I live in Melbourne, its easy for me to get to games and write off the losses on the way home in the train with lots of other Essendon fans just having to accept the result… Its not so easy for you to travel such a long distance and travel back home thinking, why did I bother to go ? I feel for you .
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I still wonder why I bother on the train home.
Can the board pull the coaches aside and tell them to come up with another game plan because this one is scheizenhouzen?
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I would not consider that to be the role of the Board, maybe the Football Manager or the CEO perhaps, but you employ Coaches for their expertise, and you live with their performance or sack them.
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This leads to far more questions than there are known answers at this point. We have to consider the possibility that the game plan is a dud nd the players are not buying in.
But, we have so many key players out of form I doubt we would win the games we did last year, with last years game plan.
Thanks Jackie, appreciate the time you’ve taken responding.
I was certainly disturbed by Joe’s attitude in the first few games but I feel it has been better these last 2. His kicking is worse and he has had chances to kick 3+ in nearly all games but not taken them,
However, his form doesn’t explain why we near last for I50s (yet #5 for marks I50, a remarkable effort), near last for stoppages in our forward half and near last for contested possession. That is the makings of a Bottom 4 side. No wonder we have only won 6 quarters out 20 all year which is down with Carlton & Brisbane who will both finish Bottom 4 this year.
If anything we have gone backwards on these numbers from last year - we have improved statistically on clearances but our clearances are rushed and not particularly to advantage whereas the oppositions’ always seem - especially the Pies - to be easy and thus to advantage.
Our problem is our midfield exacerbated by a) not playing a hard tag; b) not introducing new blood (McGrath lasted there 2 weeks) and c) having Heppell and Zaharakis turn the ball over constantly (Heppell shocking in Q1 against the Pies).
We desperately need new options in the midfield and both Clarke and Mutch are hard nut types in the guise of Hocking and Howlett but hopefully with much bigger tanks. They have to be blooded and played week in, week out. And McGrath given a “hard tag” role on the oppositions’ best mid each week.
Our coaching staff keep playing conservative with selection picking the same players to play the same way that keep failing.
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Absolutely.
I rate the hpnfooty.com PAV tool, and from memory last year had 3 players that they rated in the top 25 in the league: Daniher, Merrett, Heppell
Right now, we’d have none (maybe Hurley?).
If we take Joey’s game on the weekend he had 22 touches (yay!), 9 i50s (huge!) And 10 clangers (wtaf)…
Beating the press is partly psychological. Once you get through it a few times for some easy “Joe the goose” goals, it puts the pressure back on the pressing team: do we hold our line or start to fall back?
Sliding doors stuff, but if Hepp had turned it over a few less times, and Joe delivered better i50 (which he was fantastic at last year) we might have taken the game by the scruff
To be frank the club is looking very red faced with regards to our recruiting.
EVERYBODY would have told you at the end of the 2017 season that we needed decent midfielders to shore up the loss of Jobe. Instead we decided to go with makeshift midfielders in Smith and Stringer. By themselves I don’t think they have been bad picks but they weren’t what we needed. Seems the club put a lot o faith in the likes of Parish, McGrath, and Langford to step up and it hasn’t eventuated.
To tell the truth I do think the club is playing without a lot of cohesiveness and passion for the contest. Something has happened. The outbursts from Goddard show frustration from within.
Gun midfielders aren’t that easy to find. Smith is about as good as it gets without parting with serious coin.
I was in the Rockcliffe camp but so far he’s spudded it up and now has a calf injury. Do we really need a David Myers replacement?
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Stringer is like that shiny thing in the toy shop which unexpectedly comes on sale at a price too good to refuse. You get it home, then realise that it wasn’t really what you wanted after all.
We needed midfielders, midfielders and more midfielders. We got Smith, who’s determined and was a good start but is small and was never going to be the silver bullet on his own. We got Saad who’s handy, but whose main purpose seems to have been to supposedly release McGrath (a guy as small as Smith) into the midfield.
We needed a big-bodied bigger midfielder to come in too… but then Stringer unexpectedly became available and we just had to have him because… highlights package!!
The man is talented for sure, and he’s going to be fun to watch at times… but he’s also fat, lazy and erratic, and he’s going to be equally frustrating. He’s also no more a midfielder than I am. Furthermore, he’s a FORWARD. The one part of the ground we had coverage in!!! The only reason to get him would’ve been to release Hooker into the back line, but no… we trained all summer with Hooker still in attack and it unbalanced our forward line something shocking, and it took until round 4 for us to realise the inevitable.
All very nice except… we still have no decent big-bodied midfielder!
I don’t buy the “need a big bodied midfielder” stuff.
We need pace and transition. We aren’t terrible at centre bounces at all, we struggle getting to contests and spreading from contests, chucking a hulk in the middle won’t help that.
IMO we look our best with Fantasia breaking through the middle, McGrath was doing it last year and against Adelaide, Saad, McKenna (old chompy is a BIG out), Gleeson. Even Zaka when he’s on.
The problem is other teams know this and everyone else doesn’t work hard enough to give them an option further afield. So we have Saad breaking lines and then… no option. Players are getting fatigued because the forward pressure is atrocious and we get rebounded against easily, whereas the opposition is able to lock us in.
Speed and power away from the contest rather than the old school “big bodies” is what we need.
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Yep, we had Watson in there last year and if he didn’t win us the clearance he was a liability. I feel the same about Myers.
I sure loved that grand final i saw because my parents made we watch it when i wanted to play with my hot wheels.
hurleys topped a couple of times, re-evaluate at seasons end.
Great post. One additional thing that Joe is being poor at this year is defensive awareness. He often mans the mark (which is fair as a kpp) but then he completely neglects what that man does after the ball is moved on. This player if they run forward will easily create an overlap because Joe just stands there or half heartedly jogs after them. There are others in the team that do this but Joe is the worst offender.
In addition, his manning of the mark is non-existent. There was an occasion on Wednesday where Joe was on the mark and the player was able to run and gain another 5 or 10 metres because of the poor positioning on the mark.
They need to go back to basics and take the game on again and play with some risk.
Sure it won’t help the scores against us, but at least we will be a scoring team again.
In the process may
who is?
Can only blame them for what they are responsible for. That is, extending a coach is who clearly coaching int he wrong decade and promoting a guy who failed and failed us as a head ‘recruiter’…that is to continue us on our path to moving further and further away from #17.
At least we have a computer game team.
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That’s the one I was thinking of.