Congratulations on a great season. Is it nice to win awards?
It’s always nice to get some recognition for what you do but you’re just a piece of the jigsaw puzzle if you like. You’re ably supported by staff and players and by people who work in the club but it’s always nice for you to get recognition.

It was a fairytale season in many ways… but tinged with some disappointment?
Yes, but we’ll definitely take the positives from it simply because we are stronger mentally from it. When we get ourselves in those situations in future seasons it will obviously put us in good stead.

One other thing is that it will give people a lot more motivation once we begin the pre-season for next year… it will give the guys real motivation. I think you could see that from Adelaide this year who really gained a lot of motivation from how they finished last year. They won the league quite easily but didn’t make the Grand Final which would have been most disappointing for them. They’ve drawn on it and we’ll definitely draw on it in the year coming up.

If you don’t finish first or second it’s a very hard ask to get yourselves to the Grand Final. You’re playing against two quality teams and with the salary cap it evens out the competition to a degree - not to say that people don’t buy and sell better than others - but if you don’t finish first or second and have to play away from home twice in front of packed stadiums… it’s a difficult ask and we’ll definitely be trying our best to make sure we get in the top two.

What do you say to the boys after a defeat like that (against Adelaide in the Preliminary Final)?
I think you’ve got to point out the positives and I think it’s imperative to get them to understand how close they were. They were very, very close and it’s a game of inches sometimes. It’s just the few things that you have to dot and cross, that you might not have done… you know you’ve just got to not leave anything to chance. We’ll definitely remind ourselves of the hurt when we get into certain areas. It’s definitely one where you will have regrets but for most of them they can still put that behind them and win the ultimate chance. For some, they may not get that chance again.

Back to coming on board as the boss, what did you see as the main thing that you needed to address?
I think it is something that you look at and you think well, ‘there are a number of things I think I can attack but what’s most important?’ And what was most important to me was that we’d conceded 16 goals in seven games. For me that was just suicide so we needed to come up with a system if you like, or a style of play where we could utilise the squad that we had to the best abilities that they had. We set about that and what you’ve got to try and do is win the players over as well so that they believe in what we are trying to do. Then, the first three games we won so what it did was have a lot of faith in the way we were trying to play and secondly, was that it got us in the mix and got us close to the top four quite quickly. And once we got a sniff things started to snowball.