Just need a coach who can adapt and thrive in an ever-changing environment. I dont think we have that.
One of the most apt sayings I see in a business sense is the old ‘cant see the forrest for the trees’. Often people are so fixated on detail, they dont see the bigger picture. It is a great quote.
Take us - 18 - 24 months ago there was a case for Hooker forward in our setup. In a basic sense - since then Stewart has improved exponentially, Stringer has been added and he is a forward first and foremost - and the game as evolved to require more nimble forward lines to deal with constant and ever-increasing pressure around the ball. Hurley more and more needs someone like Hooker back there as the alternatives are, well, the less said the better.
Things changed, and we didnt. That’s the bottom line.
Sometimes the people most involved are the ones that see the least. Not saying they should listen to fans at all, but there would be an element of them living in a bubble and refusing to accept that decisions made in the past need altering.
The thing is the Hooker fwd vs Freo and Dogs wouldn’t have been an issue if the rest of team applied themselves defensively & were smarter/more effective with ball use like they did against Port
I dont expect Hooker back will be a permanent thing. He will be moved fwd and back as req’d
But we have changed… what do you mean we didn’t? You might say it’s too late, but essentially he did it after less than 3 complete games, the first of which was a win against the grand finalists from last year.
I expect that we’d start Hooker back every game. And then move him forward if we need to mix it up.
Does anyone have a feel for when Hooker generally gets his goals. I have this perception that it is later in games as the opposition tire… but I could be very wrong about that.
Woosh used to run a very tall fwd line at WC and team trapped ball fwd via midfield dominance/fwd pressure.
But repeat entries don’t always result in scores as pushed wide or too much congestion. The reason needed talls as it’s very hard to take mark when opposition numbers all back in defence so those who can clunk in a pack very valuable. Hooker one of best.
I expect we may keep Hooker back as 1st preference now until such time or against teams where our midfield is really firing.
You can see in pressers he’s not giving up on Hooker fwd idea. Still wants to do it.
It’s a footy Internet forum so what we do is put forward our thoughts etc etc but I reckon most of us think a coach has coached well if the team wins and the coach has coached poorly when they don’t. I think a lot of comenatators are the same and don’t know enough to explain it or articulate why.
Personally, I think Buckley is a very good coach given the results that he achieves with the side that he has. I dislike the Scott brothers but think that Brad in particular is a good coach because he gets an average side to perform better than I expect.
One of the key things for me is that you’ve taken a guy out of the forwardline who can have a bit of the yips with goal kicking… and made way for a bloke that can pretty regularly kick goals from anywhere.
Given that Stewart has improved so much in the air, it just all makes so much sense.
The only negative is that now both our tall KP backmen are at the older end of our list. But we do have some good young kids on the list, plus hopefully a Fletcher by the end of this year. Plus we have what I consider to be excellent quality back-up players on our list who we can arguably keep for not a lot of salary cap space. So even that isn’t a massive negative.
See I don’t get the criticism that Worsfold has been slow to react.
He made the changes after 3 rounds. In fact, you could argue that he made the changes after 2 rounds because the structure worked in round 1 - we beat last year’s best team scoring and defending better than our season average last year. So no need to change then.
He didn’t change after the round 2 loss, but why would he? Surely we don’t want a coach who changes things drastically after one loss - it might just be an anomaly.
We lose again in round 3 and he then makes a change.
So he has made a change after 2 weeks. That’s hardly slow to react.
See you say 3 games , but the trend has been there for 2 years now.
Some of us have said the way the game is played has changed over summer and that we needed to start changing with it.
Some of us could see hooker, jd stewart and stringer as forwards was not gonna work.
And with preseason games its up to 6 games.
Its the slowness and stubbornness to change thats a worry.
You hesr stories of hodge going on about how clarkson would constantly be ringing him and running different strategies and different improvements to the team when they were at the top (he prolly stull does it now), and thats arguably the greatest coach of the modern era.
Our coach reminds me way too much of sheedies later days. He was stuck in his ways and believed he knew all and didnt have to change anything, cos ehat worked 5-10 years ago would just automatically work again, just cos
We’d end up with 26 players in the field out of a possible 3 left on the senior list. Some of them would be from other clubs and have to play forward and back concurrently.
I love how you automatically assume he does everything, and wonderfully to boot . Just like you did with previous coaches, how many coaches in bb’s history have you been wrong about ?