What's gone wrong

He should have got best on ground, did he?

I find this idea of a big bodied midfield beast somewhat of a myth. Sure, there’s a Bontempelli (who was speculative at pick 4) & Cripps but who else? Tom Mitchell is hardly a “beast” but an effective clearance player. Luke Parker is 184cm so hardly a beast but an effective clearance player, ditto Sloane & Matt Crouch. The beast types are hard to find and you generally need to burn a top ten pick to get one. We were extremely lucky we got Jobe but even then he took years to develop. What I think we need is depth through the midfield. We have a clearance machine belting down the door in the VFL (Clarke) but we refuse to give him a shot, instead we deprive him the chance by playing a truck like Myers who ain’t gonna improve. It seems they’re not playing Clarke because of his limitations but we overlook the very obvious limitations of some “favourites” and keep going back to the well.

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I think its what you turn to when your players that are the same height and weight but poorly conditioned get beat up by better sides week in week out.

yep. and honestly what is wrong with saying to a kid, look ok you struggling with kicking, work on it, we will play you, but simply for now try not to kick it, focus solely on contests, tackling and good clearence work.
also let the team know to get to him everytime he has it.
if he has to kick, kick it long.

surely that plan can not be any worse than watching myers do the exact same thing, clarke would probably panic less to boot, so you’d still be coming out on top.

I mean clayton oliver had what 25 odd handballs last week, and he’s a decent player and kick.

I do not get it. there is almost a downright refusal to play anyone who isn’t deemed in the best 22.
surely as a coach you’d want to prove you know what you’re doing, and you’d use every tool available to do so.

It’s just a downright stubbornness to not try anyone else, and i don’t see what they get from it, or what motivation there is to keep doing it.

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You don’t have to be massive to be BB mid. Kennedy, Fyfe, Martin are BB mids, strong through the core and not much shorter than Bont etc. Sloane, Crouch shorter again. But when you get to some of the our guys that rotate through inside you’re talking about Smith 174,tippa 171, McGrath 178, that’s just giving away too much. Heppell should be better inside but isn’t. Completely agree, Clarke big enough, fit enough to go through their fulltime.

Ronke is exactly the type of mid/fwd Sydney have an endless supply of.

Hard at it, good skills by hand and foot, good vision and awareness, good lateral movement, decent size, athletic/muscular and well conditioned (this is something we have struggled with for a while), stands up in tackles, runs hard both ways, head over the ball all day, plays with aggression and physicality.

By contrast our list team don’t seem to focus on picking players that fit that profile regularly and on occasion when they might have picked a similar type it seems our development program has failed.

As the season wears on it’s painfully obvious that fundamental changes to our football program are required.

More obvious is that it’s not just the list but the club that needs a rebuild.

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Yes, another rebuild of sorts needed, unfortunately.

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Yep.

Maybe the plan was about pumping up the membership which it did but was not necessarily about blooding youngsters, who could actually play and be trained while playing.

I don’t know that it was ever the intention to climb above the 8th of last year, this year.
Many of us assumed that and bought the story. But; its turned out to be, a very different story.

From memory we had a much better run last year with injuries too. They should never be an excuse, but combined with the players who went out last year their effect can be compounded.

One thing I asked myself over the past 3-4 weeks was “When was the last time we had a team that you could go to the game confident they would at a minimum give a strong, committed effort for 4 quarters?” Really you probably have to go back to that 1999-2001 period. That is a ■■■■■■ long time ago. I’d even be happy with us just being an over performing team, one that on paper nobody rates but through a mixture of hard work, good coaching and discipline played greater than the sum of its parts.

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We’re about on par with our performances v Carlton last year.

First round finals exit + quality (under-utilised) mid +’half back flanker from bottom 4 team + ex all Australian being kicked out of his old club = premiership…?

Slightly disagree. First half of 2012 and 2013 were pretty good. We played some really good footy in those years.

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*first not-quite-half of 2012. Round 10, 2012, never forget.

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I reckon it’s been all downhill since that standing ovation we gave the team when they almost came back vs north in 2016.

Stupid players, coach and club took the message the wrong way.

We care about winning but nowhere near as much as we do about effort.

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yeah that was ugly… but you remember it because we were flying to that point. Then we won the next 2 out of 3, only going down to Sydney by a goal. Then the wheels fell off with injuries etc.

But we had some ripping wins in those years… backs against the wall, interstate… and I do think you could, by and large, expect a committed effort most weeks. Sometimes we lacked skill and polish but fark they usually tried.

I also think we had a much much worse list in those years…

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The only 2 teams further away from a flag than us are st.kilda and gold coast.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

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FFS we have burned a great many top ten picks over the last 20 years and got none of them.

It’s an imponderable issue whether we are even more adept at burning top 10 picks than we are at failing to develop talent of those we do select