St Kilda leader Dylan Roberton believes the Saints have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes against Melbourne on Saturday night and apply them to this weekend’s trip to Western Australia.
Roberton, who was included in St Kilda’s leadership group for the first time this year, said the message from Alan Richardson in the aftermath of the 30-point loss was to pick themselves up and respond to their disappointing start to 2017.
“His main message was we started really well and finished poorly so we can either learn from that or we can feel sorry for ourselves and we lose from it,” Roberton told saints.com.au in the rooms on Saturday night.
“We’ll focus on next week and West Coast, it’s a really good opportunity to learn from what went wrong and fix it up next week.”
From a physical perspective, Roberton said the opening game of the season is always the most difficult as the body is shocked back into the intensity and physical demands of a game with premiership points on the line.
Monday Wash-Up: Round 1 v Melbourne
“We’ve obviously done a lot of work but everyone knows the first game’s the toughest one so it feels like you haven’t really done a pre-season,” he said.
“But Melbourne would have felt the exact same so there’s no excuses there. We’ve just got to learn from what we did wrong and move on to next week.”
Roberton said the Saints new-look defence, which contained Jake Carlisle and Nathan Brown for the first time, will take time to build synergy and will need to do so fast with West Coast containing reigning Coleman medallist Josh Kennedy and a plethora of weapons in attack.
“Like everyone we started really well and once we were under siege we probably went a bit into our shells and we were a bit quiet and stuff like that,” he said.
“It was our first game together so we’ll learn.”
