You'd have to think we'd be pretty used to travelling by now.

In the first seven rounds, we've been to Brisbane and Adelaide and now in round eight, we're back in Adelaide again.

Football Park is an interesting ground to play. When we kick a goal it just goes silent.

That's a good thing in a lot of ways because you can hear your teammates congratulating each other.

It's become a challenge for all the teams who play at Football Park to achieve as many moments of silence as possible.

Not everyone is successful. Both Adelaide and Port Adelaide are pretty good teams at the moment.

Port made the preliminary finals last year and were disappointed to miss out on the grand final.

They have a terrific mid-field. Against that, our mid-field is improving every week.

For the young blokes, it's a hard way to learn, but playing against Voss at Brisbane or Crawford last week is a good lesson.

You get the chance to watch these blokes close up, how they find the ball, how they get away from their man.

Shane Crawford's performance last week was, as Mark Thompson said, one of the best running performances ever seen in the AFL. He was still going at a million miles an hour at the end of the game.

That's the standard we need to reach. I think that a few of our young mid-fielders will be pretty good, given time to develop.

We've been pretty disappointed with our past two losses.

But it's not always the loss that's the problem, it's how you deal with it.

If you lose confidence or make hasty changes, you're likely to go backwards.

If you take the lessons from the loss and stick to the game plan, the hard practice, then you will come good.

I'd have to say our preparation for the season, and every game so far, has been good. We will continue to work that way and maybe end up silencing a bit more than Football Park crowd.