Adelaide coach Neil Craig is adamant: his players are premiership contenders. The most talented list in his tenure at the Crows is a versatile squad with a desired blend of youth and experience.

“We are really happy with the way the list has been able to come together and develop,” Craig says.

“We are confident that we have got a list together now that we can finally have a real strong go at winning the premiership in the next few years.”

But, Craig says, there is a but … an inability to beat the league’s top four.

Craig hasn’t missed the finals in five complete seasons in charge at Adelaide but has won just three of nine finals, and never made a grand final.

Fourth, third, eighth, seventh, fifth – Adelaide’s ultimate ladder positions from 2005 on highlight the consistent competitiveness which has become a trademark of Craig’s Crows.

But the 54-year-old coach says that is no longer enough.

“This squad is now ready to push further,” he says.

“Our first challenge is to be able to challenge top four teams, that is our next step … we need to set our expectations high for us to take another step forward as a club.

“We need to be able to challenge those top four teams – challenge means not get close to them, we need to start to beat them so that we end up being a top four team.”

Last season, the Crows defeated a top four side just once – Collingwood, in the opening round.

But Craig’s contentment with his squad was evidenced by his club’s idle trading period.

While many clubs went berserk, Adelaide cut the least numbers of players of any club – five – and didn’t trade.

The delistees featured just one league regular, tagger Robert Shirley. The others were injury cursed 17-gamer Nick Gill and a trio who never played a premiership match.

Four draftees were added to a club which Craig says has a deliberately “demanding environment”.

“In terms of the way we train, the physical workloads, the attention to detail, the standards that we have – it’s not for everyone and that is fine because we don’t want an environment for everyone, that is not what we are about,” he says.

“So that is just us having to do things differently.”

Doing things differently includes Adelaide’s training regime: fast-paced match play scenarios considered the hardest in the competition.

The punishing practices have been blamed for a lengthy preseason injury list featuring the likes of Nathan van Berlo, Jason Porplyzia, Chris Knights, Brett Burton, Brad Symes and Ivan Maric.

But it’s an argument Craig discounts.

“I’m concerned about them, please don’t believe I am flippant about them at all, but there is an insinuation that we train too hard and we are causing them,” he said.

“Sometimes perception is not fact.”

Craig has spent much of preseason tinkering a game plan which late last season merged eye-catching attacking flair with miserly defence – Adelaide’s task is “doing it for longer and being able to do it under certain opposition defence”.

The Crows mentor also predicts pressure on the ball carrier would emerge as the populist theory this season – which sits fine with him, as Adelaide has been doing that for years.

“A lot of the clubs are talking about what you are doing when you haven’t got the ball, all of a sudden it’s going to be about pressuring the ball carrier … that trend will continue,” Craig says.

“The key to all that is how long you can keep doing it, how long players and clubs can sustain it.

“We think one of the competitive advantages that we have got is that we have been through the honeymoon period of it when it’s new and it’s fresh – we understand how important it is and it becomes just what we do.

“It’s very demanding but that is why we train like we do.”

© AAP 2012

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