AFTER his side’s narrow Elimination Final win over Geelong on the weekend, North coach Darren Crocker certainly felt like his side got away with the win.

“Absolutely”, he said. “But as I just said to the players, we’ve probably been on the wrong end of a few of those results as well, having controlled large parts of the game and especially the territory side of things. So I suppose in a final it was nice to get one back but to Geelong’s credit coming in to the game we knew that they were a big improver, and that we’d actually have to be right up to our best.

“Fortunately parts of our game, I thought our contest was strong, our pressure was very good, but they will definitely feel disappointed they didn’t come away with that win.”

Crocker praised his defensive unit and how they performed under pressure in the win.

“I thought our pressure and then our defence and both our defensive unit, the players that were playing down there, I thought every single one of our defenders had an impact on that game and had moments they had to step up and save the team,” he said. “But also collectively as a group I thought we just defended really well. Probably when you’re under pressure like they were putting us under territory wise, you can tend to fold back a little bit and get too many numbers behind the footy. It worked out that in the end that might have been what saved us.”

Crocker certainly has some focuses for this coming week that he will take out of Saturday night’s win.

“I don’t know whether it was the narrow ground, but I felt that both teams really struggled to move the ball with any fluency and it really was a game where territory was off the contest and not so much in transition,” he said. “They were able to get that territory off the contest and lock it in there a lot better than we were. So we’ll look a little bit, I thought we over used the ball at times around the initial contest and also our ball movement, we probably didn’t get that going as much as we would have liked.

“So we’ll have a look at that, we’ll take again the learnings out of this game and especially now that the players have experienced a final, they are a little bit different. We spoke before the game, finals aren’t perfect games, there’s going to be a lot of imperfect moments. It’s how you cope with those imperfect moments and be able to find a way through it.”

Crocker is certainly ready to renew the battle with Richmond this week in the semi finals, after the pair played out an enthralling draw in Round 10.

“It’s a drawn game, and our players, there were parts of that game that we controlled, and probably weren’t able to come away with the result we were after. But it’ll be really good to come up against them having just recently played them.”