CROWS coach Neil Craig says his side must show courage in persisting with the game plan that last week resulted in a 68-point loss to Geelong.

Adelaide’s plan to attack the Cats, rather than to play defensively, was unsuccessful, but Craig was confident the defeat would ‘challenge’ the Crows to get better and not mar future performances.

“We’ve got to be better than being scarred because if you want to stay in this competition, you’re going to get hurt a lot of times; individually, team-wise, on-field, off-field, all sorts of things,” Craig said on Friday.

“There are a lot of situations where you’ve got to face adversity, so that’s why it’s so important to become battle-hardened and not mentally scarred because of a down period.”

Craig revealed the players had identified several areas of Geelong’s play they were impressed with, including ferocity, ball movement and a super-fast start, which the Crows would attempt to implement in their own game this week and beyond.

“The players said; ‘hey, we’ve been talking about ball movement but that [Geelong’s display] was [great] ball movement’, and that’s been a positive aspect, if you like, of a bad loss,” he said.

“I think the other thing to come out of the game was a realisation that we don’t just walk away from the result and think; ‘well that was just an exceptional opposition’.

“The first goal Geelong scored was from a ball over the back and then there was no one on the line for Burton’s kick and that’s got nothing to do with Geelong; that’s us being poor.

“When you put a side that is in exceptional form against a side that isn’t doing the little things correctly, that’s [a 68-point margin] the kind of result you get.

“We’ve got to make sure that we just don’t walk away from it, we’ve got to be better than that.”