AHEAD of the Blues clash with the Demons, Senior Coach Michael Voss is looking to produce consistent performances and balance up the areas of focus. 

In the annual Carlton Respects game, Voss was strong on the importance of the initiative and why the Blues champion the cause.

Here's what he had to say.

On Carlton Respects: 

"With our Carlton Respects program being incredibly important for our football club and clearly the area that we’d love to - not just sitting here winning football

games - but make our community proud.

"Part of that is our Carlton Respects so we encourage our supporters to get to the ground really early, we’ll be honouring the 78 women who passed last year as a result of domestic violence.

"We’ll acknowledge that at the start of the game, so if you can get to your seats before that, that would be great.

"The bigger picture is to be able to have is education and awareness around what is a really important topic and growing.

We need to be able to continue to have a conversation around it and there are clear behaviours that need to change in our society to be able to get the ground we need."

On Cody Walker nominating Carlton and the father-son rule: 

"It’s exciting news. Now, we get to spend a bit of time with our Academy players - they come in and train with us - they were here last week doing a little bit of training with us.

"To have Lucas and Ben Camporeale come through, to have another Walker come through the doors is very exciting for the football club and when obviously that time comes and he’s ready to come in, it’ll be a great story for the football club. 

"The father-son rule should stay how it currently sits. There are some things we need to continue around the history of the game and the traditions of the game and that is one of them.

"I understand if there is a further conversation around what academies look like in general, but when it comes to the father and sons, I think that’s been a tradition that has stood the test of time and should continue to do so.

"Whether that evolves over time and what you end up paying for that will probably be a continued conversation, but where teams can get access to their father-sons and father-daughters should always be made available."

On the review of the Brisbane game: 

"We had a mixture of things. It’s probably acknowledging some of the gains that we made with some of the things, and how we started the game around some of the errors we made and take them away.

"Run into an umpire, that’s an unusual way to give up a goal, so you have to try to take those things off the table and look at what we can control and in the first half. We did look after most of those things, but as the game went through the third quarter, we fell away defensively.

"So our consistency to be able to get things done, that conversation hasn’t changed for us. It’s a continuous thing we’re trying to chase, not sometimes, but always. Against sides that are effectively the top two teams in the competition, they ask you to be good at all phases of your game and at the moment, we’re showing we’re not that, but it was nice to see a little bit of progress."

On Adam Cerra's tribunal fine: 

"It was slightly different. The communication is there, but it was an accident in the end, was it necessary to go to the tribunal? Probably not. It could’ve figured itself out. How to approach that moving forward, it’s the first one to go to the tribunal, but I think now after we’ve run the process, there’s maybe a better way. 

"We’ve still got to be really mindful that the umpires have a job to do as well and we have to respect that space. I don’t think it’s a free-for-all, we have to also acknowledge that there is genuine accidental contact.

"You can probably ask me about Ben Camporeale getting four weeks, the accidental contact, the nature of that, that motion could happen 100 times in a game, yet at the wrong time, two players come together and we find ourselves an accident like that.

"You have to find what those football actions look like and those non-football actions. He gets four weeks and Tom Lynch strikes and gets three, it doesn’t make sense to me. More work needs to be done, I don’t think we can leave that alone."

On containing Max Gawn: 

"He’s been an amazing player over a long period of time. He’s a fantastic player, a leader, he shifts the needle for them, so there’s going to be a fair bit of energy spent on him.

"'Pitto' will have his hands full, he’s played on him in the past, as has Tom [De Koning], so they’ll both have to tackle that at some stage.

"He’s an extremely important player to them and I think any strategy that has been done has been done against Max, so we’ll concentrate on how we need to execute and maybe limit his impact as much as we possibly can, but it’s very hard to stop - because he does put himself in really proactive positions - which makes it really hard to fully take him out of the game."

On Tom De Koning's contract: 

"We’ve put it to one side. We get asked every single week about it, but the only conversations we’re having are how do we proactively get the best of Tom and the best of Pitto when they play, and right now, that’s going in combination.

"That’s a conversation they’ve both had together and working with Kreuz, their ruck coach, around how we do that. That includes some time forward for both at different stages throughout the game.

"As you saw, Pitto kicked a couple of goals, Tom hit the scoreboard, so to get three goals from ruckmen, that’s pretty good, but we’re still looking at what is the best version of that looks like and how we can maximise it. 

"I think the most important thing is that what the player wants is to be able to continue to get on with it.

"The topic of conversation is for everyone else, but not for us. The way that we look at it is that any player who finds themselves in that situation, it’s about the role they play in the team and the energy they bring for the team and how they continue to make us better and that’s the only conversation we have between the four walls.

"That’s not changed from the start of the year, and that hasn’t changed towards the end of the year. In time, we’ll get what that decision is, we’re quite happy with where that is at this point in time, so when we're ready, we’ll be ready to deal with it."

On what the focus is for the Melbourne game: 

"'Saady' coming in adds a little bit of run out of our back half and a bit of ball use. Melbourne has been pretty consistent over the last period of time. I know they haven’t necessarily been getting a heap of wins in the last five or six weeks, but what they’ve been able to do has been pretty consistent.

"Obviously there’s a couple of areas they’ve gone after, they’ve changed their forward mix. Pickett has been extremely damaging forward of the ball, so he’ll need to get some attention as we spoke about with Gawn.

"There are a few things to consider there but for us, it’s being able to get that balance in our profile, not be too heavily weighted towards one and look at what that mix ultimately looks like."