ESSENDON continued its surge into the top eight, defeating Gold Coast on Sunday afternoon to win its third game in a row.

Despite giving a positive performance for much of the day, the Bombers took a while to deliver the knock out blow, and speaking post-match Bombers coach Nat Wood talked about the frustrations of not being able to deliver that knock out blow.

“It was a point of the game we weren’t able to get right,” Wood said.

“It’s a thing that we’ve been working on. We spoke about earlier in the start of season not being very good in our defence and our contest. It’s really important to get those things right. I thought moving the ball, we got 44 inside 50s. We’re really proud of that.”

“We allowed the Suns to exit out from some of our entries pretty easily at times. That’s something we want to pride ourselves on, being able to lock it up.”

“It would have been nice to get a little more scoreboard pressure. The pressure of the ball from the Suns was huge.

“That pressure up the ground, that’s what influences your inability to get some nicer movement going forward.”

On a more positive note, Wood praised her midfield group and talked about who really stood up for her side.

“I thought what all our mids did today and we gave them some different roles and some tasks,” Wood said.

“I thought they worked in unison really well. I thought Madi P wore a pretty hard tag for most of the day, but she worked over to create a two v one and worked really hard on Rowbottom.

“Charlie had some really good moments in the game, particularly in the second half. Early on, we were able to extend her flow a little bit. We allowed Georgia Gee and Steph Cain at different times to get on the outside a little bit.

“What we’ve seen from our midfield is a real growth in being able to play slightly different roles each week, in terms of negate some of the oppositions strengths, as well as bring ours to the fold.”