“I don’t have any excuses. It was a largely inept performance really when you look at it.”
“It was embarrassing - and not because of any perception that some people might have based on Melbourne finishing on the bottom of the ladder last year. It’s not that at all - it was the way we played that was the embarrassing part.”
“I thought Melbourne put their head over the footy more, they wanted the footy more, they ran harder, they had the courage to run and they spread quicker.”
“We weren't willing to be able to do those sorts of yards and they're up and going and running hard and left us in our wake.”
“Things we've been able to do against opposition sides, they clearly did to us. They were very impressive in the way they went about it.”
“We tried to do a lot of different things, but nothing was happening. They were still running in waves and we tried to get numbers at the contest and then tried getting numbers behind the ball. Nothing was really working. It was just one of those games where we just weren’t ‘on’.”
“There were moments we had to get back into the contest. But I heard ‘Rocket’ Eade say last week that his team were almost holding up the dam wall waiting for it to burst. That’s what it was like for us this week.”
Voss on whether there were any warning signs
“It's always an attitude thing but I certainly didn't see that performance coming, that's for sure.”
“We've got to make sure that we prepare exceptionally well, like every other side in the competition does.”
“It's a very grinding season, and if you're five per cent off you're going to get a bit of a touch up.”
“So this is a really good reality check for us to be able to ensure that we can come into every game thinking about the same things we want to put in place at the start of the game and not start ahead of ourselves.”
“So we had an issue and I’m not 100% sure what it is until I go back over the tapes again. But yes - reality bites.”
Voss on the team’s best players
“I can certainly name them because there weren’t many of them.”
“Simon Black was certainly one of our better players. He was enormous coming back from injury. I thought Matthew Leuenberger tried really hard and Joel Patfull was really brave with the way he went about it. Brent Staker didn’t get a lot of the ball but at least he battled pretty hard.”
“Outside of those guys - and I might be missing someone else - we had a lot of poor performers out there.”
