I also managed to drop into training this morning so thought I would add some random thoughts on what I personally noticed:
Firstly I also was planning on talking Colyer up. As well as the goals Jackie described, earlier when he was on the McCraken Oval he kicked a great goal on the run from 45m out on tight angle. His confidence appears to be really high.
Overall I was quite impressed with most of training, players seemed to be in a good mood and switched on. I was happy too that in a lot of the drills they would finish the play off kicking at goal, in previous times I've been to training they have not done that and I've never liked it. Overall from what I saw their accuracy was fairly high.
In the general drills JoeDan kicked some good goals on the run. However later when Matt Lloyd spend a fair bit of time with JoeDan having set shots at goal his accuracy was a bit hit and miss. This was under far more pressure than earlier, the video camera was from the angle of the man on the mark and he had Lloyd and 3 or 4 trainers scrutinising every little movement.
I am impressed with Nathan Bassett as a coach, he seems to have a lot of input during training and actually providing a fair amount of teaching to various individuals.
Funniest moment for mine was when Licka gave some friendly ribbing to Jonathan Giles. I can't remember the exact words said, but after Giles had taken a mark and kicked a goal which Licka effectively said "Great work Giles it's like he is back at Canberra! Well the crowd would have been about the same size hey? Giles, he dominates in the orange!" (Players were wearing orange training bibs at the time)
Jake Long's skills looked fine the few times I looked at him, I did however at one stage later on notice that he looked exhausted after a drill. Tippa made a good tackle, and didn't look out of place although I must qualify that I did not keep that close an eye on him.
Loved some of Gwilt's kicks which were long and accurate. Heppell quite vocal on the McCraken Oval when the players were split between the two ovals. A definite leader out on, although that's hardly ground breaking news!
At the end of the training session Edwards stayed out for extra practice with two trainers (Crow and one other) while Neeld looked on. Essentially Edwards kept running between the two trainers while they threw a footy at him or near him and he kept on running back and forth handballing back or kicking for goal. It seemed like the purpose was to build up his endurance as he did this for about 7 minutes straight and hardly had a breather.
I also thought I saw Coner McKenna out on there, and did not see Baguley.
Good report - thank you. When they train on two ovals at once you can't see everything that happens so it's good to get several different viewpoints. The Edwards report was interesting I saw him do some terrific work around goals at training last pre-season and was a but surprised he didn't get a game as most of the newcomers did. If Hird can get the best out of him he could be a bit of a joker in the pack.
