The 6-7 that we had out of our best 22 are not as good as the 7 that could be selected from the GWS’s 10 or so they had unavailable.
Which really just goes to show how good their depth is.
IMO best 22 vs best 22 they are clearly ahead. And that’s no surprise as most of their list are high draft picks. Or older stars.
Their list build is also far more advanced given the leg up they’ve had and made worse for us by fact we’ve been slapped with draft penalties and lost key quality players
we were missing 7 of our best 22??? 
Ambrose. Kelly. Parish. LAV. Brown… and some would argue Langford (Myers) & Leuey (TBC).
Although not based on TBC’s weekend game.
Let’s be realistic, of those names you’ve mentioned only Kelly, Parish and Ambrose are walk up starts to our best 22. I’m a fan boy of Langford but on exposed form this year he’s not a definitively better option than any of the contemporaries in his position, evidenced by him being fit and playing reserves. Leuey and TBell are very much a coin toss, again as evidenced by Leuey being fit and playing reserves.
And Laverde has potential but you couldn’t say he’s definitively making the side better, much like Langford.
We’ve got a very large middle tier… half of them aren’t getting any better and the other half will hopefully be the guys to take us forward.
Boom
I think I am being realistic. On the players who are debatable.
LAV would have started rd1 as our 6th fwd without a doubt IMO. That’s where he’d trained all preseason and he fits as that pseudo 3rd tall/mid.
Myers form has been ordinary, returning players getting a bit more leeway at present but Langford SHOULD replace him this week. That said you are correct in that Langford is available to play as opposed to being out injured.
Kelly > Stanton
Parish > Howlett
Ambrose > Hartley
Brown > Gleeson (3rd tall def req’d for GWS)
LAV > Stewart
Langford > Myers
Leuey = TBC
I bring it back to the “definitive” part. Only 3 of those guys are definitively better options IMO. Kelly, Parish and Ambrose. I would love to say Langford is, but I think we agree on that point and yes, hopefully this is the week he is officially locked in for good. Brown/Gleeson/Dea all fighting for the same spot and I’m not sure any are ahead of the other, I don’t necessarily think we do need a 3rd tall and would probably be inclined to play one of Gleeson or Dea over Brown.
At best I reckon 4 best 22 missing IMO. Fast forward 12mths and I’d hope Lav, Lang and Gleeson have all well and truly cemented themselves as best 22.
Patton. Cameron. Lobb.
Ambrose. Hurley. Brown.
Absolutely would have needed a 3rd tall
Neither Dea or Gleeson are going to cut it on Cameron or Lobb.
Langford and Looney weren’t missing, we chose not to pick them which probably suggests they aren’t walk up best-22.
Buntine’s played 41 games in 5.5 years
If he’s an “out” worth worrying about then so is Jackson Merrett
As fringe as it gets
Haynes is normally their 3rd tall back, they’ve still got 4-5 tall backs fit, hardly a crucial loss - we’re currently playing Dea/Gleeson as third tall
They had 6 actual clear cut firsts players out
We had 3
Lay off the cones
Also I don’t reckon Stewart would even be getting a game with them atm if he had decided to stay an extra year (even with all their outs)
Yet he currently plays in the 1sts with us; their list is a lot stronger then ours, no question & they had more walk up starts out than us too.
He would be at the moment IMO, with Lobb out injured
Not convinced about that. In 2016 Lobb played 24, Patton 23 & Cameron 20, with Stewart only playing 1. Looks to me they went with 3 talls in 21 out of 24 games & if one of the big three were out, they only played 2 talls.
They have used Tomlinson forward too at times, and the Himmelburg kid played a few games too
I have Stewart ahead of both
Only my opinion, may well be wrong.
Looking at game day tactical coaching, there has been a change this year.
In 2016 Wooshas right hand man on game day was Neeld, Head of Player development. This year its Rob Harding, Opposition strategy coach.
This is probably a better choice when you are actually trying to win games rather than trying to train young players.
In spite of this change Woosha still adheres to maintaining shape and structure and at best uses “accountability” rather than “run with”/tagging. This is in spite of several teams tagging key players and seemingly winning games on the back of it, ( eg. Sloan) while we seem to have tried and abandoned even the accountability strategy, which worked with Trav on Gaff and BJ on several players up to Round 8.
Even when the opposition disturbs its own structure by tagging Zac Merret, we dont respond by tagging the oppositions ball magnet/ damaging player.
I cannot say for sure we would benefit by tagging, but it looks like Woosha is idealogially opposed to it and has not selected a player to specialise in it, thus its not a tool he has available even when an opposition player is really really hurting us at crucial times in games.
I actually reckon the tagging thing is a bit of a misnomer and most coaches are ideologically opposed to it in it’s purest form. Tagging these days basically constitutes sitting one player on the designated opponent at stoppages and trying to ensure they don’t win clean possession. Nobody is sending out a player to spend two ours chasing one guy around the field, it compromises defensive zones or forward press too much to have one guy out of position. I reckon most sides are doing similar to what we are doing with varied levels of “accountability”. We could 100% apply a greater focus to some players, Kelly is probably not a good example though as his hard running capability means he’s always a chance to get it on the outside if he can’t win it in tight, perhaps Ward is the guy you might sit on for GWS? That said it is interesting how we had success against Gaff, who’s more outside than my dog after a swim in the bay, with Colyer running with him at stoppages. Probably points to our ability to cut off the supply as much as Colyer sitting on him on the outside of the stoppage. The Sloane one is the perfect example of teams sitting on the guy on the inside and preventing him from winning it out. I think you’d probably see a reduction in the Crouch boys numbers in those games when Sloane was tagged also, as he is their source of the footy (although I’ve not looked at the numbers, this is purely a hunch). Thus one of the big criticisms of Adelaide being their lack of inside midfield grunt.
Looking ahead to Port and you’re straight away drawn to Wines or Boak as the inside guys you’d need to stop. Perhaps Hep and BJ will be given that more accountable role in our stoppage structure to that end this week.
Considering Kelly has basically been unstoppable this year despite a tag, I am not sure what us trying to tag him would have achieved? He has destroyed tags this year.
Well the Woosha philosophy might be that every player needs to be accountable, rather than just one “pure tagger” and therefore a pure tagger is never needed.
We probably lost the game against Fremantle due to Bradley Hill and probably Trav is the only player in our side that could limit Hill. This lesson was learned and the following week Trav limited Gaff which would seem to have helped us to win.
This is different to the scenario you paint of Wines/Boak being inside players.
Clearly Harding needs to identify the player we most need to shut down and someone with the right attributes eg. BJ on the inside or Trav on the outside is given the role.
As Trav and BJ have shown, its also possible to win the ball while reducing an opposition players ability to “win games” for his side.
Hearing ya. Definitely different scenarios re: Boak/Wines and Hill/Gaff. Trying to elude to the old “many ways to skin a cat” chestnut.
I’d hypothesise that the Hill example adds further weight to my point about stopping the supply, which upon reflection I think had as much influence on Gaff’s output as Colyer’s run with role at the stoppages. It wasn’t just Hill that smashed us in Perth. From memory we got belted in clearances after halftime with Hill the main benefactor of that. If we’d have been able to stop the supply then perhaps his influence would’ve been significantly reduced. He was also aided by us completely running out of puff after half time, apparently the GPS numbers were way down even in the 2nd quarter of that game, such was the lack of run in the legs. I suppose as is often the case the truth lies somewhere between the two.
What is apparent is that at times our mids across the board have a tendency to be too focused on winning the ball and lack that accountability the other way. When we take a more even balance into games the results speak for themselves - see Geelong and West Coast.
Chop Suey, do you recall who played on Hill ? iirc it was mainly Darcy, we all know he tends to run off his man a lot when playing on the outside , but maybe thats the role Darce was given that day.