Definitely a case to suggest Carlisle, Roberton and Steven are far and above our most important players, along with missing our skipper plus McCartin (Hannebery is an unknown quantity at this point and can't exactly say we play better with him yet)Mitchell, Shield and JOM pretty much trumps Carlisle, Steven, Hannebery and the other campaigner.
Sure they suffered some serious outs in the midfield but we were really lacking key position players all day and they exposed that during the first 3 quarters (Scrimshaw and Sicily had field days). Don't think its fair to suggest we weren't as inhibited going into it as them
However expect that had Hawthorn not lost Stratton and Frawley (despite us being down a rotation as well) that they'd would have held us off at the end, since they were not as easily able to expose our lack of size late + ran out of legs.