The key talking points from senior coach Luke Beveridge’s weekly press conference.

Special guests

We’ve got young Darcy here today – obviously with the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal tomorrow, we’ll turn our minds to all the children and their families who have had a tough time over the journey. It’s great to have Darcy here, and to have Isla here too, Darcy’s little sister. It’s good to have the kids up here on the balcony and be involved with us here today.

It’s a pretty important day for all of us – we’re fortunate enough as a football club to play this game against North Melbourne. As the Kangaroos and our Club has said over the journey, we love the fact that we’re part of it, and want to be part of it for a long time. We’re looking forward to the challenge of playing them tomorrow.

Goalkicking

The positives with it all are the opportunities that we are creating. We feel like we haven’t drawn the benefits from the way we’ve defended as a team. We’ve had some periods where we’ve just frustrated ourself enough, that unfortunately we’ve given really good opposition teams enough of a look for them to get momentum.

In a shorter week you can’t spend a lot of time on repetition – a lot of it is about recovery and preparing for the next game and challenge. We did enough yesterday to get ourselves in the right frame of mind.

A lot of it is psychological – that positive self-talk. Our players are all capable, and there’s a mixture of things. There’s the set shots, and where you’re taking them from, and then I think there was five rushed behinds last week as well which get caught up in the total. There’s also the entry and what you’re doing in that part of the game – we don’t feel like we’re doing that well enough. With all the inside 50s we’re getting, we can turn them into better quality entries with more of the chance to kick the goal. We’ll get there – one of the things you try not to do is turn it into a guerrilla when you’re talking about it too much. We’ve got faith we’ll come out of it.

Player availability

Zaine Cordy will be available and is likely to come into the team this afternoon.

Mitch Wallis could definitely be in the 22. He’s someone that had some impact here and there coming on (as the substitute), and he’s had some considerable game-time because we’ve had some in-game injuries the last two weeks. He’s mature, he’s experienced – he’s actually that ideal type of player. Wally will be in the mix again this week.

Start to season

We don’t need to reset – we’ve played some pretty good sides that we just haven’t been good enough against. You’d think off the back of last year we would be, but this is what happens in the changing complexion of the competition. I spoke about re-establishing yourself all over again at the start of the year, and at the moment we haven’t re-established ourselves as a team that’s going to be there at the end of the year yet.

Our challenge is to shave off these loose ends that are costing us in-game, but understanding we’ve got our own challenges – whether it’s personnel or the teams that we’re playing are a little more powerful than us at the moment, we’ve just got to keep chipping away at the things that are really working for us but just doing it for longer.

Opposition

North Melbourne have had some periods where you can see their best footy. They’ll probably talk about last year and the contrast in the two games we played them – they were very, very good. It was only the start of the game that cost them last year where we established a little bit of a margin, but as I always say history doesn’t have so much of an impact on the now.

I’ve got no doubts based on the way they steeled themselves against Sydney last week, we’re expecting the same North Melbourne team to come out with all their vigour. We need to be prepared for that.