Cagey Crows coach hints at Magpie mind games
Steve Larkin |
Cagey Adelaide coach Matthew Nicks suggests he’s playing mind games with Collingwood as the Crows prepare to leap into a great unknown in their qualifying final.
Nicks has confirmed Max Michalanney will return, along with Luke Pedlar, in Thursday night’s opening AFL finals fixture.
Michalanney has missed the past four games and Pedlar has been sidelined for the past two, both because of hamstring injuries.
Michalanney is renowned as Adelaide’s premier shutdown defender but has been training with the forwards in the lead-up to the Adelaide Oval encounter.
“We might have done that deliberately to take you guys off track, I guess you’ll find that out tomorrow night,” Nicks told reporters on Wednesday.
“But we know Max can play multiple roles.
“It’s one of the things we looked at this year, becoming a more flexible team, players becoming more flexible individually to play different roles that we might need at different times.
“So if he’s needed to go forward of the ball at any stage, we’re confident he can do a great job.
“And we understand what he’s done there for a longer period of time behind the ball.”
Nicks’ Crows finished top of the ladder to secure the club’s first finals appearance since losing the 2017 premiership decider.
Only seven Crows have finals experience ahead of a clash against finals-hardened Collingwood, who won the flag two years ago.
Nicks conceded that how his players would cope with the occasion was unknown.
“We understand emotion amps up, pressure amps up, in finals footy – that’s what we’ve got to be able to deal with,” he said.
“And we have been working to deal with that all year.
“We have played a number of huge games across the year … our stadium packs out, so it won’t be necessarily a new environment, although there’ll be a lot more Collingwood supporters than were there the last game.
“That’s the challenging part: we don’t know, because we don’t have experience on that stage yet, at least not to the level of our opponents.
“But this is what we’ve done all our preparation for, is to be in this moment.”
Adelaide pipped Collingwood by three points on August 16 to break an 11-game winless streak against the Pies dating back to 2016.
That clash had a bitter fallout, with star Crow Izak Rankine banned for four games for directing a homophobic slur at a Collingwood player.
Rankine returned to Australia on Tuesday night and addressed his teammates before training on Wednesday.
“We’re focused on the footy, and have been as a group for the last week and a half,” Nicks said.
“We’re in a unique position, so is our opponent, that we played each other recently.
“There’s a lot of respect there for the way that last game played out.”
In the recent clash, the Crows prevailed despite losing the inside-50 count 37-71.
“They definitely dominated … we’re probably losing nine out of 10 of those games when you look at it statistically,” Nicks said.
“But fortunately, you don’t actually get the result on just those stats, it’s about goals and points.
“The reality is, we’ve got to be better than we were last time.
“The inside-50 count that we had last time, we know that’s not going to hold up.”
AAP
