While I wasn’t able to attend myself due to the lockdown, my spies were able to give me a fairly good rundown of today’s session.
Firstly some good news, Draper was out doing a lot of running at a good pace across both ovals. He also was out running on Saturday, so it doesn’t seem like he’s too far off rejoining the main group.
Zakka was also out doing some running but it was more of a jog, but at least that’s a step up from what he’s been doing to recently.
Hurley, Stringer Ambrose, Clarke and Parish didn’t train. Parish trained with the main group on Saturday so it may just have been watching his training loads.
Cox has missed a couple of sessions recently but trained fully today with bandaging on his left leg. He was kicking well off both feet though without any apparent discomfort so seems to be nearly over whatever ailment he had, although he wasn’t doing any tackling drills.
The rest of the group all completed the session with the main group including Johnson, McBride, Laverde, Zerk and Perkins, so overall the group seems to be fairly healthy, although Stringer was recently seen in a moonboot so that must be a bit of a concern this close to the start of serious practice matches.
As per government regulations the players trained in groups of up to 10, so no large scale match sim today. A lot of the drills concentrated on kicking skills, particulalry hitting a 20 - 30 metres passes quickly from taking possesion through a mark.
One of the groups consisted of 2MP, Jones, Tippa and Smith playing as forwards against, Zerk, Ridley, Hind and Redman. working on both bringing the ball into attack and the defenders trying to work the ball out again. Jones was matched up on Ridley and at one stage took a very strong contested mark in the goalsquare, taking front position and being able to hold off Ridley from spoiling. This is very good news as it’s the part of his game Jones needs to improve probably the most, and Ridley has become bigger and stronger in the off season and has rarely been beaten.
That’s all I really have at the moment, I don’t have much information on any other individual players, hopefully both the full squad can train together and we are able to go and watch later in the week.
