Irish Echo Sport

We all got a bit of a shock at the Swans on Tuesday last when Micky O’Loughlin announced that he would be retiring at the end of the season.

We had just finished a meeting about the previous weekend’s game and were about to head out for training when Micky announced to the squad that this season would be his last, and to be perfectly honest it came as a big shock to all of us.

We all thought he would have at least one season left so it was a tough one.

He is a legend of a person and a player and everyone will miss him around the place. He really is just such a great character.

On the playing front, it’s been a bad few weeks for the club on the field.

I made my return as a regular player two weeks’ ago, but there has been some soul searching going on.

In the week before the Collingwood game there had been a lot of discussion about leadership within the club. The boys were all really fired up because we knew it was a must-win game.

We were on the bus on the way back from a reserves game in Canberra so we had to listen to the game on the bus. It was a tight game, and when we took the lead at the end of the last quarter I thought we’d win it. But Collingwood got up in the end to win by three goals. We were all pretty gutted.

The only consolation for me on a personal front was that I had done quite well in the reserves game. I was playing at full back but I was only on limited playing time as they wanted to ease me back into it.

We ended up losing by a big score, but we were heavily depleted and without eight of our Swans players.

Back at the club on Monday we sat down to talk about the weekend before and the week ahead.

There was a lot of talk about what is expected of us and the importance of keeping things positive around the club was made clear – we can’t let this losing streak get to us as that will only make things worse.

We had another meeting on the Tuesday morning and some footage was shown of how hard the boys were working.

It was made clear that some of it wasn’t good enough and that this might be why results aren’t going our way, but the coach is good in how he shows us positives at the end of these meetings to keep spirits up.

And it was after this meeting that Micky dropped his bombshell.

The following day I met with one of the reserve coaches to look at my tape form the weekend before and both of us were pretty pleased.

He told me just to keep going the way I am and I should get my chance – it’s all about form from here on in and hopefully I can get that right sooner rather than later.

We had a good solid session on the Thursday but we got the bad news thereafter that Jarred McVeigh – in my opinion our best midfielder – would miss the Adelaide game with a shoulder injury. That was a massive blow for the team.

But the boys played some great stuff in the first half without him, and they went in at half time ahead.

I’m not sure what exactly happened in the second half, but we started to make some stupid mistakes and ended up going down by a couple of goals.

I’m not sure where that leaves us as a team and it puts us under massive pressure to reach the top eight.

With the seniors losing we were all fired up for our game in Canberra, but without some of our top players we were overpowered by Eastlake, the best team in the league.

It was a disappointing result, but I was happy overall with my own display and hopefully I’m just one step closer to senior selection.

That could still be a long way away though and I can’t afford to take my foot off the pedal!