Footy has changed and some sides ( coaches) ( Essendon )are having trouble coming to terms with it. High levels of skills are not enough any more.
Some games now resemble a massive rabble at a seemingly endless sequence of stoppages and the challenge is to get clean possession out of the rabble most often while maintaining the best balance of players ahead of and behind the ball.
Last night showed that Collingwoods massively “contested” scrapping style gameplan can almost beat the top side, and key forwards might hardly kick any goals when games are played that way.
Funnily enough , we used a similar game plan in round 1 against the Swans with a similar result, But I have not seen us play that way since.
It will be interesting to see if Collingwood have spent too many tickets playing this style of footy so hard in the first half of the year. Conventional opinion says they will drop away.
.
Collingwood have kicked at least 17 goals in their previous 4 games.
True, but that gameplan used last night was imo the only way that Buckley thought he could beat them, just like Hird tried something similar to try to restrict West Coast. In the end, the big difference was that Essendon didnt have a ruckman to compete with Natanui, whereas Collingwoods ruckman competed well with Sandilands for 3 quarters AND, Fremantle seem to be about a 2 goal better side than West Coast