Senior coach Luke Beveridge addressed the media on Thursday morning ahead of the Dogs’ Easter Sunday night clash with St Kilda.

Here are the key talking points.

On Marcus Bontempelli:

“If he gets through the session – which shouldn’t be any doubt – he’ll play.

“That’s been the plan for a little while; as you get a bit closer to the pointy end of returning, it’s a little bit more certain. I think we’ve telegraphed that a little bit over the last fortnight so that should hopefully happen.

“He should be named in the squad this afternoon and finalised (in the team) tomorrow.

“It’s important we don’t think about (how much we have missed him). When you think of the history of our performances, everyone knows how complicit he’s been in the great victories and how critical he’s been in our team over the last decade plus.

“If we think that we have to have him in the team to win games of footy, then we’re on the wrong track and not in the right frame of mind.

“Balancing his game-time and where he plays – remembering he’s been out of action for a little while now – it’s all really important...obviously it’s exciting having him back in the team and we really welcome that.”

On St Kilda:

“They’ve got some real strengths in their team with their run and their competitiveness in their contest. In the ebbs and sway of momentum in games, they stay in it.

“There’s a discipline – there always has been in Ross’ teams.

“I think, like us, they have some youth and some experience, and there’s some real promise there from some of their guys coming through. If they if they want to play a taller side, they've got some important players out at either end from a key positional perspective, so they need to do things a little differently. They haven’t got the aerial presence that they may have comparatively to other teams that they’ve played and maybe even us this week.”

On changing the team to match St Kilda:

“You always think about it, but we’ve never been a team that totally succumbs to what the needs might be – the horses for courses type approach.

“That’s not to say we haven’t made a decision here or there along those lines, but we’ve been relatively tall comparatively. If you think about our team compared to St Kilda, we’ve got some really tall guys like Tim, Sam and Rory.

“We’ll work through it, but our team won’t change too much.”