inside 50 entries – Symonds praised his defence for standing up when the Cats dominated the final term, holding forward half possession consistently throughout the quarter.

“Our backline’s a real strength of ours,” her said. “They worked really well together, they’ve played a number of games together now and they’ve got a little bit of chemistry. “We thought our backline held up really, really well. It was just our rebound from defence, what we did with it then as I spoke about we kept getting the ball inside 50, 40m out from goal and we just needed to find one more mark inside 50 and we would have been okay but we just couldn’t find that extra kick.”

Now the Pies set their sights on Adelaide, with the Crows coming off back-to-back wins over Richmond and North Melbourne, finishing strongly in the final terms to grab the victories. Symonds said he was looking forward to taking on the Crows at Victoria Park for a change.

“Obviously the Crows we’ve had some really good battles over the past couple of years,” he said. “We’ve obviously played them on their home turf, so we get a chance to play them on ours, so really looking forward to that. “Second part of Indigenous Round as well, so looking forward to having that at home.

“We’ll do our recovery now, Jaimee Lambert just copped a little corky but that all looks okay, she came back on etc and ran out the game so we’re pretty confident we’ll get through. “Touch wood the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a pretty good list to work from because touch wood everyone is injury free.”

Collingwood at Adelaide clash at Victoria Park on Sunday, September 18 from 12:10pm.