Essendon Players' Workrate

Hate this argument. You wonder why we are where we are. Have never been a team built around fitness and work rate.

If we work harder, in all likelihood we play better even though we won.

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So you’d be happier with the win if the boys put an extra 8kms on the board? It’s a silly thing to focus on.

edit* it’s not an argument, it’s a fact.

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well yes I would. It would show that they are working harder to provide an option to kick to or working harder to get back and help the defence.

Fair argument from you if we were on top of the ladder and cruising, but we are so far from that

The numbers may have been affected by Fantasia spending some time off the ground getting patched up and Bellchambers missing a quarter

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We’ll never be a top team unless we improve our decade old average skills & decision making.
Improve that and our “workrate” would probably improve as we wouldn’t get as worn out working defensively on yet another turnover.

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If you are applying good full ground pressure, then you herd the opposition wide and make them run more.

If you control the footy then you are going make the opposition chase you.

So if you play well you should run less and expend less energy.

Our issue this year in my view has been our forward line.

We work our ■■■■ off to get it in but without a Joe or a Hooker to draw a couple of defenders, split packs, make room for the smalls the ball keeps coming back out.

Considering how easily the ball has come back out of our forward line, and the natural physical and morale sapping effect this has on the blokes who have worked so hard to get the ball in there - I think the work rate of Saad, Hurley etc has been tremendous to my naked eye.

They keep going and going.

Its not a work rate issue in my view. Not from the guys further up the ground anyway.

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I dont think we’ve run further than our opponents in any game this year so not gonna blame 1 injury

Agree with Lance.

You do need work rate but can limit your relative running demand with an effective zone. It’s frustrating to supporters when we set up a zone and hold it: cue the “man up FFS” or “why isn’t he on a man” calls from the bleachers, but for the back 2/3 of the ground this is deliberate. GWS did some great kicking to great leads to poke holes in the zone but they also did a lot of dummy leads to try stretch the zone and manufacture spaces. We weren’t necessarily winning the game or getting the ball back much, but I actually pointed out to my son how they were working hard to break down our zone and we were holding ok.

Couple of times you could see the zone badly set up - our guys too close leaving space beyond that cluster.

In the long run, us at times trusting the zone and making them work to try get through it and not heeding “man up FFS” calls from the bleacher might have been a tiny factor in their inability to stop our charge.

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Yep. Headless Chooks running about in panicked circles will often if not always clock up more metres.

As a for instance, … if we had our skills up a level, & hit more targets going in 50, … we would have run even less, … but won by a shitload more.

Silly, pointless stat. Needs to put into the Cannon and fired into the Sun.

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Since you like these kind of stats, check out ‘repeat sprints’.

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In all likelihood it’s their mids being more willing to drop back and help out their defence considering they are 3rd and we are 9th but hey I guess Essendon can do no wrong to some Blitzers even though we havn’t won a final in 15 years

Once studied properly by the coaches (different camera angles etc.) to see where we are getting outworked it’s definitely something to address.

Yes we won but if we aren’t getting back hard enough to help our defence out then we will continue to concede shots at goal 49% of the time when the opposition enters their 50 (A percetage this high is not sustainable if we want to win games of footy)

I get a stat for that every time i need a new beer from the fridge.

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Not a great story for us.

Interesting reading

  • Total Distance: Swans 1st > Ess 17th
  • Total Dist (high speed): Tigers 1st > Ess 18th
  • Total sprints: Tigers 1st > Ess 9th

Of note, ladder leader Cats are 10th, 15th and 12th in all those categories.

Efficient Footy is Good Footy.

I want us to produce the same sort of work rate that the roos dished up to the pies last week. The intensity they were attacking the pies was ferocious at times. I’m not sure if this is the type of work rate that is being referred to in here or not or what the stats were for that game but if we played like that we could be anything.

We could even be norf.

Anything but that.

Lots of posts about running, but have any of you stopped for a moment and considered that running doesn’t win games. Efficiency of movement is what wins games. Good delivery by foot and hand is far more important. There was a scene in the movie “Goal”, where the manager asks the player to run as fast as he can to the goals, then kicks the ball past him and into the goals. He does that 2 or 3 times to emphasise a point, that being that the ball moves faster than the player and it doesn’t matter how fast the player is, if the ball and the player have the same starting point, the ball will always get there quicker.

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