Yes and its not that I think they should necessarily be aggressive, but a bit of emotion after a good win or a bad loss goes a long way to letting people know exactly how you feel.
This is absolutely, in my view, the discussion we need to have as an organisation and group of people who care about the same thing - Essendon getting good again.
I was beginning to work on a new thread opening but its such big topic I started to get lost in the complexity of the matter and my own words.
Saladin has articulated it well and assuming he doesn’t mind, I might open up a new thread with his description above.
I am very interested in this topic and what we think as Essendon people.
Maybe woosha needs to contact “Leading Teams” and organise a truth session?
Or, just maybe, he and the rest of the staff could do their highly paid jobs?
The players are not without blame, obviously. But when you have a group as mentally soft as ours then those administering the group had damn well better do something about it.
We only get to see the game day coaching, and this season is a massive fail. Massive.
Few, if any of us, know what the coaches are like during the week, but surely it’s their job to motivate, develop and prepare the playing list to be at their best consistently.
We only get to see the results of the midweek coaching on game day and so far it’s a zero out of ten.
Our game plan is basically the Knights era run and gun except with better cattle. So no development there. Maybe Worsfold just found an old notebook that knights forgot to put in the box with his photos and pot plant on the way out.
We have no idea how to play “tempo footy” and with one of the oldest lists in the league you can’t use youth as a factor.
Our skills are appalling more often than not and they aren’t getting better. We do nothing, nothing, to help out teammates being tagged or double teamed.
Our lack of opposition analysis means we let Sydney shuffle the ball blindly to the back of the pack every damn time knowing they will have two loose players set up there every. Damn. Time. We allowed that for a whole match and it lost us the game. Watch two Sydney games on the ■■■■■■■ television and you’ll see it, yet our coaches didn’t.
There is no plan B. That would require coaching effort and I a seeing absolutely no evidence of that.
We are being let down by the whole club, but the coaches are absolutely worthless at the moment.
Fix it or resign.
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Spot f ucking on!!!
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I wish he would stop with this shaking the hands of the umps before every game its not helping us
What you are dealing with though can be a catch 22. It is precarious to handle.
Just go and get mentally strong.
Just do it Jack Watts. Just get mentally strong.
Just drop Jack Watts to the seconds and then he’ll learn to get mentally strong.
Or was Jack Watts built back up by one man sticking up for him against the tide of abuse from opposition and fellow club supporters alike. Told to work on small goals. Not to expect to be an utter champion and just to be a good player. Given the chance to improve, then fail, then improve, then fail, then improve and then improve and then improve.
Mental strength comes from confidence.
Confidence comes from winning.
But when you aren’t winning, confidence has to come from continued hard work, belief, resilience and sticking together.
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I love Jobe. He’s been the best player our club has had since Hird Retired. One of the club’s greatest leaders. He’s a Brownlow medalist and All Australian.
But even in the 3 finals games he’s played, he crumbled under the pressure. I know He’s not alone. But it represents how fragile this club has been. Especially when Zac Merrett was dragging this club along the finish line against North Melbourne in the 2014 elimination final.
Hird was a beast when he was our coach during training. I didn’t think Hird would curse like a sailor but wow did he let rip at times.
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It’s so easy to say “there is no plan B”. There could be a plan B. Maybe it also doesnt work?
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That was very funny. I somewhat agree, the run and gun down the corridor style wins games when you are the underdog, but when you are favourites and you have the other team planning to stop it as well as the players being more reluctant to take risks for the fear of failure then you get garbage like yesterday.
I disagree with this statement.
It looked like a deliberate ploy to combat the zone through the corridor to draw opposition players out of position. We’ve seen a couple of times this year when the opposition has sat in the corridor and we try to kick diagonally off half back to break through (like usual) and they pick it off.
This to me looked like an entire team that plays in the defensive half of the ground with an instruction/agreement to try and break through with handball.
You’d notice a change though.
I haven’t seen a change all year.
Unless “plan b” is “lull the opposition in to a false sense of security by allowing them to win”.
The seeds for this loss were planted earlier in the year. Remember when we were 4-5 goals up against a Collingwood side minus nearly all its best mids & they ran away to win easily. Its just a practice game was the excuse. We showed no sign of being able to stop great players like Tom Phillips & Josh Smith FFS. Then we sent a pretty strong side up against GC & again got out to a 30 point lead early before being smashed through the middle by a team missing its best mid. In JLT 3 we were 40 points up at half time, we lost by 22. We had no answer for a team on a role & didn’t even look we tried to quell the influence of their best mids. Where was the development? What were we learning about controlling momentum when we didn’t even appear to try to stem these turnarounds? I want to see at least some sign that the coaches are working towards fixing obvious problems because I’m not seeing anything. Even look at the early rounds & some of the stinking performances of guys like Zaka - what was done??? How can we hope to have a competitive environment where these types of losses are rare if ever when we don’t punish failure. We have encouraged complacency & its been happening for a long time so its certainly not something I’m lobbing only on Woosha.
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I think I may be misreading this but Sal said we freeze in these games and it looks like we do. However your conversations that you heard were after the game? So what Sal is saying is probably right and hopefully what you’re saying is that it won’t happen again?
Personally I hope woosha ripped so far into them that he reduced them to tears and made them question if they still want to play football because that’s how i felt after the game yesterday.
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Yep agree with what you say however not sure I would move them all on
But what you say does have merit
The culture at this club is ■■■■ poor and unfortunately it runs through our leaders and it very well may affect our youth
Maybe ■■■■ poor is the wrong word but the headspace of these guys has been found wanting
I also think we need to tinker with positions etc but that is another issue
Reckon it’s time the club ■■■■■■ off the fking dance and kiss cam and starts spending money on shrinks
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Take the players back to Windy Hill and train there hard there until they get their ■■■■ together!!! Actually, that brings me to my next point, I listening to Terry Daniher’s speech at Sheeds 50 years in footy, he said that back in his day when they had security on horse back during games, that there was a particular area the horses use to crap and Sheeds would train guys in that area if they weren’t pulling their weight. Not sure if its a big enough area for the whole 22 though.
How do you know that Worsfold didn’t sense this and say that to the players on Monday last week? Regardless, it is the players that take the field and not the coach. They can do all the preparation work through the week but if they don’t turn up and apply that preparation on game day then it cannot be Worsfolds or the coaches fault. In addition, what happened on Sunday, has been happening for a very long period of time - before Wooshas time, before Hirds time and possibly even Knights. It is a mindset issue and the playing group need to eradicate that (with the assistance of coaches). I find it very hard to believe that any coach would not address such an issue with their team.
And I very, very much look forward to seeing a single shred of evidence that the coaches have addressed any of it.
A single aspect.
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yeah ummm the boys were disappointing and uhhh vowed not to do it… again.
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See. That’s the problem. Hard to hit 6s with a straight bat. Needs to clear the front leg and swing across the line. Even a top edge might go for four.