Pies need to wake up before it's too late to save their season

SCOTT PENDLEBURY EXCLUSIVE: IT'S like there is a snooze button on our season. Every second week we are hitting it and falling back to sleep.

Scott Pendlebury

IT'S like there is a snooze button on our season.

Every second week we are hitting it and falling back to sleep.

It's time now to snap out of a cycle that threatens to make a meal of our year.

It's frustrating, winning one week, helping restore our confidence levels, then losing the next.

But the reality is we've been going like yo-yos since Round 3, halting the momentum we generated with good wins in the first two games of the season.

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Looking at our efforts over the past two months leaves no one in any doubt that we are a middle-of-the-road side at the moment.

But we started the year gunning to win the premiership and that goal and our belief hasn't changed.

There is just a lot of work to be done to realise that lofty ambition.

The good footy we have played gives us all confidence that we can compete with the teams who are sitting at the top of the AFL tree, where we were a couple of years ago.

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The evidence was there only two weeks ago when our defensive pressure was top notch against Geelong.

It's eliminating the poor periods in games that continue to bob up.

The 10 or 15-minute passages where we allow the opposition to get a run-on that puts us out of the game.

That inconsistency is costing us.

In the post-match review last weekend, we isolated the problems down to three or four seconds of ball watching that hurt us against Sydney.

The coaching group this week said they believed we were going all right, we just had to sharpen up the areas where we were falling away for patches of games.

A month ago I said our midfield was guilty of cheating, after a shocking last quarter against Essendon in the Anzac Day game.

As a team we got caught out sneaking forward of the contest and leaving the work to others to win the footy.

It might sound like a big call but I stand by it.

Against the Swans, I couldn't fault our effort.

We were just too slow to react.

We were asleep when we needed to be sharp.

Our mental application simply wasn't good enough. We were lagging.

I know I was guilty of it myself. My man, Ryan O'Keefe, would win the footy and for a brief moment I was caught out ball-watching.

By then, he was 20m or 30m away.

It happened a lot in the game, which meant we were chasing a lot of Sydney tail, leaving our backline exposed.

This week, we have drilled down on our starting positions.

Instead of being 1m away from our man, we need to be there next to them, ready to check or block their run before they can get on their bike and shoot away from us.

Players are less willing to bolt off on you when you are trying to shunt their escape route from the contest, either with or without the ball.

It's cutting off the opposition's transition at the source that will help get us back to the level we need to be at.

Watching the vision of the Swans' loss only re-affirmed this issue for us.

It's a mindset thing. We need to be more alert, especially defensively.

When we do that, you won't be seeing the opposition jumping out of the blocks, running down the wings with the footy all by themselves.

Sydney is a great running side, but I think we can compete with them on foot if we are more proactive around the contest and in transition.

Every team trains incredibly hard over the summer, so the fitness gap can't be as wide as it may have appeared from the grandstand last Friday night.

I'm confident there will be a much different outcome against the Lions.

We have watched a lot of vision of them this week.

We feel like we know how they want to play and what we have to do to stop them.

Though we have dropped down the ladder, the investment and desire from the playing group is most certainly there.

That buy-in from all of us has been the best I have seen at the club.

You might question that with the news about Heath Shaw's omission last week.

He had a back and hamstring issue but his skinfolds were at the upper end of the acceptable range and that was part of the reason to leave him out of the side. It was a disappointing result but Shawy acknowledges he has not met the elite standards we are desperate to maintain this season.

The level of discipline set by every club is going up every year and no small things can be overlooked if we are to achieve our ultimate goal. The skinfold issue is something, as Bucks said, that Shawy is working hard on and I have no ntsG don'tnte doubt he will get on top of it.

He is a really professional guy and he does a heap of work every week to make sure his body is all right on match day.

He is such an important player for us and we are all looking forward to having him back in the team tonight, back to his hard-running best.

One of the biggest criticisms of us this year has been that we have been too heavily scored against and that's true.

We need to hold up better defensively, and that's not just restricted to the backmen in one-on-one contests.

We need to defend better as a team.

The intriguing aspect of this season is that it is a much different challenge each week.

A few years ago teams were trying to emulate the style of the premier each year, which probably played into the hands of the clubs who pioneered the successful system.

But this season teams are sticking more to what they want to do.

It means the games being played each week are varying greatly in their style, whether it be more of a stoppage or transition-based game.

As a player, it makes each contest exciting to approach and we feel we have zeroed in on what the Lions will bring to the table.

There are some new faces in the Brisbane team but we respect what they can do.

We are hell-bent on stringing two wins together to help get the season back on track but it has to start tonight.

Hopefully we don't hit that snooze button again.