"It's a wonderful challenge for this group of players to try and see how they go in high-pressure footy with the big buzz of a big crowd. Because we haven't been a well-performed club for some time, we haven't been in a situation where we play in front of this size of crowd regularly."

"Our teams have been working with zones from kick-ins to try and stop the opposition from sweeping the ball down the ground on a regular basis. At different stages over the last 18 months we've played a lot of man-on-man football as well, sometimes that's been successful against some opposition and sometimes it hasn't."

"That's a great feature of Collingwood's play, with their kick-ins, sometimes they're man-on-man and sometimes they're in a zone, you're not really certain what you're going to be doing."

"We'll back ourselves into playing the four quarters out and we're a good running side. We've shown in the past that particularly our second half of the games are really strong; just our ability to keep running and keep pushing ourselves."

"Not necessarily, do we think, the game structure they've got is any different than we've (encountered) in the last 18 months. I don't know if we're going to spend a lot of time worrying about things that are uncontrollable, we'll look at the things that we can control."

"It may well be on their terms and we might come away with a good going-over and find out that we are not good enough in those circumstances. On the other side of the coin it could well be that we play our style of game and make them change theirs. I'm not going to concede Friday before a Saturday match that it's going to be played on their terms."

"I don't see it really being an advantage. Will it be a disadvantage for Hawthorn? I wouldn't have thought so. The maturity of the Hawthorn side would suggest to me that the crowd's not going to be any issue. It would be different if they were full of young kids."

"When you're three and three, you'd say patchy. I think we're better than three and three. We lost two games by a kick or less, or thereabouts anyway, and I reckon we had both sides covered and a couple of things just didn't go according to the script. When we've played patchy football, and we come into this game, this is probably a really good test for us."

"With the backs, forward and the mids, it's about the amount of pressure we can put on Hawthorn. I think that's the way we're going to try and beat them. We'll find out soon enough."

"Their forward line is going really well at the moment. One kicked eight one week and the next, the other one kicked a bag. They've got a few hot targets down there. I think it will always be a difficult game for our backs to control their forward line, but I think we've just got to stick to our game plan and our guns, and have a fair crack."

"I'd love the chance but we've also got Harry O'Brien and Shane Wakelin, who are probably in the best form of their careers. Any one of us could get the job, but I'm quite happy to just be a part of it and be part of the Collingwood team."