What Carlton Senior Coach Michael Voss had to say following a disappointing result in Thursday night's season opener at the SCG.

On a frustrating second half:

“Our intensity just dropped significantly. (Sydney) absolutely dialled up their pressure, around the ball, across the whole ground. We lost some pretty important territory in our stoppages, their centre square bounce was too good, their best players got going and had a significant influence on the game in the second half. And our intensity dropped... we (were) thinking the game's in pretty good shape, and (then) for the next 20-odd minutes, it was watching the ball go through the opposition's goals. And no matter what we did, we couldn't stop it.

“Whether we adjusted what we were trying to do, eventually, we were somewhat stuck in our back half. So, we had to go away from that and see whether we could get the scoreboard ticking back over again because we just lost some important territory around stoppage, and their best players really got going, and we just couldn't stop it.

“We're locked in in the way we wanted to play, and I think we saw that. You saw a first half where we played some really strong football, we were able to transfer some of the things from pre-season into that game. (I) really liked the way we were moving the football, making some good opportunities forward of centre. So, the game was looking really healthy for us, we were winning some really important battles that we'd assigned people to do.

“But the challenge for us  is the consistency of being able to do that, and when you stray from it, we've seen what happens. And our intensity absolutely did drop… When we lost our pressure around the ball, and we were losing our contest and we lost important metres from stoppage, they were just able to dominate field position and they were kicking them from everywhere. So, we're going to have to look back at that pretty closely.”

On not being defined by one game:

“There's a good body of work there. We're sitting at Opening Round, so you put that in context for the whole season. (We have) completely different personnel, we've got a new style of football that we're trying to play, we obviously clearly couldn't execute that for as long as we wanted to tonight, and that put us under an extreme amount of pressure. So, we'll go back and look at that and we'll see what we can learn from it. And then we'll make our adjustments, train hard, and then we'll turn up next week and we'll go again.

“There's been some really good positivity coming in this season and the pre-season games say so. We finished games off really strong through the pre-season games (and had) some of our best scoring quarters in the second half. So, at the moment, let's make it one game, but it's up to us to make a change. And obviously we weren't able to stop that momentum tonight.”

On positives takeaways:

“The first half we had some great footy, but (then) we just we really let ourselves down. That real contrast between showing what really defines us and then what doesn't. When you look at Harry Dean today, how he went down back, he had some amazing moments and some amazing moments of composure. And our first game with Jagga Smith going through midfield. He's learned a lot about his game that's going to ultimately make us better. We forget that he's played his first game because we've spoken about him a lot. So for him to be able to get that exposure against that midfield, he'll learn a lot from that. The jelling of the new pieces, we've got some work to do clearly to consistently get it to where we want, but we still should have a really strong visual of what it looks like.

“We've seen a lot of good stuff over the course of the pre-season that gives us great confidence that we can correct it quickly and get to work, but we don't step away, we've got work to do. (It's) hugely disappointing, I know the boys were looking forward to doing a heap better than that. We'll review it, pretty hard, we'll correct what we need to, and hopefully we get that better execution come next week."