Fixed.
Most of the sorry lot couldn’t hit the side of a barn…
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When John Worsfold was appointed I thought some of this would rub off. I know all these aren’t permitted now but I thought they would be playing with more intent.
He knows about captaining a premiership side and coaching one as well.
I don’t know why there is some sort of disconnect.
There’s a good list of blokes he takes out on that video.
1 Teams are clogging up the corridor, forcing us to overuse and go wide. Also has the benefit of starving Zac of the ball.
2 Tackling pressure is way off - probably as a result of the players overworking going so wide all the time.
3. Skill level is off across the board.
4 Backline lacks a genuine gun user or distributor. The only one close to it is Hurley but even then his kicks tend to be ‘slow’.
5. JD’s goal-kicking is still an issue and has cost us at important moments in games this year.
Possible remedies
- Get Zerrett or Tippa maybe playing across half back where their kicking skills can be used to set up attacks.
- Play Goddard as a pure forward.
- Fantasia should never ever play Reserves. Ever.
- JD to grow up and start taking ownership of his goalkicking. No more of these silly snaps or running around. Every shot for the rest of the year needs to be a drop punt and I dont care if he’s next to the point post.
Otherwise, we win 4 or 5 games for the rest of the season, get pick #4 or something and we have a new coach in 2019.
The game changed and we didnt. Lots of out of form key players.
Our coaching team sucks and is league worst.
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Piggybacking off this…
It looks like the gameplan was developed first and then players shoehorned into roles, some who clearly can’t do what is required consistently.
Build your strategy around the personnel you have. It’s on the second slide of the first lecture of Cert III in Sports Coaching.
-edit- Watch what the Cavs do at crunch moments in NBA games. It’s not “centre does this, guard does that”. It’s GIB BALL FKN TO LEBRON. Do you reckon they built that gameplan before he came along?
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addendum, hope JR doesn’t touch it.
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Fair points. However, you get injuries to key personnel and there goes your gameplan. Reckon the Dogs and Tiges built their strategy around their personnel, but made sure first that the personnel were all carbon copies of each other - running midsized tacklers. If key injuries happen, you just backfill with more of the same type of player. Hawks do it - they’ve got some ‘soldier out/soldier in’ w&nkfest term for it. But it works. Stock up your list with 6 foot runners and you can get injuries to key position types (6ft 4+), and it doesn’t matter - you didn’t rely on them anyway. Hawks won a premiership without Buddy, Roughhead playing more like a ruck rover and a joke like Frawley leading the backline. Dogs got one without gun talls, so did Tiges. So absolutely, design your strategies around your players, but don’t rely on a Lebron (or in our case Daniher) for it to work. Rely on the majority of your players having enough foot speed to buy that extra second of two to get a decent 30 kick away, rather than a rushed handpass to no one. Rely on always having two or three at the drop of the ball so that a Daniher doesn’t have to take a clean mark etc, etc.
Yeah it was a hack example I used but my main point stands. At the moment we have Hurley trying to play the role Kelly did and he just…can’t.
He needs a fkn attitude coach to stop being a lazy fark
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As bad as we’ve been, only Anzac Day saw us battered on the scoreboard. And we’ve scored 80-plus in 4 of the 7 games. All of which is astonishing.
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Honestly think we have about 4/5s of a good squad, just need clearance and defensively accountable mids.
but thats only half of a good team, we need better leaders or the leaders to show better. and we need a simple but effective plan with practiced drills for us to work through traffic. but for the drills to work we need the players to be good at one aspect of it (defending the midfield or moving through it) so the other facet can improve. we can beat ourselves up in training but its not effective if we vs a real opposition and get pantsed ad nauseam.
also sacking neeld and skippy would probably help.
That is true.
But to counter that… We’ve only played 2 teams in the top 8 (and beat one of them). Our results thus far have been against pretty average teams.
I do wonder if the brilliance of our forward line masked most of our issues last year.
We didn’t really play great football last year until the Geelong game, which incidentally was Stewart’s first game.
That forward six of Daniher, Hooker, Stewart, Fantasia, Tippa and Green, was responsible for most of the damage we did last year, and essentially all the scoreboard damage. Even though we were conceeding similar scores to what we are this year, enough teams allowed us to move the ball quickly down to our forwards who were in red hot form, for us to look like a legitimate threat.
It’s also interesting to note that any time we went in without that exact mix of players (i.e with Lav, Begley, McKernan etc), it never worked quite as well.
But just purely on goal numbers, this is how far down we are. Our top six from last year in goals per game:
Daniher 2.83
Hooker 2.05
Fantasia 1.95
Tippa 1.48
Stewart 1.38
Green 1.00
But this year:
Stewart 1.86
Stringer. 1.43
Green 1.40
Daniher 1.14
Hooker 1.00
Tippa. 1.00
And when you take into account Hooker being up the other end and Green currently being injured, our next two are:
Bellchambers. 0.67
Smith. 0.57
The combination of injuries, poor form, players being moved, new players in there and a now league-wide ability to stop us moving the ball quickly from defence, means that our only real weapon has been totally nullified.
Last year we regularly had the Joe and Raz show. This year, we haven’t even had the Joe or Raz show. Or the Hooker show. Or the Tippa show…
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Absolutely. It wasn’t a defence of anything. We’ve been deadset deplorable. I think we’ve actually got off lightly for results.
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Check how often Richmond has the Jack Riewoldt show.
Who needs a tall spine and the elite ball movement we practiced all pre-season.
What you need is 22 players who win the ball significantly more than 50% of the time so you dont have to rely on an outnumber that ruins team balance, then set up a withering press and lock the ball in your forward line, then allow 10+ individuals to kick goals . Its a diffuse target, not the one that stands out like Joe Daniher doing PR in a primary classroom.
The age of the key forward target is over. Double teaming has killed that. The Hawthorn uncontested/precision kicking game was pronounced dead in 2016. That Hawthorn game plan is essentially our game plan to which Worsfold added a press last year. Why? Because our recruitment has favoured skilfull players over ball winners for the last 10 years.
What use is great ball movement if it cannot be executed because of pressure ?
Hawthorn. Smart coach. By round 5 last year Clarkson buried his old game plan and changed it over the next 17 matches. FCS, the team that won the 3 peat with an uncontested game plan out tackles us and picks us off and now sits 4th on the ladder .
Everyone knows we try to execute our corridor game plan. Thats a tactic that is easiest to score from either way, so its high risk. Why does our corridor game plan fail ? pressure, kicking into the corridor in the oppositions F50, poor decisions as to when to centre the ball, always looking for the same players to target.
Everything starts in the midfield. Baker was a Star pointed out how we have robbed Peter to Pay Paul by increasing the number of players around stoppages to win them, only to find that we are down on players in defence and attack, or they are way out of position . Nothing can cover for the lack of ball winning mids. Heppel is winning a lot, but thats mostly when he sweeps in defence. Zac Merret is tagged and is getting hammered. Darcy is too small.
We have a list that lacks enough real competitive animal types above 185 cm. Stringer doesn’t have the tank to play as a mid, Smith is too short. Myers is half a player with no right side and is half as effective as he should be.
Our corridor game plan worked last year enough to win 12 games. Its high risk, our opponents have worked us out and we have become tentative turnover merchants as a result. A significant number of players probably don’t buy into the game plan. ( check the body language on players during games)
Today all the 22 must be able to win the ball, embrace chaos ball inside 50 inside stoppages, execute under pressure and take chances with the ball locked in F50, win the ball at the centre bounce, rinse and repeat.
I loved to watch us play in our 2017 wins, but it was fragile stuff. Carlton and Brisbane worked us out and Sydney out worked us in the final.
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What’s gone wrong?
The season started.
The good teams (ones better than us) have worked out play a press in the middle of the ground and we have nothing!
This stifles run from the backline and makes us chip around the backline. And when your kicking to a 50/50 on the wing it aint pretty.
Also I’ve noticed when teams employ the press most of our guys stand still and when you handball to those stationary targets you are going to get pummeled in this league.
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THIS.[quote=“simmo41, post:65, topic:12915, full:true”]
Piggybacking off this…
It looks like the gameplan was developed first and then players shoehorned into roles, some who clearly can’t do what is required consistently.
Build your strategy around the personnel you have. It’s on the second slide of the first lecture of Cert III in Sports Coaching.
-edit- Watch what the Cavs do at crunch moments in NBA games. It’s not “centre does this, guard does that”. It’s GIB BALL FKN TO LEBRON. Do you reckon they built that gameplan before he came along?
[/quote]
Last year was the first year in forever that I can remember us getting a lot of goals out the back. Our ping off half back was awesome and our forwards were getting a lot of very good looks at it.
We aren’t getting anywhere near the number of fast counter attacking movements that we did last year.
I’d be interested to see the stats on the defensive half turnovers we’re giving up. They feel higher.
There is clearly a personal issue relative to last year at half back and I think teams are making sure they force Zerret to handball at half back too. Also there is a comp wide focus on pressing up at the moment which makes every game look like dream time last year.
All this translates to our forward line getting nothing like the service they had last year. No doubt there are also form and fitness issues forward too but my sense is our ball movement is the bigger issue
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I don’t know why this is an issue. If thats the case, long kick forward down the line to our big contest marking talls. Play crash and bash footy. We can mark it or bring to ground, collapse down hard on the contest, get any of ball up, out of bounds or tackle for free kick. Move the zone up, reset and go from there. Play it like an NFL game.
In fact, given our talls, that’s probably a better game style for us than trying to be flashy picking targets.
Also gives us a plan B when plan A through the corridor fails.
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