Autopsy 2022 Rd 3 Nervous Blues beat Hawks by 1 point

[El Topo]

Re-watching this game, our biggest failing and the reason we looked out of gas and let them back in was our inability to lock the ball in our forward end.

Why this happened is because they are a good intercepting and running from defence team but the main reason was our kicking and some really poor efforts from some of our players to make a contest.

De Koning was a liability, there were far too many times he failed to make a contest and they marked in front of him. There were others but he was one of the main ones. This has to be something that we own, we must bring the ball to ground, some really poor discipline in this area.

There were a heap of poor kicks that just went down their throats. In fact it was a circus just how many kicks went straight to Hawthorn players unopposed in our forward half.

This was something that has plagued us the last few seasons, we have been an interceptors dream and it snuck back in. We didn't create those breaks in play where the play stops and slows down and we either have a shot or just keep it forward. We turned it over and turned it over a lot.

This is going to be something we need to get right or we aren't going to win too many more with this problem, certainly not against the better sides. These errors are something that is really hard to defend against and take a lot of energy to do so.

You take the forward half turnovers out of the game and IMO we win by 5 goals, no problem.

We desperately needed some composure and leadership forward of centre. Looking at you, Cripps...

 

[gbatman]

Interesting listening to Ross the Boss on FC, he attributes the momentum swing towards the small forwards being gassed.

We might need more rotations here. De Koning out for Martin would solve this problem.

 

[gbatman]

We desperately needed some composure and leadership forward of centre. Looking at you, Cripps...

Yeah we are a little bit gung ho. I think that was from the start we had, when you score so heavily so quickly you just want to keep it going.

Comes a time when you chip it around, switch play a bit more and move it slower.

The turnovers did not help our defending, some of them was just bad football but there would have been less of them if we slowed our ball movement earlier and made sure we weren't outnumbered forward of the ball a bit more.

There are a few things we can do here. I think one thing is to play that extra runner forward of the ball which means De Koning is out and Martin or when fit Honey come in. Keep the small forwards fresher. Slow down play a lot more and play more tempo footy is the other thing. We score at our best when going fast forward but we can also butcher it and be scored against doing that.

Vossy has a lot to figure out on what works best for us and that means we are probably unsure on how to play and when to go that way.

 

[Revenant1965]

The great thing about our structures not being quite right going forward after first quarter is that our coaches will be across it. The combo of Voss, Hansen, Clarke, Hamill together with Greaves and Development Coaches, gives me great confidence. This year when we hear about 'learnings', I feel confident that we can know things will change...