I may be wrong, but I've checked our boards since Saturday's loss, and have seen very little on the poor performance by the HFC on Saturday night. Obviously I could be incorrect, and it could be the fact that there's been tonnes of Judd threads, but I thought I'd begin this, because personally I thought our performance was digarceful, and didn't warrant any excuses.
Straight off the bat, we have better playing personnel than North, particularly since Jones was out. Next, I would say that in a finals performance, I'd expect a solid performance at the very least, which our game was nowhere near.
First off, I couldn't believe how often the forward 50 entries were kicked to Buddy. I'm sure Clarkson wouldn't have wanted that, because he played down Buddy's performance against Adelaide, so I honestly believe many hawks players had stars in their eyes and thought that Buddy was the only person who could win the game. But the fact is that we have Roughead and Boyle, who both are good footballers. Kicking to Buddy so often made it so predictable to their defence, and lost the opportnity for others kicking goals. As a consequence Buddy was double teamed, and they got a lot of rebound out of defence.
Second. Why were they targeting Harvey with physicality, when all you had to do is what Geelong did and put a solid tag on him. Against Adelaide, we identified who we needed to stop, McLeod, and put a tagger on him. We didn't rough him up at all. Doing what we did to Harvey, just took our eyes off the ball, and setup a mentality of playing reaction football.
As with my first point, I also thought our forward 50 entries were generally very sloppy, and that none, apart from Young, tried to run the ball to take a shot for goal. It was pretty clear that North were zoning, so why didn't they run the ball. Too often players went backwards by hand, to make an assesment, instead of taking thm on. Don't give me 'Shinboner spirit", "they put on great pressure' bs, Adelaide put more pressure on us than North, but in that game we played more attacking like we had nothing to lose.
Sure Hodge was debilitated, but Sewell played a great game on Harvey, and when he switch to Harris, he took him out of the game. Perhaps Hodge's was worse, and maybe Clarkson did fail in not putting him on hb, or more often as a forward.
We really ran out off puff in the end, and it could've been that we're a young group that's gone further, and consequently used up all our gas. But I really think that normally we outrun the opposition rather than outclass them, and on this occasion we couldn't do that, so lost by a larger margin than expected.
Enough, I could go on, but in summary I was very frustrated watching the game, and it reminded me much of the 2000 finals loss against them which we should've won. Hopefully we're not going down that path.
I hope that Clarkson did a thorough analysis of the game, and realises that the opposition weren't better than the one before; that we were very, very ordinary and some decisions and player development need to be addessed to certain individuals (namely Lewis).
Thoughts?
Straight off the bat, we have better playing personnel than North, particularly since Jones was out. Next, I would say that in a finals performance, I'd expect a solid performance at the very least, which our game was nowhere near.
First off, I couldn't believe how often the forward 50 entries were kicked to Buddy. I'm sure Clarkson wouldn't have wanted that, because he played down Buddy's performance against Adelaide, so I honestly believe many hawks players had stars in their eyes and thought that Buddy was the only person who could win the game. But the fact is that we have Roughead and Boyle, who both are good footballers. Kicking to Buddy so often made it so predictable to their defence, and lost the opportnity for others kicking goals. As a consequence Buddy was double teamed, and they got a lot of rebound out of defence.
Second. Why were they targeting Harvey with physicality, when all you had to do is what Geelong did and put a solid tag on him. Against Adelaide, we identified who we needed to stop, McLeod, and put a tagger on him. We didn't rough him up at all. Doing what we did to Harvey, just took our eyes off the ball, and setup a mentality of playing reaction football.
As with my first point, I also thought our forward 50 entries were generally very sloppy, and that none, apart from Young, tried to run the ball to take a shot for goal. It was pretty clear that North were zoning, so why didn't they run the ball. Too often players went backwards by hand, to make an assesment, instead of taking thm on. Don't give me 'Shinboner spirit", "they put on great pressure' bs, Adelaide put more pressure on us than North, but in that game we played more attacking like we had nothing to lose.
Sure Hodge was debilitated, but Sewell played a great game on Harvey, and when he switch to Harris, he took him out of the game. Perhaps Hodge's was worse, and maybe Clarkson did fail in not putting him on hb, or more often as a forward.
We really ran out off puff in the end, and it could've been that we're a young group that's gone further, and consequently used up all our gas. But I really think that normally we outrun the opposition rather than outclass them, and on this occasion we couldn't do that, so lost by a larger margin than expected.
Enough, I could go on, but in summary I was very frustrated watching the game, and it reminded me much of the 2000 finals loss against them which we should've won. Hopefully we're not going down that path.
I hope that Clarkson did a thorough analysis of the game, and realises that the opposition weren't better than the one before; that we were very, very ordinary and some decisions and player development need to be addessed to certain individuals (namely Lewis).
Thoughts?
