SPEAKING on AFL 360, Senior Coach David Teague spoke of the importance of Carlton closing the gap between its best and worst form.

Teague joined Gerard Whateley and Mark Robinson on the back of the disappointing result against Adelaide, where Carlton went down by 16 points after a poor first half.

While taking some silver linings from the second-half showing, Teague said it was an unacceptable opening and something the Blues needed to fix to take the next step.

“Unfortunately the gap between our best and our worst is too big and it’s too often: not only the size of the gap but the frequency it occurs,” Teague said. 

“In the second half, the resilience — the way the players found a way to continue to fight. [But] we need it from the word go, we need it for the 100 minutes of the game and right now we’re not delivering it.” 

The result confirmed that the Blues would miss out on the top eight and a finals berth this year.

Teague believes his team is well on the way to finals appearance, but have to be able to get through whole games with the pressure turned up. 

“I think a lot of players are showing a lot of improvement, but when the pressure comes and the big moments come, we’re not there yet and that’s where we got to get to,” he said. 
“To play finals you need to be able to handle those and we’ve shown that that’s our biggest growth area is stepping up and not allowing teams to get on a run.”

One of the players who attempted to carry the Blues on his back in the second half was Patrick Cripps, with no better example than his sensational Goal of the Year nomination in the third quarter.

Teague noted it was no surprise that Cripps could pull off the spectacular.

“I probably missed the detail around the start of it but when he got going and got his momentum up, we knew he wanted to hit the scoreboard,” he said. 

“It doesn’t surprise me, we know who he is, we know what he does. He’ll do anything he can to help this football club and he found a way to get a goal when we needed it.”