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 we are heading to the northern Victorian town of Mildura to hear from Richmond coach Ryan Ferguson and GWS coach Cam Bernasconi.

The victorious Ferguson spoke highly of the crowd in Mildura and of his team’s performance to get over the line against GWS.

“The day was fantastic,” Ferguson said. It’s funny, even the pouring rain at one point couldn’t dampen the spirits of the people that came out to watch us. I couldn’t believe how many people in those conditions still came out, which I should be able to believe.

“They’ve supported our team so well, but it was a nice, hard fought contest. Took a while to be able to break through, but we knew that was going to be the case and if we stuck at it long enough, we thought we had the quality to put the score on the board at some point.”

Ferguson spoke of how once his team broke open the game they certainly reaped the rewards from that.

“We knew they were really strong in the contest and we’d have to match them in that area and sometimes it takes a while before you get the breakthroughs, but just the ability to finds space and in a congested game take the moments to find space and get some shape and get it out to our wingers was really important today,” he said. That enabled us to get a few quality shots on goal, and even the finish, it was important to take your moments in a game like this, so to finish strong in front of goals was important.”

Ferguson also addressed the high tackling pressure that his team persisted with throughout the game.

“I though our rucks, I don’t know what the hit outs to advantage were or anything like that, but I thought Gab Seymour supported by Woodsy (Jemima Woods) were strong in the middle for us and at ground level as well, but I actually thought our tackle pressure right up to the final siren was a weapon for us, and to play out every moment, it’s important to what we are, the brand of footy we’re trying to create, so I love that we played out every moment until the final siren.”

Meanwhile the vanquished Bernasconi was reflective about another big loss for his Giants side.

“Yeah it was a tough day out at the office today” Bernasconi said. I think just with the conditions being a bit wet, especially with some breeze, Richmond just adapted a lot faster than we did. We gave them a four goal head start and they had the breeze and took the most of the opportunities and then we had it in our front half and we had the breeze and just struggled to convert again.

“We’ll get some really good learnings, but pretty disappointed coming out to Mildura and still only kicking a couple of goals, but it’s one of these things that it’s all about growth this year, and we’ll review it and get a lot of learnings from it again.”

He did not explicitly say whether tackling pressure was a focus for his team heading into the game, but acknowledged it was always going to be a factor in the game considering the conditions.

“I think that’s what happens when the game’s scrappy,” Bernasconi said. When it’s windy and wet, it turns into a lot of contests and who scraps the hardest for longer, and essentially they’ve got some really good midfielders around the ball, and just a few stronger bodies and more mature aged players that could be a bit stronger over the ball and win their ground ball, but also tackle to hurt as well, and then hats off to the Tigers.

“I think they’re playing a brand of footy that’s really good at the moment. They’re strong inside, but they can move it from A to B really well. It’s one of those things, we knew it would be a scrap and I thought we competed hard at times, but it’s probably just a bit of the story for this group at the moment. We can do it for 50, 60 per cent of the game against the better sides, but we just fall away for the full four quarters.”

Heading into their last game of the season next week against Gold Coast, Bernasconi is hoping for a strong finish to his side’s season.

“We’re trying to even today understand that we can’t play finals but we still want to make sure we have a really strong foundation to finish the year off, and once again Season 7 is all about growth this year, and we’ve taken some steps forward and we’ve had a couple go back as well, but the whole idea of us and what we’re trying to achieve is to come up with our Giants DNA that not only is going to make us a better side, but compete with the best,” he said.

“At times we’re aggressive with our ball movement which therefore we can get hurt the other way, and we’ll keep doubling down on that. We want to have a method that can generate scores for us, but make sure we show some real character in the last game.”