Round 1 2025 Review

Football Discussion Dustin Fletcher Hangar
502

I think next week will be telling, we had a horrible first quarter and settled for the rest of the game but just wasted too many chances and our defense was way too poor to stop them when they ran it back the other way.

If we can tighten up defensively we will be in good shape to bounce back.

Prior and Shiel should be on notice, though they were both pretty poor last night and I don’t think they should be given too much rope by the coaches if they don’t turn it around quickly they should be back in the VFL. McKay was shockingly bad, I thought he was the worst on ground, clearly impacted by not much pre-season but I bloody hope he gets his form back quickly.

Still not really sold with Jones on the wing, thought he was great overhead but was a bit slow on disposal and in a few instances it really caused us to be hemmed into our backline. With Langford out I would like to see him move forward, it will allow us to bring in someone like SEH.

I think the Redman move really hurt us defensively as well, I don’t mind him in the CB but he needs to move back straight away.

I would love to bring another small to mid size defender next week, Tex and Fog aren’t super tall but are strong. But Prior really worried me with him getting smashed in multiple contests, so I think we need to bring in Hayes.

The midfield for me was pretty amazing, led by Caldwell and not Merrett which is also a big positive as more players standing up is great for us. Tsatas worked his way into the game, but 57% tog is always going to limit his impact.

Perkins had an amazing last half, if he can carry even half of that momentum forward it would be massive for us.

I thought Gresham and Kako applied a ton of good pressure and looked dangerous around the goal, clearly a mistake to make Gresh sub which is hopefully corrected going forward.
It felt a bit cluttered and clunky in the forward line, we also seemed to target Draper every time he was forward and I felt chose him over better options quite a few times.

I thought Draper had a decent game, but still tried to do too much when he got the ball. Bryan was also solid.

Tldr;
Not great, not terrible.
Rids, Langers Out: SEH, Hayes In

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503

Ridley worries me, structurally we seem better without him. Especially with Reid and McKay. When we are playing all three in a situation like last night I’d really like one of them to pinch hit forward for a quarter or two. Also we should always play two speedy small forwards maybe even three.

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504

4 centre clearance goals to 0 sure didn’t help. Pretty much broken even everywhere else.

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506

Hawks kicked 7 goals in a row pretty much game over. the next 3 qrts we played catch up

Was as a putrid effort and they should be embarrased of the first qrt

We cant afford to give teams a head start like that they need to be switched on from the word go.

507

Team selection policy hasn’t improved since last year.

Too many talls in defence against a Hawks side stacked with dangerous small forwards.

Where are the “learnings”?

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508

I’m sorry, but this is just plain wrong. We won hitouts 54-34 and clearances 50-31. Meek had one more disposal and four more hitouts than Bryan, but less marks, less tackles and the same number of clearances, despite Meek playing 23% more game time than Bryan. And Bryan’s tap work was clearly the best of any player who rucked in this game.

Fans are going to need some patience with Nick Bryan. He should have played 20-25 more AFL games than he has, but our coaches in their infinite wisdom opted to pump games into that young whipper-snapper Goldstein last season.

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509

100%. Bryan is the least of our worries.

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510

club should make a decision on Draper or Bryan. Not close to convinced that 2 rucks is way to go. I don’t care which way club decides, but move one on and see what draft capital we acquire from it.

511

We need a full forward.
Someone to straighten us up a bit.
Jones?
Cox?

512

What I’m concerned about is we make such hard work scoring goals, but yet we get easily scored upon after we score. Been a running theme for us for years.

Words cannot describe how idiotic it was to start a debutant as our only small forward. That’s firmly on Brad Scott. You’d think BS would learn, but you see decisions like this, including redman starting in the centre, playing too tall in the backline, shiel playing down back and it makes you wonder.

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513

You’ve probably gone overboard there with the Goldstein comment.
This is what development looks like. Bryan won’t succeed every week. And I’m not advocating to play Goldstein ahead of him. And I don’t think Bryan’s development has hurt him greatly.
He struggles against big bodied rucks at VFL level too. But at VFL level, he can get around the ground. He can’t do that yet at AFL but with some perseverance, he will. He needs time to work his way through it. Once he does, other rucks will have more problems with him.

From watching it, I thought Meek was more dominant. Whilst we won the hit outs and clearances heavily (we actually won the around the ground clearances, not the centre bounce clearances), very few of them were out in the open where we caused damage. Think back to the last centre bounce against Freo where we got out the front of the stoppage and Merrett and Durham had a path to goal. We couldn’t get anything like that. And it was very selective which players were out the front of the stoppage. Hawthorn set up to minimise that and force a quick kick into our forward line where their loose man could be more affective and begin the march back the other way. They were fine to beat us that way. And a lot of teams last year were fine to give up the forward 50 advance, because they could hurt us more on the rebound.

I was actually surprised that Draper started at the centre bounce at the beginning of first quarter. You’d think Draper would match up better than Bryan, but he didn’t. And you’d think Draper would be better used as a forward target for the ‘get out’ quick kick forward, but that didn’t work either.

This was Meek by the way. Not English, Grundy, Witts, TDK, Gawn, Xerri or Marshall. It’s the next level below them. Both Draper and Bryan will work their way around them.

Again…
Not saying Bryan should be dropped. Not saying he’s terrible. Not saying he’s our biggest problem. We have to give him time to work through how he plays against other rucks. It won’t come out positive every week.

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514

Hawk player on sen just now said it’s huge advantage playing the week before

515

Which explains why so many on here have completely lost their ■■■■.

It’s a completely foreign concept to them.

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516

I think it was a bit of both. In recent years, when teams have come out fierce and with strong intensively in games, Essendon have struggled to cope and needed to work themselves back into games to eke out a competitive loss or a win.

517

Of course it is. Anyone not thinking this was a massive factor is kidding themselves.

Its equivalent to playing after a bye but much worse because you’re not even match fit prior to the break.

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518

One of our key issues last night was continuity, particularly in defence. Shiel and Prior were new to the back six, Reid had not played for a year, Redman went into the midfield for parts of the game and McKay had a significantly delayed start to his pre-season and it showed.

This lack of continuity probably exacerbated the disadvantage we had of not playing last week.

This is neither to defend or pot any single player. This is a team game and we need to assess team dynamics, and the capacity of players to work together.

Unfortunately there’s no shortcut for lack of continuity but game time. We are clearly committed to pumping games into Reid (which I agree with) but it contributed to us going too tall into a match where one of an opponent’s strengths is the quality of their small forwards. We are probably in a phase though where the club is prepared to cop this sort of thing.

Structurally we looked much better when we were forced into substituting Gresham earlier than I dare say we had planned.

The Hawks have been a much better run club which means they are further along in their development. They have recruited better for longer. As a result they have a more flexible and continuous playing group. It gave them both a capacity to be more efficient all night and to respond whenever they needed to.

This lack of continuity impacts us in other ways too especially in the quality of forward entries. You could see it when Hobbs completely missed Caddy’s lead in the last quarter.

We are still getting the termites out of our foundations left by over 20 years of trying to take shortcuts. One cultural positive is that across the team generally the effort and commitment seemed in place and we didn’t give up after quarter time.

And of course, while it’s not great that Rids and Langford went down at least we are likely to get to debut two out of Edwards, SEH or Hayes next week.

So hopefully this year we can make the transition from frustrating mediocrity to at least fun mediocrity.

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519

sheil? I must have been watching another game . I thought he was ok.

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520

I think this sums up my thoughts better than I ever could.

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521

Agree with most of your comments Sal. As far as having a defensive tall I think the problems were with Ridley out, left with McKay (too slow), Prior (too slow), Reid (good for positioning and punching ball away but still not physically strong enough to spread forward packs), Redman ( too sore - ribs - after two 1st half collisions), Shiel (not his go) and Draper was not able to get back to be an influence in deep defence.

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522

We looked better defensively after Rids went off as it forced us to play smaller, we just went into the game with the wrong lineup for the forwards hawks play.

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