Hawthorn Senior Coach Sam Mitchell speaks to the Media

um I mean I think as the head coach sometimes you get a lot of um credit pointed in your direction and it's not it's not accurate any any head coach will tell you it's there's a huge amount of work that goes in from a huge amount of people so um I look at all of the work that our head coach as a head coach all of the work that our other coaches have done you know if I think about someone like Kade Simpson and what he's done to you know really get career best type of Seasons out of three or four of his Defenders um you know I think I look at that and I think about the the growth that he's been able to create with his backline group I think about David hail and the consistency of the Midfield um you know I think about Adrian hikm and how a really sort of new forward line like I think five of our forwards weren't at the club last year so um when you look at how those people have built their individual areas you say okay there's a lot of growth coming from all the individuals and they they're just the coaches there's also you know our injury list is obviously reasonably healthy at the moment the boys are running out the game so there's a fitness element as well so there's an enormous amount of people that get us to a point where we have the opportunity to exceed expectations and um we're not we're not finished just yet we still got some work to do and um you know starts this week no I mean he's been sat on pretty tightly the last two weeks he um you know he's had carried a heavy workload for us for the majority of the season but um we're not we're not looking at um resting players or or in we're definitely far from that state of mind this is a final for us we lose um we lose this game our season's as good as over so um we have to put our best footb forward to make sure we play our best footy and Will's been enormously consistent for us and he was a bit more selfless on the weekend and um I think the good thing about the way we're playing at the minute particularly the Midfield um is it's quite even don't really leave a lie on any individual player and um they're all able to step up and and perform on their day uh and the the bad games of of that group are still pretty strong performances and that's what we've been working towards now for a fair while and um pleasing that we're able to have a level of consistency across the group that that gives us a chance to be in winnable positions in games and and recently win win a lot I mean we've we've been there we've been exactly where Richmond are not too long ago and uh we know that they'll go into this game believing that their best is going to really challenge us and and can get them a win so um we know that there's some processes about how we go about things that are going to matter more than than the outcomes and if we can play our best footy we feel like that is what we've tried to stick to for the majority of the year and that's given us a level of consistency which is which has been you know much better than the years gone by um and so now the challenge is in a game that most people would expect us to win can we continue to perform the things that have got us to this point and if we can't then we don't deserve to be there anyway oh I mean I think mathematically it's always been in our own hands the and what we've known for quite a period of time is we didn't have a lot of room for error um we obviously lost the game a couple weeks ago against gws and we know that every game from from that point on becomes becomes a final basically every game for us now is an elimination final and I think there's been some talk about that about last week but this week's no different if we can't perform well this week then our season will be over again so the challenge for us is is not too hard to work out

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