What's gone wrong

You’re right, Hooker was basically playing forward as a decoy because he’s just a reliable mark.

He is being paid at elite levels and should be mature enough to deal with that now.
All he does for our money is get frustrated, give away stupid 50m penalties and apply no pressure.

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It’s one of the many reasons in addition to all the other listed ones. Not sure what your issue is.

Anti Hird obsession my ■■■■

We had our 7th and 8th worst losses in the history of the club in that stretch (that’s a lot of games) and several more that were 10 goals plus.

They were dark days

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Yeh nah. Kelly replaced by Saad, Jobe “replaced” by Smith, Stanton replaced by Stringer. No effective change, but we have still played Guelfi, Laverde, Langford, Mutch, Begley, Brown, Dea and mcNiece. Younger players are getting a run

Heres a tip

when you go out to warm up forget about practising kicking them from the pockets forget about kicking dribble kicks practise set shot kicking from 30 to 4m out…its called the basics and unfortunately some of our goal kickers cant get this right yet continue to muck around from the boundary line.

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What has gone wrong:

Poor match day coaching

Poor selections

Zerretts poor form. We saw it last year, if he was kept quite the whole midfield just collapsed. It’s happening again

Only the youngsters are prepared to do the 1%ers. Senior players just never lay a shepherd, they look for the one-two instead

Midfield has actually gotten worse

Mentally weak senior players

Poor development of youngsters/ guys on the fringe

Awful communication to members- membership debacle, injuries, interviews etc

No coaches who have recently been part of success

No clear system on field

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I liken the way we are performing now to the weeks leading up to Hird’s crashing team. It was around Anzac Day that year that players (Heppell and Goddard) started saying that the way they are playing is not what the coach instructed. They don’t know why they default to that style, but it just ‘happens’. They are playing the exact slow style of footy we were playing around that time in 2015. We were able to keep the scoreboard ‘respectable’ then and we’re doing it again this year.
Then we had the Geelong blowout in 2015 and the ■■■■■■■■ fell out of the team for the rest of the season where there were beltings after belting along with terribly lazy passages of play. We are yet to see the real ugliness we saw in 2015. Hopefully it turns around before it gets to that point.

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I personally think joe was worse when Hooker was forward a few weeks ago.

Why hasn’t Joe got a goal kicking coach?

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Not sure losing 3 players who combined for 11 games last year is much of a reason for our performances this year.

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Fixed!

Everything.

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What’s gone wrong? Daniher.

That’s it. Daniher has gone wrong.

For me, if we moved the ball in any normal type way down the ground he might have a chance to break out of his rut. Our pear shaped form is not Joe’s fault.

What gets me is that last year our forward line had functioned the best I’ve seen in years so what do they do? Change the ■■■■■■■ forwards coach of course, because it just makes so much sense.

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While Jobe was a shadow of himself he still had the highest number of centre clearances (53) and highest average clearances (4.8) of any Essendon player in 2017. He hasnt effectively been replaced. You also wonder whether the absence of Jobe has also put more focus / pressure on Merrett leading to a downturn in his effectiveness.

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Might be easier to list what’s gone right.
It will be a very short list.

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Many good Points.

But what about a plan B, when the opposition employ tactics to ‘not allow us to play the way we want to play’?

Fk that line is starting to ■■■■ me!!!

Its the coaches responsibility to fix what i see as a teams inability to withstand,then counter the opposition.

I dont know the answer,im not a coach on any level.

But i see the problem, thats for sure.

We need a plan A before we can implement a plan B.

Righto. Danihers in good form and it’s all the midfielders fault. Got it.