‘A new chance for a new story’: Longmire’s comeback kids ready for Carlton
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Sydney coach John Longmire is determined to write a new finals story in Melbourne this Friday night against a resurgent Carlton team.
Longmire has moved on from last year’s heavy grand final loss to Geelong and believes that his young side can put on a memorable performance at the MCG.
“We’re just trying to keep improving and that’s all we can do, keep improving. I mean, it [the grand final] was a story. This is a new chance for a new story,” he said.
“As I said before, 50 per cent of the teams that made it last year didn’t make it this year [to the finals]. It’s tough to do, we’ve done a couple of things right this year and hopefully we’ve got a couple more things to do right before the end of the year.”
Sydney have made finals 18 times in the last 21 seasons and are facing a Carlton team making their first post-season appearance in a decade. The Blues’ last finals appearance was a defeat to Sydney in the 2013 semi-final.
The MCG is expected to sell out for a Friday night lights fixture despite the forecast of rain. Sydney have a clear advantage over Carlton in their recent finals experience and Longmire believes that this will help his side.
Sydney players showed their respect for coach John Longmire after a narrow win in his 300th game as coach.Credit: Getty Images
“We’ve been fortunate to play finals and even though they’re young, they’ve played finals for the last couple of years, which is good. What that does is it prepares the players for the expectation of how hard it’s going to be and how tough it’s going to be.
“It goes up a level in finals. The execution of your game plan needs to be absolutely spot on because otherwise it gets torn apart. You need to prepare yourself and go again whether you’ve played finals here before or not. We need to make sure we’re ready to go and Friday night we need to be ready for that first bounce.”
Sydney are set to welcome back Tom Papley and Justin McInerney from injury to face a side that thrives on winning contested marks. The Swans will face a Carlton midfield, led by captain Patrick Cripps, that provides a strong supply line to superstar forward Charlie Curnow.
Sydney’s Tom McCartin will play a key role in nullifying Curnow, but Longmire insists that it will be a team effort to keep him quiet.
“Obviously he’s one of the one of the premier forwards in the competition, but it won’t be just about Tommy, we will have to put enormous pressure on up the ground as a first point of call and then secondly, we’ll make sure that it’s a team-orientated defence.
“We have all just got to work together to help each other in our back half, as obviously they’re a very talented forward line. We want to make sure that there’ll be a pressing game, try and restrict the amount of entries they’ve got. That’ll be the challenge.”
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