The likelihood of Jeremy Cameron playing
"Once he was cleared of what were precautionary scans, it was just the contact issue he needed to recover from. The early prognosis is really positive but the next 48 hours is going to tell us a lot, but we certainly "haven’t ruled him out.
"I think it’s likely he’ll play but a bit can change between now and then."
"The message to our fans is if he plays it’s because we’re sure that he’s right to play. Not only right to play but right to perform really well. If he’s a bit off, I think as we’ve shown in previous years we’ll play the long game and get him right for next week."
Status updates on:
Mark O’Connor:
The likely scenario is we’ll get some match practice into him. We need to work through that a little bit, there are a few balls in the air but he’s part of that big group of players that are right for match practice.
Mark had a super pre-season, the unfortunate part of his injury is that it came right around the time we had some match practice against opposition, so I think we’d lean towards getting some match practice into him before we bring him in.
Sam Menegola:
He had surgery in November. The initial feedback that I got was that he might not be playing until late May so he’s obviously made a remarkable recovery but it’s impossible to prepare yourself in such a way that you can just come back in after no pre-season and play AFL from day one. We’ll just be bit patient with Sam.
Jed Bews: Jed will be available; he will play.
Mitch Duncan: Mitch will play this week.
Sam De Koning’s Development
He's in the first years of what we think will be a really long career so I think we'll look back on this one and think a week off didn't do too much harm.
In the broader context of the last couple of years, we've got a lot of players, as do other clubs, that were deprived of match practice through the covid years.
That's the disappointing part I guess, [Sam] had a really good pre-season, was deprived of match practice, and even proper training in our system through the Covid years got his chance, played well and now has to miss a week.
But the good news is he's recovered well to this point.
Preparing for the possibility Lance Franklin kicks 1000th
We've got a really good heads up already [from the AFL]. We know exactly what the situation will be depending on different circumstances whether it's close to a break or whether it's in the middle of the quarter, whether it's a live play goal or whether it's a set shot, our players understand what will happen if he kicks that fourth goal and we understand what our reaction's going to be.
We've dealt with a bit of uncertainty over the last couple of years and this is pretty minor in comparison to that. It's a good news story too, we don't want to be the ones complaining about a little bit of difficulty and spoiling the moment, he's just been a champion of our game.
Avoiding becoming too Buddy conscious
We’ll prioritize Lance, we owe him that respect but Issac Heeney and Luke Parker are super players, it's impossible for them to sneak up on us.
It's not impossible for them to play well against us, they're just really good players. But it won't be because they surprised us. I understand the logic that if you focus too much on a gun that others can bob up, it's kind of like what we're trying to do on the other end as well. They present multiple threats, the Swans, they become a good team with some really good young players coming in, high draft picks, they're a talented team, it's not just Bud.
