Carlton captain Chris Judd is hopeful others can step up to fill the void left by Marc Murphy after the key Blues midfielder injured his shoulder in Sunday's 69-point thrashing by Adelaide.
Murphy appeared to seriously injure his shoulder in a thunderous collision with Adelaide's Patrick Dangerfield midway through the second quarter, forcing the dynamic 24-year-old to be substituted from the game at half-time.
The Blues had not received the results of scans on Murphy's shoulder when Judd faced the music on Monday morning, although the skipper acknowledged the club may have to make do without his services for some time.
"I haven't seen him yet, so I don't know how bad the damage is," Judd said.
"But it didn't look good and that's a huge loss for us and another challenge.
"(But) what you see every year, really important players go down and it does open the door for other players to stand up.
Judd even went so far as to challenge his players to emulate their mortal enemy Collingwood.
"If you look at what's happened at Collingwood, (Dayne) Beams and (Steele) Sidebottom since Bally (Luke Ball) went down, that's been very important for their group.
"It gives the opportunity for somebody else to stand up and hopefully we have a player that takes that opportunity with both hands."
One of those players expected to step up is Bryce Gibbs, who only managed 12 possessions on Sunday, a long way adrift of his season average of 22.
Although Judd acknowledged several of his team-mates were lacking confidence after being absolutely belted by Adelaide for their second loss in six days, the captain felt Gibbs was not among them.
"I don't think Bryce has an issue with confidence," Judd said.
"He had a quiet game yesterday but certainly I think before that he'd been in good form, particularly down back at the start of the year, he was in red hot form.
"Generally people's memory in AFL is about two weeks, so we don't need to be sucked into thinking that the world's falling apart, we've got some things we need to work and some things we need to fix and we'll do that this week."
However, Judd warned the team that returning to form simply was not going to just happen, especially as teams will look to replicate what St Kilda and Adelaide have done so successfully in the past week and pressure the Blues, while also congesting the midfield.
"We didn't feel there was a great degree of synergy within the playing group and certainly didn't feel there was a hell of a lot of resilience," he said.
"Things like cohesion and resilience, you talk about them like they're permanent when really that has to be earned week in and week out.
"It's not a God-given right that if you've had it for X number of weeks, you have it for the next 16 or 20.
"It's something you've got to earn ... and we certainly didn't do that yesterday."