The difference between Scott and Sheedy back when Sheedy was decent was that in a day like today Sheedy would have spent the week talking up and challenging Tsatas to go head to head with Bont and Libba. He’d have backed in El Hawli and would understand that his young group wasn’t up to it, but needed the experience. Scott just rolls out the same guys that haven’t been up to it for 5 years, with the same gameplan and expects different results.
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I think it just shows how wrong our recruiting philosophy has been for the last 20 years. Bulldogs and Collingwood recruit players who win the ground ball and win contests. We’ve tried to build the spine first because our philosophy is that you can find the smalls anywhere in the draft. Very little of AFL footy is aerial contests.
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It wasn’t a better Bulldogs side on the night, despite the personnel. I remember that game and the Dogs were completely off. We were the ones with the run and aggression, which says a lot. The longer the game went, the more disinterested they looked. It looked like a good win on paper but the Dogs would have lost to most teams in the league that night.
Last night looked to me as though we came out with a similar albeit low intensity to the Dogs, but after about 10-15 mins, our confidence fell off a cliff as senior players started butchering the simplest of kicks which put the rest of the team under huge pressure defensively. When our confidence falls, our intensity drops to embarrassing levels pretty quickly. The Dogs, like most teams do, smelled blood once things started going their way and lifted another level. Their effort and execution is so much higher than it was for the early parts of last season. We were lucky the margin was only 90 or so points.
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It’s really quite staggering just how many of your bulletpoints are related to coaching.
Yes, the players (esp. the senior ones) are pitiful and contemptible, but we know that. Always have been.
The coaching though is something else…
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The last half of last year proved we can’t compete when opposition sides bring their intensity. The bulldogs we beat last year were a shadow of what they are now and they were not playing to their ability.
Durham and Caldwell are made to look like A graders because were so bereft of talent in the middle. Harsh to call 'em C graders but I get your point.
Don’t get me wrong. I love 'em like most of blitz but we need 'em to go up a cog. Still time for that to happen and yes, I’m aware that after a 90 point loss, criticising guys that generally have a go is an odd place to start.
My god, there’s so may holes in the list. Lousy selection policy exacerbates this. Terrible environment and a crap lists results in floggings against top sides. Who knew?
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Well said. Spot on.
Didn’t expect the win last night but the insipid approach to the contest from about midway through the first quarter was the most disappointing part for me. Very, very timid.
But the smack in the mouth many people needed to underline the current state/position of the club and list. Nowhere to hide and no excuses to make - thoroughly demolished by a much better team.
That’s not even true. We’ve recruited guys to win at the contest and then don’t play them, or play them on the HFF for the key development years.
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I suppose thats the point of the question, if the players are relatively the same, what is it that makes the difference? Out of form? In form? They are the same players, could we say its confidence and attitude that makes the difference?
Haven watched it yet, prob won’t given the score. It appears our midfield got completely monstered by them and we let their half backs run riot.
I wish Scott had of played Tsatas against them so we could just write him off and avoid the debate.
Tsatsas problem is he is a horrible tackler.
So he wouldn’t have helped last night.
We needed a better defensive edge
I think tsatsas would have made a decent difference last night, his clearance work would have been good for us
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Piastri is on pole again
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Jobe Watson wouldn’t have made a difference last night, they probably had 16-17 of the best 18 players on the park
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Bloke on radio just now nailed it…
“Brad Scott… he couldn’t teach a rabid dog how to bite”.
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If he manages to get 10 Clearances, he would have helped.
Tsatas should have played in place of Shiel.
Zac Johnson should have played instead of Laverde.
It would have made no difference to the scoreboard, but at least we’re prioritizing youth in a development year.
Selecting LAV in a game he didn’t need to play (given the match ups), is right on brand for Scott sadly.
Not a critique of LAV, he always gives his all.
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The team is the same as it was in 2019.
There has been no noticeable improvement in years.
Something is not right. My guess is its the Coaches tendency to continue to play players out of form (he rarely swaps out senior players who are not contributing) and he subs out younger players who are positively contributing to leave senior players who are ineffectual on the day. What does this action say in the heads to our list?
IMO, it says senior players have no real accountability. i.e. ‘I will try my best for a while but its not working, of well, there is always next week’
Also, we were lucky we didn’t lose this game by 20 goals, Dogs missed so many easy goals. If we had lost by 20 goals, we are not better than our 2019 team.
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Let’s at least acknowledge that Kennedy, a bloke who couldn’t crack the Carlton or GWS midfield, gave it to us last night.
Dogs were just red red hot and we couldn’t disrupt their game at all. We just couldn’t tackle them effectively enough to regularly disrupt them around the contest.
Scott mentioned in the presser that we completed 40 % of tackles and they were at 70%. I’ve always presumed there was a stat for tackle efficiency and there it is. It’s a shame they don’t publish that. Assuming it works the way I think it should that means we had 69 broken tackles to their 18.
Our tackle numbers were well down, Merrett had zero. I dare say if we’d suck an extra 20 tackles around the contest the pattern of the game would have looked a little different.
We struggled with their pace too. Taking off Seh instead of a tall was a terrible decision. Dogs were playing undersized at both ends of the ground but we couldn’t find any space in the forward line and we couldn’t contain their run through the middle to force a few more high lofted entries.
This was a good reminder of how far we’ve got to go with the list.
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I went…horrible, just horrible. Dunno, maybe a mulligan game where they were really good collectively and we were really bad collectively. The missed tackles were the worst part for me. We are a long way short of the Dogs.
Yep, we sadly got to see first-hand many times that sides with Jobe Watson in them were more than capable of 80+ point losses. Frustrating that there is a lot of focus on one or two players when it’s hard to pick 5 players who played their roles effectively.