Four of the club's best players sustained injuries one after the other, after the team had already lost Jamie Elliott to injury before the game.

Ben Reid re-did a hamstring injury, Dayne Beams hurt his posterior cruciate ligament and Travis Cloke injured an ankle. All three will not play again this year.

Captain Scott Pendlebury was a late withdrawal in the final minutes of warm-up with a quadriceps injury. Elliott withdrew before that with hamstring tightness.

Emergency Tony Armstrong was forced to play his second full game for the day. He ran almost 30 kilometres in the two matches after being the late call-up to the team for Pendlebury’s injury.

“I have been in the caper 20 years now player and coach and I can’t remember a night like it,” Buckley said.

To add to all these problems, when Buckley went down to the rooms at half-time to show players footage of the first half - which is the normal procedure in a game - the computers didn’t work. There was no footage.

“There are things outside of our control and I have focused on things in our control. I think there are things that we can still do better, but you don’t anticipate to get dealt a hand that we got dealt this evening and to be honest it’s a snapshot of our whole season because too much has been left to too few too often due to not having available personnel,” Buckley said.

With the defeat coming after the loss to West Coast last week, the Magpies have slipped to 10th on percentage. But despite the loss of key players for the remaining two games against GWS and Hawthorn, Buckley said he was not willing to give up.

“When I say we're still not out of it, I mean it because we can still win our last two games,” he said. “We're not going to just crawl meekly into the corner and not compete. We've got a game against GWS next week and we'll play.”

Buckley said the injuries had forced greater responsibility on young players and they had been exposed by the burden.

“It’s exposed a lot of our players, some guys who have been great role players for a long time have been asked to be movers and shakers and that hasn’t come to fruition. A lot of young blokes have been asked to play very important roles in the side, they are not yet up to it, they are still going to get there and some of our most senior players our A-graders have had to turn themselves inside out just to keep everything together and it was a bit of a perfect storm this evening."

Neither Tim Broomhead – who booted three goals in the first half – nor Ben Kennedy were rotated on the bench in the second half.

Buckley said the injuries would not alter the philosophy for the remaining two games.

“If the young bloke is the fittest bloke to play that role, and ready to play to go, I mean Jarrod Witts looked spent tonight. He's had a long season. He's played number one ruck for a long time. Brodie Grundy looked OK but Stefan Martin just turned them inside out all over the field.”

Young ruck Corey Gault played well in the VFL where Jesse White also kicked four goals. Patrick Karnezis again played well and could come into the team while Paul Seedsman and Josh Thomas would be looked at again despite not having strong VFL games.