I’m not sure it would be possible to conceive of a more underwhelming and pointless year:
We came out of 2023 with NO DISCERNABLE game plan. Honestly, what is it Brad? Other than chipping it around the backline and then kicking to a contest. Over and over again. Soft, uncontested, safe, boring and ■■■■. And won’t get us anywhere.
Finish in absolute no man’s land on the ladder because we inflated our ladder position by not playing the kids and just beating two worst teams in 20 years. Geelong - who are light years better than us - finish below us. We get an average draft pick
Injuries to young guys further stunting their development - Reid, Cox, Jones, Hunter, etc.
debuts to only two players. No rising star nominations.
Prioritise plodders like Weiderman, Phillips, Kelly, Lav and Heppell, while keeping guys like Baldwin, Bryan and Voss out of the side. Very likely lose some of those players at the end of the year, along with Zerk.
beating Melbourne and our strong performance in 3/4 on Anzac Day. Somehow, somewhere there is ability to match good teams.
third quarter against Carlton. We showed we can put the foot down and play the modern type of forward playing footy you see from the good teams.
the Fremantle game. Were we pretty happy with the Carlton game and didn’t take it seriously? What happened?
the Bulldogs game. That was the one that showed we can’t do the kick-mark game plan and it got abandoned immediately afterwards.
the games that followed that Dogs game, without the kick-mark style, we served up 2021 stuff.
So we know the kick-mark style won’t succeed long term, we know we can’t do whatever Rutten tried to do and Scott has tried to do in the last six weeks.
Find out how and why we can bring Melbourne, Anzac Day and Carlton stuff all year round.
And turn over the list, because there’s only about 11 blokes who right now look like AFL best 22 standard.
It’s hard to grade the year because it’s not clear where the club sees itself on their journey. It kinda meshed between some development (but not enough) and a some attempts to throw everything at finals which failed badly.
It’s really hard to understand where this club is at. My Great fear is that once again we’re not really rebuilding but just papering over cracks.
2023 had some great moments and momentarily signs of improvement: but I’m not sure we’re any further advanced than we were 12 months ago. Just benefactors of an easier draw.
Nah, we were done after the Freo game. Sucked out all our air. The Port game was the last of the spirit and the Adelaide game was just the twitching of the corpse.
If the season was in reverse and we played from round 23 back to round 1 and were getting pumped at the start of the year but finished off strong I would say pass. But to start well and finish the season like that. Geez. That’s a fail for mine. Not the losses at the end but how we lost
The fact is that we did play pretty well against Melbourne, but they had a really off day. They played badly, we played okay, so we won.
It wasn’t a great win. It was an okay win.
Same for Carlton, really. We played them when they were really down. They pulled their finger out after that loss and they are now in the 8 and, despite what many on here will say, serious contenders for the flag. I don’t think they’ll win it, but they might.
