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Saints look forward to Subi battle

By Mr Dandalooa

St Kilda is looking forward to its trip to Perth to take on an in-form West Coast at Subiaco Oval on Sunday.

Saints coach Ross Lyon reckons his club’s current slump in form is nothing to worry about and that his players are confident they can turn it around quickly, as it would appear the Eagles have done.

The Saints have lost three of their past four games, including their most recent against Essendon on last Sunday night.

But Lyon, who has had to endure the long-term injury loss of captain Nick Riewoldt, said there was a tendency for people to overlook the club’s deficiencies when they were winning and exaggerate them when they were losing.

“The challenge is to get to work and start banking four points again. The only way you can do that is getting back to improving your football and clearly we need to,” he said,

“It’s great that we can come together, under a bit of pressure, and hopefully work our way through it to get the win.”

Despite the loss to Essendon last weekend, Lyon said he left the match knowing that a number of key elements had improved in his side, although his boys didn’t get the 4 points.

“But there are a lot of things I ticked off with our game. Contested ball, a lot of forward entries with 26 scoring shots and our clearance work were all improvements in my mind,” he said.

“We had some significant holes with regards to some defensive aspects. I think Essendon got around 5 really easy goals, and we feel we know exactly why.

“Ideally we would have been able to fix these issues on the day (Sunday), but Essendon certainly put us under some great pressure and we didn’t take our opportunities.”

Lyon refused to blame his side’s recent run of poor form on Riewoldt’s absence, who was severely injured in round 3.

He did acknowledge the skipper’s value to the Saints, but said it is “self-evident we had opportunities. We had a lot of entries, we took 15 marks inside 50.”

“We had more shots, contested ball so ultimately we didn’t capitalise. Their big blokes - (Patrick) Ryder and (David) Hille kicked seven between them. They took six contested marks in the forward 50 so there is a little bit about defending that,” he said.