Sam Mitchell offered no excuses after Hawthorn's spluttering MCG loss to Melbourne, conceding his side had been beaten in the area it usually controls best.
"We got outworked," Mitchell said bluntly. "They've been playing some really good footy and I thought they played really well. We sort of pride ourselves on our work rate and we got a lesson today. They won ground balls by 18 or 20 and they just looked a little bit more hungry than we did today. You can't win many games at this level of footy if you're out-hunted by the opposition."
Mitchell, normally measured in his summaries, took the unusual step of branding the display an outlier for his group. "It's a challenge to be able to put your finger on it," he said. "I would say that it's an outlier performance for this group. It's been a long time since you would have to say that we have been genuinely outworked in a game. I thought, if you watched that game, it's very rare that I would have questioned that part of our group. They were a bit too good for us today. So we'll go back to the drawing board, we lick our wounds, we go again."
The Hawks coach pointed to the midfield battle as the area that quickly slipped from his side's grasp despite a promising start. "In the first quarter I think we won centre bounces plus five-zip or something like that and then we lose them by ten for the rest of the game," he said. "The adjustment and the smarts that takes from their midfield, they won a lot of stoppage, particularly when the ox was on."
Mitchell was generous in his appraisal of Max Gawn, who has rolled back the clock as Melbourne's spiritual anchor. "Max Gawn is, it'd be hard to argue he's not the player of this generation," Mitchell said. "There are other players you could easily say that about, Bontempelli or whoever as well. The adjustment and the smarts their midfield made was a big factor."
A recurring theme of the press conference was Hawthorn's inefficient forward 50 entries. "It's difficult because we actually won the inside 50 count, would you believe?" Mitchell pointed out. "Our potency going forward really struggled today. We weren't able to find scores going forward. We found great ways to not score from good entries and they were really potent going the other way. They had quite an isolated forward line and made the most of their chances at different stages and stripped the game away from us."
The Hawks have a five-day turnaround into a Thursday-night assignment, which Mitchell suggested he was almost grateful for. "Thank goodness for that," he said. "We can turn it around pretty quick." He also confirmed that key forward Jack Gunston's absence had a knock-on effect across the structure. "Of course someone like Jack will help us coming back, but you don't rely on one player. When Jack's not there, other players are playing roles that suit them, and we just weren't able to execute them as well today."
Mitchell pointed to an in-game scare around Ed Langdon but said the wingman would be fine after returning from a tight calf. "He came back on and once the game was over, he said can we just get him off, please," Mitchell explained. The Hawthorn coach insisted his group would respond on the short turnaround, even as the loss stretched questions about their place in a competitive top eight.
