Well said about 2016. There’s players dropping like flies with mental illness issues and ~50% of this forum felt it necessary yesterday to absolutely slam a guy who’s been out of the AFL system for 2 years who’s worked tirelessly to provide back up support when required.
Bellchambers has put in so many ■■■■ weak performances in the decade he’s played and has almost walked away scott free from criticism. He’s twice the build of Clarke and has only recently started to hit parks with the required level of force.
He’d be lucky to make ~150k this season and he’s being critiqued like he’s supposed to be the next Polly Farmer.
As I said in the game day thread, the midfield have a lot to answer for. I played my entire career as a ruckman, and I can tell you with absolute certainty thatthe only thing you see going for the tap is the ball. You palm it down or thump it forward or take it out of the air, but just like going for a mark, you need to be oblivious to everything else going on around you for that fleeting moment in time. He won plenty of taps, and the majority of the time our onballers were behind their opponents allowing Sydney first access to the ball. Aliir was smart as well, picking and choosing when to contest. That meant that sometimes Clarke tapped straight to him because he was expecting him to contest and was looking to place it to our advantage. Aliir simply stopped and let Clarke tap it to him. All it would have taken was for his onballers to let him know whether Aliir was contesting or not at each bounce to enable him to hit out accordingly.
Zac Clarke is playing next week whether you like or not, let’s hope he took a mountain of confidence from that last quarter as that is what we need from him.
And the midfielders will have learnt abit from yesterday too.
An almost universal tactic with teams is to set up the defence/mids up-field to lock the ball in your forward half, creating more forward entries and therefore more chances at goal. To counter this, you need to win the emerging ball from your defenders (at best) or create a stoppage. As soon as your defence possess the ball, your mids/fwds move into spreading/receiving mode. If your defence just lobs the ball out of defence or sprints it out before there is time for this re-shaping to happen, it plays into the oppositions hands, and their back-men simply chop it off, for another fwd entry for them. The transition between defending and attacking requires x-amount of time, with that time as short as possible, but if it isn’t considered at all, it’s simply giving the ball back to the opposition.
As sh*t as he was, I think he is better suited to playing against a Goldstein. I wouldn’t want to put McKernan or Hooker against Goldstein. Surely Clarke can’t put in another below par effort next week.
100% agree, where was this mid field leadership let alone the coaching box feedback to change the strategy over the 4 quarters! Clarke is not awesome and deserves criticism but he is ours and the collective team let us and him down badly. Supporters and Clarke deserve better.
Why Clarke wasn’t smart enough to know Aliir was not contesting the Ruck and only playing the follow up. After the second time he did it he should have been belting the ball forward 20-30 metres and our mids ready for it.
Instead he tapped it down Heeneys throat or straight to space where Aliir just followed up and burst away.
Clarke is an average player, who we drafted as a back up, if injuries happened. Just like the situation we are in…
He hasn’t played any football over a month and was brought straight into the team, due to the situation. He gave it all in the ruck contests and won fair majority of it.
It is better than having Hooker or NLM in the ruck. Stop acting stupid and accept that he is our only option for the next 6 weeks and support him.
Right now he is the only specialist ruckman we have available.
He needs to take in some of Wooshas famous learnings during the week. But funnily enough, he might actually be better against a known recognised ruckman next week. Goldy has averaged just 3 clearances this year. Alir had 8
Midfielders, coaching and Clarke all failed. Sydney set up defensively every time and we tapped to the attaching side and our players couldn’t budge their midfielders. Even the way Sydney exited a clearance was constant. We had so many options to resolve this.
If Merrett or Sheil cant provide any sort of leadership then we are in more trouble than we think.
Of course, Clarke does have a brain so he could have made adjustments himself with the rest of the midfielders too. Sounds like everyone in the team couldn’t see what the rest could.
I reckon our on-field leadership has been pretty poor all year TBH.
Hurley and Hepp have been good, in their own ways. A few others have flashed in and out. That’s about it.
