AFL - Terrible Ideas, Too Many Ideas, No Idea…

Yeah I have a Toyota and ignoring the 3 recalls it has been bullet proof. That said, my wife had a Camry before her current Sorento and the Camry was junk. My Yaris (which just gets me to the station and back) is a vastly better and more reliable car.

To be fair, that’s only 10 less than the average for a Sydney home game :wink:

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Won’t be on the above site - which is an Aussie Rules site and not a cheap P 0rn site.

So no replays available?

All footage of the abomination should be sent to the bottom of the Pacific, but instead:

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Well, all that proves is that Toyotas are really crap, and Toyotas are all excellent.

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I may be pessimistic but after watching us last Friday i’m a little worried about our season. You could tell that the gameplay this year will be run and take the game on. This is exciting but is it effective? I’m not sure how we will go against teams who shut down our run and turn the game into our contest (given our lack of inside mids). Last year we had an easy draw and great run with injuries and still got belted in the finals. I’m very worried for 2018.

The jlt series will be an indicator for how we will go, just like last year some alarm bells were ringing early on that proved to hold true for the whole season.
I actually remember seeing Richmond in the jlt last year too and thinking gee they look super organised but told myself it was only the jlt so didn’t matter.
For teams outside of the seasoned top 4 sides you really wanna see some positives for the team not just good performances of individual players.

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I was as annoyed with our poor conversion as anyone here but let’s not rush to put a line through our season on the back of 40 minutes of Gaelic football.

The structure of that game bore no resemblance at all to Australian rules football and there was no evidence at all on which you could assess how we will go at stopagges this year.

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LOL.
Stoppages in AFLX ?

All i got out of it is that hawthorn still get rub of the green from the umps

Agree but most are now coming to an understanding that AFLx is not about speed but rather precision… and it highlighted that we have some very bad kicks in the team. We turned the ball over a lot from poor kicking under little pressure.

Secondly our kicks on goal were really bad… which has been a long standing theme for the team… so it isn’t unrealistic to suggest this is a ‘real’ thing irrespective of the form of game being played.

Still full lid off for this fan but sometimes pre-season shows glimpses of real defects that get borne out over the course of the season, so I don’t think you can just dismiss it all.

I’ll be keen to see how next week goes with more ‘realistic’ set ups. Also I really really really wouldn’t mind if we spent a full week of allocated training just on goal kicking. A basketballer will literally spend hours on repetitive shooting… yet AFL seems to shy away from it?! No amount of defensive pressure, structures, run and carry, stoppages or anything else will matter if we can’t put it through the big sticks when it counts!

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I don’t think comparing to basketball is valid. Shooting in basketball has a far bigger significance to the outcome of the game than in AFL. Not saying it’s not important in AFL, but it’s more so in basketball.
Plus in AFL, plenty of other drills actually use kicking skills, so theoretically any kicking practice should also help your goal kicking.
That’s not the case with shooting in basketball

“Left out of both matches were Jackson Merrett, Mason Redman and Matt Dea.”

Who?

Maybe, but there are teams who shoot well for goal and individuals who can calm the nerves and shoot well and then there are others who will butcher it most of the time.

I think we lost games last year because of poor kicking and will continue to do so unless we address it. Hooker missed how many in the intra-club? Yeah, yeah its just pre-season but how many did he miss in proper games last year?

And there is more to basketball than shooting… in fact because most NBA players are basically ‘perfect’ shooting wise it is often the quality of looks, pattern plays etc that detemines the outcome. Although bad shooting will lead to bad basketball.

Here’s some of Richard Hinds comments which summaries MO. “If you wanted to kill AFL stone dead surely you would turn it into this …” “a bog standard low pressure training drill…” “A basketball guard dribbling up the floor without pressure is one thing. An AFL defender eating up half the field while attracting as much interest from the opposition as a sausage roll at a Vegan picnic is an abandonment of the games greatest fundamental” “They will have been reassured the AFL, despite its devoted media cannot dominate every inch of the disputed late summer months …,at least not with this soulless dross”

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We lost it in our kicking for goal more so than poor field kicking imo.

We should have put Hawthorne to the sword in the first 3 minutes when we had 6 shots to zip for a return of 2 misses, 3 behinds and 1 goal. We often hurried shots to get them off before crossing the 40 and spurned chances to run all the way in or use the guy over the top. If we put it on the score board early we would have won. It happened in the first 5 minutes of the second half against the saints too.

I feel silly taking about this though so I’m going to stop.

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I don’t like Hinds, but that is a really good article. The more articles bagging this ■■■■, the better

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According to Worsfold when he was interviewed during one of the games, we selected the team based on which players had the best conditioning at this stage of the year. This gives an indication of how seriously we were taking it.

Let’s see how the games against Richmond and Geelong go before we start trading the team out and doing a full rebuild. Given our opponents who are both well organised and good we will get a good idea about how we’re tracking (the only two viable options being 17 here we come or full rebuild).

It went well and the AFL are positive and it’s coming back. Just needs a tweak. That’s a relief.

AFLX here to stay with a tweak or two

Love it or loathe it, AFLX is here to stay, albeit with a few tweaks, after a largely positive response from coaches, players and administrators.

Traditionalists lamented the lack of stoppages and contests, and the emphasis on running and booting 10-point goals from over 40 metres.

But players and coaches were generally supportive of the fast-paced, seven-a-side, 20-minute a game concept, which drew almost 43,00 fans across the three tournaments.

A crowd of 9892 at Sydney’s Allianz Stadium on Saturday followed attendances of 22,585 at Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium on Friday and 10,253 at Adelaide’'s Coopers Stadium on Thursday.

“Overall we feel very positive with the whole AFLX tournaments,” AFLX project manager David Stevenson said.

“If you look through the crowd numbers that we got at each of the three, through the player feedback, through the club feedback, through the (TV) ratings, it very much exceeded our expectations, so we feel really good,”

Asked if AFLX was here to stay, Stevenson said "Yeah, certainly.

"We wouldn’t have put all this effort in if we thought it was just a one-year proposition.

"There’s definitely some things we’ll change and we’ll tweak along the way.

"We learnt some things that we’ll improve and we’ll get some feedback from the players.

“We’ll do a post-mortem next week and we’re going to go out and survey all the clubs and the players, and the fans and broadcasters, and work out what worked and what didn’t, and what we’ll change for next year.”

Questioned about potential changes for 2019, Stevenson said “There’s a couple of things on field. Trying to create some more high marks which will be great, some more contested football would be good, how can we use the corners more,”

One issue set to be reviewed is the fixtures and the short time between the last pool game and the grand final, with Hawthorn and Sydney having around a 10-minute break before their respective decider.

“The model we took was to fixture all the games out, so an alternative could be to have a more fluid fixture so you could try and engineer the live games a little bit earlier and give the teams a break,” Stevenson said.

He wasn’t overly concerned that most clubs named just a handful of established stars.

“We think the game was really strong even without all of those established stars,” he said.

“I felt we had a good mix, established stars, and we saw some new names that I think will give us some pretty good excitement as the year goes on.”

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