Atkins hits books to prepare for Hawks

GEELONG captain Tom Atkins says his side will not gloss over Saturday’s emphatic loss to Casey Demons, despite being keen to move on as quickly as possible.

Atkins said the Demons outnumbered his teammates to the contest and were cleaner with the footy, leaving the Cats with some questions before a knockout semifinal against Box Hill on Sunday.

Despite a horrible day, he said his side would thoroughly review what went wrong.

“We certainly don’t want to get our heads down or dwell on it too much, but it was a good wake-up call for us,” he said.

“There are a lot of points that can be taken from the game on how we want to play next week.

“They just caught us off guard a bit in the first quarter and we certainly didn’t play the way we wanted to and they played to the best of their ability.

“Their tackling pressure was very good. We knew going in that they like to outnumber at the ball and tackle pretty well, but I certainly think they took it to another level on the weekend and we weren’t able to withstand the pressure how we would have liked.”

While Jordan Keras’s injuryenforced omission the past two weeks has left the Cats thinner in the midfield department, Atkins said his side would make no excuse for being beaten around the footy.

“We should be able to win games without certain players,” he said.

“We just need to back the system rather than the personnel we’ve got because we know it’s an ever-changing thing, the people we’re going to have on the field.

“We’d like to think if anyone was to go out, we should still be able to put up a pretty good performance and we certainly didn’t do that on the weekend.”