Hi all,

Now’s as good a time as any to check in, after all, we have a big game on Sunday.

It’s a good feeling to coming off a win against one of the quality sides of the AFL.

Certainly, it has been a tough couple of weeks for our group, but we’ve worked hard to stick on task, stick together and remain tight around the clubrooms.

Walshy was obviously a big part of our club, but we know he would just have wanted us to go out and do our jobs.

Part of keeping things going at the club has simply being enjoying what we’re doing. We’re fortunate that we can come to work every day and do what we love.

We tried to keep things pretty normal for Collingwood, we trained hard at the club, played a tough game of footy and got a lot of confidence out of the result.

This week is about making sure we put in four quarters of footy again.

We know this season hasn’t run to plan in many ways, we haven’t performed the way we want to at times and our consistency has been an area of focus for us, but we also know that changing everything up or doing things differently isn’t the answer.

The answer is more in making sure we stay accountable to each other, that we review where we go wrong and go well in quarters, stay in the moment and see what we can improve.

We don’t want to get focussed on the outcome, it’s more about how we get there – when we do the right things, results will come.

So the Showdown. It’s a big game.

We’ve been supportive of the Crows boys over the last fortnight in a spirit of fellowship. We know what they’re going through and we’ve appreciated their support back.

But once we cross that white line on Sunday we’ll be going out there to do what we love and play our way when the ball goes up again.

We want to enjoy footy, and that means playing the game the way we want to, which is also the way Phil would want to see the game played – tough, honest and contested, and enjoyable to play and watch.

It will be a good game of footy and one that we’re ready for.

Showdowns are special games, we play in front of more than 50,000 fans and it’s an environment like no other. It’s hard to describe the feeling unless you’ve gone out there and felt it yourself, but I’m sure you can imagine the buzz we get (hopefully you get that feeling too).

I hope to see everyone who can get to the game with their Power scarves high and plenty of voice, it’s a huge game and we’re up for it, but it’s even better with our fans behind us.

Thanks for supporting us over the last few weeks, we appreciated it, and certainly it motivates us to keep on going and playing hard footy for this great club.

See you Sunday,

Boaky