For me it is horses for courses.
It comes down to what do you want to be your strength and what puts you in the best position to win the game.
Do you want to win the ball at the centre bounce clearance?
Do you want to trap the ball in your forward half and continually work off opposition errors?
Do you want to win by sling shoting of the half back line?
Do you want to kick to leading forwards on the move?
You can’t have all 4. We’ve been able to dominate centre clearance (which is something we have rarely done in the last decade) then we began dominating forward half possession and pressure (another thing we haven’t done for a decade). But that meant we pick our spots when sling shooting off the half back line and transition the ball quickly. But that’s not happening as often because we’re dominating field position. In order to sling shot of the half back line effectively, you have to allow the opposition to have the majority of their players in their half of the field. This way you take all their defensive energy and beat them on the rebound. This is what Carlton and Geelong did against us. But at the same time as doing that, you are giving the opponent the opportunity to score against your defence.
If you want open space to lead into, then we have to give up some of that forward press setup that we have and pretty much push it further back.
By doing that, the player kicking into the forward line has more players closer to him, so there’s more pressure on releasing the kick, but there’s more space to lead into it.
Also, if the opposition is set up for what you are doing, our field setup allows the opposition to win the ball back and sling shot back up the field.
When we are forward pressing, it means the opposition has crowded the backline meaning you are less likely to have clean kick to the advantage of our forward and it becomes more of a contested mark situation. Which isn’t the strength of 2MP, Langford, Stringer or Jones.
It comes down to what is the pattern of play we are trying to develop long term as our strength and what best suits the players we have at the moment.
We could fix our forward entries, but it means we’ll be in high scoring games more often than not. And we’ve been there and done that. That doesn’t get us where we want. But it does look great when it works (as we’ve experienced in the past).
I think we want to be a defensive first team, that traps the ball in our forward half and wins the centre bounce clearances. When one of those is taken away from us, then we try rebounding off our half back flank. But we’re struggling to strike the right balance. And we’ve been trying to re-balance every time we’ve made some personnel changes. One time was when Parish went out of the team, again when Ridley came back, again when we’ve reduced down to two small forwards on the field at the same time.
For me, I’d run out the rest of the year maximising forward half pressure. Rather than trying to continually re-balance things depending on the personnel available. That will keep us in games more often than not. And as long as the effort is there, it should also minimise the demoralising losses we experience towards the back end of seasons.
The defensive mindset is more likely to get us where we want to be than the attacking flair mindset.
. If it wasn’t for a silly reverse free kick in the 4th v Cripps we lose to 2nd bottom. We threw away a 5 goal lead and didn’t take chances up forward v Pies.