We had too few players ahead of the ball. Carlton were determined to have at least one loose player there, which isn’t such a big advantage when it is 7 on 6, but today it was more like 6 on 4, or 5 on 3, a lot of the time.
So where were our spares? Up around the ball, or just 10m behind the ball I think. They were probably involved in the unnecessary handball chains before banging it long to Simpson or Docherty or Rowe…
… It just seems the mids slowly gave up territory, the HF’s got drawn into the midfield, and the mids lost all willingness to work forward and re-spread their numbers along the length of the ground.
Nothing changed at HT or 3QT, so the coaches did not correct these issues.
Don’t blame the umpires or individual players. The i50 count shows this was so much bigger than that.
I keep reminding myself that I expected it would take a long time to gel and we’re gonna lose games we expect to win at times. But yeah, we didn’t adapt well to the conditions during that game at all.
The positional errors looked all too familiar. I cant recall the last time letting a team have a spare at half back worked out well for us, let alone on a saturated day where running at the defence was almost impossible.
The last time we played Carlscum.
Worked fairly well.
Our 2017 game plan is actually designed in order for us to beat mid to low range teams that regularly drop an extra behind the ball.
Sunday’s weather notwithstanding the coaches instructions re manning up a spare are not to tag him, and hence let them dictate our set ups, but to drag the spare out of position and make them accountable by us taking up more dangerous options / positions forward of the ball.
This is what Hepp means when he says we weren’t smart enough - we didn’t use the width or diagonal ball or look for the extra high forward option. This means rolling a variety of players through there which we also failed to do.
There was also the matter of the play being a rolling maul all day.
Tough to get time to place that diagonal kick, especially when you’re trying not to overuse the ball!
No offence, seriously.
Just all this theory-saving is doing my head in.
Agree with this. You can bypass a spare down back with a dry ball and good skills, but it’s just about impossible when you’re just hacking the ball forward. A smart defender will intercept it every time. And when it’s wet and slippery like yesterday there’s little value in the diagonal kick anyway because it’s too wide, hard to be precise with skills, and a slippery ball hard to take possession.
The answer was simple - man up and be direct. We weren’t.
I’ll refer to to Scotty Lucas’s summary then, which I’ve just read on the club website.
And no offense but I’d rather read about suggestions for improvement than than the reflex wholesale bagging that’s about as relevant and helpful as a Collingwood crowd yelling 'Ball!" all day.
(Though I suppose it stops them burgling your house while they’re doing it.)
That gameplan that Hep was talking about wasn’t attainable in those conditions. If the coaches were telling them to use the width and kick diagonally it was a MAJOR tactical fail. All it ended up doing was getting our own players into a handball backwards mentality to find a player in space to execute that type of kick. Then we end up with a bar of soap that keeps going back 5-10 metres with every handball under pressure. You had players up the ground playing from behind because the message was to spread and move away from your direct opponent waiting for that diagonal kick.
In the end we handballed backwards and put ourselves under pressure, and when the handball continued to fail we then started producing hack kicks up the line to Carlton players who played in front. So frustrating to watch.
Just watched Heps interview on the club site. He didnt waffle about diagonals and spreading the field. He called it straight - “our inability to man up the 7th (their spare behind the ball) cost us”.
What also cost us was our inability/unwillingness to push up to pressure Carlton when they had the ball in their defensive half.
Carlton play like Hawthorn and prefer to take uncontested marks all the way down the field to set up scoring opportunities. We were really good at denying Hawthorn the time and space to do this two weeks ago but yesterday were quite content to trail Carlton players as they led up to the ball carrier and let them take easy marks and largely move the ball uncontested.
Had we closed down that space and applied as much defensive pressure to them as they did to us we may have got a different result as we would have got the ball back in our forward line and negated their spare man.