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 gather what they had to say post their respective matches on the weekend.

This week it is off to Arden Street, to hear from the coaches whose sides played out potentially the most telling draw of the season – North Melbourne’s Darren Crocker and Richmond’s Ryan Ferguson.

Crocker was asked about whether his side kicked itself out of the match, a notion which he felt did not tell the entire story of the match.

“When you look at three (goals) nine (behinds), and then there was out on the full, (Vikki) Wall kicked one out on the full as well, you can look at it that way,” he said.

“Where we were most disappointed with was early in the game. We felt like the first quarter the Tiges jumped out of the blocks, their pressure was really good. We didn’t handle that as well as we would have liked, we overused the ball early, allowed them to get the game looking how they wanted it to look and it wasn’t until we were able to reset at quarter time where second quarter it became a bit of an armwrestle.

“Third quarter I thought we obviously dominated but just couldn’t put the scoreboard pressure on that would have allowed us to go into the last quarter with a bit of breathing space. But, what our players should take out of it is not like we’re playing really poorly, we’re playing some bloody good football and football that we think should really hold up under finals pressure.”

Crocker had a reflective perspective on how his side’s regular season panned out and where they ended up.

“I think our fixture has prepared us really well for what’s to come and the players should take belief out of that,” he said.

“It’s been a tough fixture for us, but I think it’s prepared us well. I think as a coaching panel we believe we’ve been playing better footy than we have previously, and as I eluded to, think that’s going to hold us in good stead come the next few weeks.”

On the flipside, Ferguson could see the humour in his side finishing out the home and away season with a draw like they did.

“It was probably a fitting finale for us the way our season has gone with so many close games and we’ve found a way to get over the line in them and essentially get over the line today for what we needed,” he said.

“It was a brilliant crowd, an electric atmosphere, obviously playing a cracking team. Kangaroos, I thought in the third quarter they just turned up the heat up on us and we just had to hang on there for a little while, and got a bit more momentum in the fourth quarter but we still had to hang on at times. It was just a cracking game of footy in the end.”

Ferguson thought that although his side had a great start, the Tigers did not quite do as much damage as they may have wanted to.

“I thought we owned the first half and they probably owned the second half and we would have liked to have done a bit more damage with it, but also there was also some good patches of play in there as well, particularly into the wind we got a nice counter attack going.

“To defend resolutely for big periods of time, which you’ve got to do into the wind against good teams, but to get some counter attack and not just defend the whole quarter and to kick that goal into the wind was important come the back end of the game.”