IN a weekly series at Rookie Me Central, we cast our eyes and ears around the league to gather thoughts from AFL Women’s coaches, and see what they had to say post their respective matches on the weekend.

In this week’s edition it’s back to Victoria and across to the country town of Warrnambool to hear from Geelong coach Dan Lowther and Essendon coach Nat Wood.

For the victorious Lowther, he was impressed with his team’s efforts, particularly late in the piece.

“The game was a great tussle from first quarter to last,” Lowther said. Three quarter time I thought oh maybe it’s going to go down to the wire, which it kind of felt like it would, but to our girls’ credit our inside 50 entries late in the game proved to be the difference which was good.

“We came expecting a really tough game to be fair, like Essendon’s got some really good players on their list, and they’re only going to get better with more cohesion and time together which is what we’ve had over the last couple of years to build more synergy. So great game, really proud of that we got the win, it was what we were after.”

One area of the game that Lowther was particularly happy with from his team was the improvement in their clearances.

“Particularly last quarter clearly when we got on top I thought our clearance rate improved. Essendon were probably all over us with their clearances and their stoppage work was quite good, so it was an arm-wrestle in that sense and then last quarter we got a few our way but look at the stats, our metres gained from clearances was quite positive so once the ball was out of a congested space we used the ball quite well. We didn’t get many opportunities to do that, but when we did we were pretty good with it.”

On the flipside, a frustrated Wood noted how her side keeps having what she calls “honourable losses”.

“I feel like we’ve had a few honourable losses which in one hand is a credit to the way the players are going about the games week in and week out, but it’s disappointing in not being able to finish out the game well,” she said.

Wood was clear in what she felt went right and wrong for her side against the Cats.

“We spoke at the end of last week against Brisbane, our clearances weren’t at the level and we probably haven’t had a game this year where we’ve been able to get a lot of ascendency through having our hands on it first in the middle, so it was a focus. I thought the girls did an outstanding job of that.

“We moved some players around, it was pretty slippery in the middle as well. We moved some players around, we were able to get some better numbers for us and some better connection.

“We dropped away going inside 50. I thought at times some of our connection moving inside 50 was as good as we’ve had, but we’re just not consistent yet across all of a quarter and then within the quarters and a real credit to Geelong, they came out and really lifted the intensity and the standard, and they were really clean in their execution in the fourth quarter, and we weren’t able to go up a gear with them at that point.”