Brisbane belt Bulldogs but Starce searches for more

BRISBANE picked up its third win on the trot this AFL Women’s season after defeating the Western Bulldogs last night, but Lions’ coach Craig Starcevich was not necessarily as happy as most coaches would be after a 47-point win.

Perhaps a sign of the kind of club Brisbane is, Starcevich was frustrated at times with the way his side performed and was picking out the faults of the Lions’ performance because “because parts of that won’t stack up against good sides”.

“However, if you just sort of calm down a little bit and have a look at, the way we try and play leaves ourselves exposed to getting scored back the other way, which I would rather play expansive, exciting, quick moving footy than in a slow, skinny corridor where no one scores,” he said. “So that’s, “That’s just us, that’s what we do, and it leaves us open a little bit going back the other way.

“We’ve still had 26 scoring shots, they’re about eight. Disappointing we couldn’t restrict it, a few bits and pieces that they produced, but it was probably lack of pressure and lack of effort from us mainly in the third quarter.”

When asked what specifically he was not impressed by, Starcevich said the mistakes with ball in hand.

“I think when the skill errors that result in really bad turnovers and they can go back and put some pressure on you, not maintaining our normal high level of desperation and pressure, which is vital for our game,” he said. “If that drops off, we’re not going to be as competitive as we need to be.

“There are a few things there tonight that were disappointing and little patches and it’s probably been a little bit of a story the last three weeks. “We’ve had little spurts of some really good passages of footy but haven’t quite put the whole thing together yet. “Tonight a desperate opposition exposed us a little bit when we took our foot off the gas.”

There was a spanner in the works just before the bounce when Dakota Davidson was a late omission, but Starcevich explained the situation.

“That was probably enough of a distraction at the beginning of the game to be honest but she just woke up a bit sick this morning, tried to get through the warm up and felt like she had no energy, so we had to make the change,” he said.

He expects she will be fine to travel to Perth for Brisbane’s game against West Coast on Sunday.

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