Crows show fight but miss money

ADELAIDE'S players will take plenty out of the narrow loss to Geelong according to Neil Craig, but the coach couldn't help feeling a little short-changed after the match.

Craig said his Crows had talked about believing they could beat any team – including the highly-fancied Cats on their home patch – during the week and despite coming up short on Saturday he wasn't stepping away from that approach.

"I don't think it's an unrealistic belief, but as we all know talking about it is one thing. What do they say? 'Show me the money' and I can't show you any at the moment," Craig said after the two-point defeat.

"We showed plenty of fight, no doubt about that, [particularly] in comparison to our St Kilda performance where our first quarter was outstanding and then gave pretty much nothing for the rest of the day.

"It was great recognition for our group to show real tenacity to hang in the game and persist, particularly when things got out of our control for a period of time.

"We get a lot of things out of it, but we're setting ourselves to be the best in the competition and we're still not there obviously. We came here to win, absolutely, and with the way the premiership table is it could end up being a costly loss for us."

Adelaide failed the test provided by the top of the table Saints dismally just two weeks ago and appeared to take great strides forward in a short period of time in coming so close to upsetting Geelong.

Craig was unsure whether that was a fair comparison given the differing characteristics of the top two sides, but agreed there could be some parallels drawn between the two performances.

"In terms of our persistence to keep trying to do what we need to do there is certainly a big improvement there against a top side," he said.

"In terms of some of our ball movement? No. Against a top side it broke down badly particularly when the game is tight toward the end and you need that ball movement that we will get better at."

With four games remaining in the season and 11 wins on the board, Adelaide still has some work to do in securing a finals berth and faces some stern challenges in the form of fellow finals aspirants Collingwood, Hawthorn and Carlton.

"I'm sure a lot of our supporters would be saying that it is a really tough draw, but we wouldn't have it any other way," Craig said.

"We're not over the line by any stretch of the imagination and we've got a tough draw, but from a bigger picture point of view the more we can play against high level competition, the quicker we'll develop.

"The more you can expose your playing group to that [level of opposition], the better we'll be. In terms of where we want to go and how quickly we want to get there you can't buy these types of games."