I think I understand what you are trying to say. However here is the truth that all of us EFC supporters have ignored for far too long. Ladder Position is the only thing that matters. Honestly… thats it.
Yes its nice that we are exciting to watch.
Yes its nice that we are a family friendly club.
Yes its nice we play the blockbusters
Yes its nice that our jumper is the best.
But the ONLY reason we exist to to win premierships… those are on the back of improving your ladder position.
I do get what you are saying but seriously… there was absolutely ZERO reason why we should have gone down the ladder this year.
And if I could just pre-empt a lot of posts by saying that I Know You think it’s stupid.
You’re going to post it anyway, but…look, you know, whatever.
It’s not that we lost.
It’s not ever about winning and losing, it’s whether we do everything we can to win.
And a little bit about the hackneyed ‘way we want to play.’
I was massively impressed with the Sydney game.
That’s the way I want Essendon to play.
And incidentally it won the game, but that really is an aside.
The way we played against Hawthorn is Not how I want us to play.
But I believe…fear…that it’s how Worsfold wants us to play.
That we have not learned anything from the loose man in defence, and I’m just talking about that…not moving Hooker forward, in two years…it makes me pretty friggin’ despondent.
As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter how much we ‘learn’ and ‘improve’, if we continue to allow that to happen, if we let our opponents zone off, if we leave our fifty empty, if we lead back rather than forward, if we don’t apply pressure around the stoppages, if we don’t harass the ball carrier, then we are going no ■■■■■■■ where.
And I do not accept that this is a player issue but, even if it is, then we either have ineffective communicators or the stupidest footballers in the history of ever.
Seeing as though this is the Woosha thread, here are some basic thoughts on our style of footy, or ‘gameplan’ if you prefer.
Last year, we played a style of footy that could tear teams apart, but was easily shut down. Essentially, if any of these four things happened, it was kryptonite for us:
The Opposition setup a strong zone, blocking our run through the middle.
The opposition’s best inside mid got off the chain.
If the opposition’s spare man was allowed to take intercept marks at will.
Our senior players disposal going to sh*t, resulting in easy turnover goals.
On the weekend, all four of those things happened at the one time, yet we still kicked 16 goals and only lost by 4 points to a well-coached side currently sitting 5th.
I don’t know if Essendon has improved, but Essington clearly has.
IMO what ■■■■■■ us up early on in the year was playing a gameplan too similar to 2017 which focused so heavily on Joe, Stewart and Raz being 100% and in good form, when basically none of them were fit or in good form, and taking way too long to recognise it and change.
I see Ivan above saying we ‘pretty clearly improved but it took a while to take shape’, I have to disagree with that, I see improvement from the way we were playing at the start of the year, but I still reckon our 2017 form was on the whole better… our tenacity and rebound has increased heaps from 2017, but I reckon thats borne mostly out of not having any forwards and needing to capitalise on what assets we have.
I reckon if we could fuse our 2017 and 2nd half of the 2018 season together, we’d have a premiership winning team, but thats a huge task for the coaches, and I reckon it will take a couple of seasons to perfect. One issue I see lingering with this club and the coaches is for whatever reason we are never able to get all areas of the ground firing at once. 2013 we had a good midfield IMO, good for the time and in tune with the way the game was played but forwardline was garbage, 2014 much the same. 2015 and 16 are write offs, now in 2017 the forwardline was probably the competitions best, but midfield was lacking, now our forwardline has been nuked, the midfield has been the best performed for a period of time and the defence has been pretty solid.
But thats been the story for a while now. I think the back half of 2018 will be instrumental for us going into next season. The coaches have to reinforce just how potent we can be when we apply pressure and rebound like crazy, but have to find a meaningful role for Daniher and create that small forward buzz again that we managed to in 2017. IF we can do that, I reckon look out, but until then its still much the same… Cant say on the whole we have improved, but in certain areas of the ground for sure we have.
Not a good day for any of us on Saturday.
Skill level was terrible, and too many players were way below their best
players I expected to perform based on the last 10 weeks played their poorest game for a while.
Most players were down on their normal stats.
Really disappointed in the effort of TBC, Hepps and Goddard, but hey had plenty of mates.
Rightly or wrongly the coaches box still have to take responsibility for what happens in a game. The most glaring issue that repeated itself all day was the lack of target up forward and the easy rebound from our forward entries. We should have made a move earlier to put Hooker forward.
the other big issue was our inability to rebound from 50 and stop them scoring.
Francis had a poor game, and if there was no confidence to move Hooker earlier, why didn’t they move francis forward to make straton accountable.
This is a coaching panel problem, that players get pigeon holed into only being a defender, or forward. It surely cant only be Hooker who can be moved forward or back. We needed to try something to change the momentum of the game and it didn’t happen til very late.
We all knew that the first 8 weeks of the year would come back to bite us in the ■■■. That had everything to do with our coaching and style of play. Seemed like we chose this game to revisit some of the rubbish from the start of the season.
Slow ball movement, lack of forward structure, really poor skill and execution.
So there is no real surprise that our season ended in round 20.
the only thing I hope is that we don’t waste the next 10months and we front with a team in round 1 next year that knows exactly how they are expected to play.
Seriously, is there a single club in the competition that hasn’t been burnt by a loose man in defence at some point this year? Every club sets up with a loose man at some point in every game.
If it was simple as just manning up the loose and every issue with the game plan would be solved, don’t you think we’d suddenly stop seeing loose men ever?
Struggling with the loose primarily isn’t a coaching problem. It’s a decision making problem from the players.
How did the way we played against Sydney differ from the game against Hawthorn?
I thought we played nearly the same game yet Hawthorn are better on the rebound and we played on a bigger windier ground.
We had to move the ball further to get inside 50, we for some reason relied on our skills and run to win and we refused to bring in additional talls.
It should have been us that pushed for the loose, we got out to a 3 goal led twice in the first half and both times gave it up within minutes. Goddard doesn’t have enough impact playing as the loose and coaches had the option to completely nullify any space in Hawthorne forward half to prevent 3 goals in two <10 minute periods. Biggest issues were at team selection and the decisions made when we had the lead.
A journo asked Woosha early in the year about improving skills on the training track and he said it wasn’t an issue. All year it’s cost us +4 goal swings.
We turned the ball over more often even when not under pressure, many players looked flat as a tack and couldn’t run out quarters. Our contested ball was way down. Id say we played much worse and still almost won.
So, wading through the usual fluff, your position is;
Woosha and co get the team back to playing competitive footy for 11 rounds playing some decent footy, finals are even back on the radar.
But underneath all that, Woosha really prefers the Neeld approach and instructs the other coaches and players to revert back to the losing formula against Hawthorn.
Don’t think so.