ON THE eve of the Good Friday SuperClash, Senior Coach Michael Voss acknowledged the special nature of the game and how proud he is to have the chance to contribute to the Good Friday Appeal as a club.

With each adult ticket sold donating $5 to the appeal, Voss hopes his side can put out a consistent, excitable brand of footy that brings a smile to the fans’ faces. 

Starting his week with a visit to the Royal Children’s Hospital, Voss admitted it puts the week - and football as a whole - into perspective when looking at Friday's game. 

Here’s what he had to say. 

On the Good Friday match: 

"The week started going to the hospital – that’s really important. It probably wraps a lot of perspective around football and the challenges people are facing, to know we’re able to make a difference.

"Our difference maker is to raise money for really important needs, whether that’s research or advanced technology – that’s our role to play but also, bring a little bit of joy as well: a smile on the face, even if it’s just for a moment.

"Behind all that and in the middle of it is that we need to play a style of footy that goes out and puts smiles on the faces of our people, and that’s what we want to be able to do." 

On Sam Walsh: 

“He won’t play this week. We’ve been steadfast in our position with him. He’s had some milestones he’s had to achieve. One of those was training fully yesterday, which he did.

“He’ll be available next week.”

On Matt Kennedy: 

"He won’t play. He fell a bit short, but he’ll be available next week.

"He wasn’t able to get the required work in yesterday so we just take a pretty low-risk approach to it and another person needs to stand up and get the job done. It’s been a real signature part of our team, that one man goes down, another comes in and we’ve been a pretty settled side but obviously he hasn’t come up."

On North Melbourne's start to the season: 

"They’ve started really positively. What’s really clear is the identity they want to play.

"They probably didn’t get it exactly how they wanted it last week but we expect them to be quite ferocious.

"They’ve got some strengths around the ball that we have to be mindful of and they have some threats up forward that we have to be mindful of as well." 

On coming up against Alastair Clarkson:

"We know what kind of coach he’s been over such a long period of time. He’s not missing anything.

"What our task is as coaches is to ensure that we put the necessary work in and we prepare for those ‘what ifs?’, but there's still an expectation on the way we want to play and what we want to bring to the contest.

"If that means we’re fighting it out the whole way, we’ll fight it out the whole way."

On goalkicking: 

"The sticks are the same width apart so not much changes. We just have to make sure we put them through the big ones more.

"We’re always looking for more opportunities to improve, there’s some fundamentals in the game that we need to get right. That part of the game went against us on the weekend: it’s pretty important that we don’t paint the whole performance with the same brush.

"There were parts we did really well and some improvement points we need to take away from it. Clearly from that game, we weren't able to finish our work so we hope that changes in the immediate term: there’s no reason it can’t, but it will be a continual work on for us." 

On Luke Davies-Uniacke: 

"He’s certainly the real centrepiece for them in there. They’ve had some real stoppage dominance over the last little period of time.

"It’s something we’ll look at — we tend to try and back in what we’ve got and go from there but his performances have been pretty impressive, he’s been pretty powerful from those parts of the game. It’s a definite watch for us."

On Mathew Buck's appointment as AFLW Senior Coach: 

"That's a great appointment: every really good club is trying to establish their systems and process and people. You get good people in, you want them to have that succession planning in mind and when they come through like 'Bucky' has, it's a real win for our program, but also a credit to him. 

"He stands up in a really important role for us and to be the Club we want to be, we want all our programs to be really successful and he'll get to lead that in the next little while.

"We want to provide resources and we want to be the best coaching group we can possibly be - talking about the 'group', there's AFL men's and AFL women's - we want to be the best and be the best player environment in the AFL."