I just rewatched the Kanga game. My God Peter Wright was awful. He just hates playing on McKay, has zero confidence. Then goes into the ruck and just lets Goldy push him around like he’s a junior. I know he ended up getting a couple of goals but he’s seriously out of touch.
As for our midfield - I haven’t looked at clearance numbers but they were absolutely pantsed by LDU, Cunnington, Thomas and co. And that’s despite our ruck dominance. At least Hobbsy cracked in. Would love to get Caldwell and Stringer into those bounces because they bodyline the footy or the player with the footy.
Redman had a somewhat dodgy game too, by his high standards at least. Did some great things as well. Tsatas goes alright, a definite keeper. The surprise packet was Baldwin, who was possibly our best defender. Didn’t he come to us as a forward? If Ridley gets back soon I wouldn’t mind seeing how Kainie goes up there beside Langers and 2MP - could provide a good aerial foil for Peter because of his excellent judgement.
But all in all we were pretty putrid. How can we turn this around by Saturday? Getting Drapes back would be a start.
In
Draper - ruck/KPF support
Setterfield - Bigger mid, defensive bullock for parish Merrett. take on Giants best mid -Tom Green
Walla - some small forward spark
VOSS - finals like intentisty. who am I kidding we will bring in Stringer on 1 foot.
We narrowly won the contested possession count 139-130, lost the clearance count 34-39 ( whilst also giving a stack of centre bounces to Bryan, Hobbs, Perko and Tsatas so perhaps somewhat understandable) , had 12 extra inside 50’s , but couldn’t stop them running it back out for large portions of that match.
The ground level presence inside the forward 50 has been an issue for some time. On several occassions, Langer’s was our best pressuring player on the deck, and he’s also a marking target. Our smalls are getting too far from the talls, but also not closing off the escape paths. It’s not quite working as a unit.
Yep…our forward structure is the biggest flaw. I feel like we have enough capable small forwards but something is breaking down and they’re never in the right position.
He (together with Martin) just let go of Larkey in front of the goal post to allow the easy goal. Just unfathomable the lack of commitment to the tackle there.
Eddie Ford’s goal direct from the centre bounce where Redman just gave up on attempting to get there for a spoil. Just put his head down and started trotting up, even when the ball was only halfway there. He never should have been giving Ford that much latitude from a centre bounce that he had to make up a lot of ground in any case.
Our small forwards have been caught out of position for weeks and way too often in games. At least one of them has to be a stay at home type, to crumb the packs. All too often there is no one at the foot of packs to rove balls, except for 2 or 3 small defenders who have no problems clearing the ball time and again.
It’s frequently the case that a team looks worse in hindsight than you maybe realised at the time.
At that time, we probably all held fairly reasonable hopes that Stewart and Waterman, for example, would be good players, that Smith would get back to his best, that Shiel was better than he has proven to be, that Francis would go from a dodgy fringe player to a reliable good player. We are basically optimists when it comes to all the players who haven’t yet proven themselves to be not up to it.
And no doubt, we are currently doing the same with lots of players from the current group whom we “hope” will be good, but might well not be. I’m loathe to speculate on which ones, but it’s always true that we overhype and project great improvement (Perkins, Menzie, Tsatas, Davey, Cox, Reid) when experience should tell us it isn’t going to happen, at least for many.
Then, on the other hand, every now and then you get a player like BZT doing what he is doing, and you hope again.
