Coach Fages and the coaching group
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Nunez
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To replace Gunking as FF.
Lyons would have to mark the ball within 35 meters of goal to be chance to make the distance, can barely kick it over a cake tin.
- Mar 12, 2003
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It's the classic conundrum isn't it, between attack and defence. Do we go for JL to help us win more clearances, or do we go for Dev to help mitigate the impact of opposition clearances?
My concern is not so much the volume of clearances, either way, but the quality of them. Ours are poor, but when we concede them we really get opened up. I'm just not sure Lyons will help us on either front.
If Lyons helps us win a clearance he's just another Neale type, when what we really need is more leg drive to help us take the ball from inside to outside.
But on the flipside he's not going to be much help at all once we lose grip on the ball in there.
Dev on the other hand may not help us win more clearances, but I don't think he will do any worse than what has been happening in there. But on the defence side he offers far more, will chase, and his tackling is excellent when he gets there, certainly compared to the rest of the team.
To be fair he kicked a superb 50m goal against Melbourne. I'm hardly chairman of the Jarryd Lyons fan club but let's at least make our criticisms fair and justified. You would have been right 12 months ago when he was clearly hampered.
- May 3, 2015
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Rayner usually just follows his opponent around in centre bounces anyway
Rayner can do that spasmodically, McCluggage quite often. Could Bailey be the answer... I thought for a couple of games before his recent injury he seemed to be finding some pretty good midfield form.
Conundrum is I love Bailey playing primarily forward as he is so dangerous in F50 and a very hard matchup for the opposition defence.... hard for any team to find 3 decent match ups for Charlie, Zac and Linc.
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Just been watching the first half of the third quarter. Featuring Dev Rob going into 3 centre bounces. We were the next to score from each of them and he was influential during that time.
To me it's becoming nearly as much of a no-brainer as playing with only two tall forwards.
Time for our coaching group to swallow their pride and nut up. The future is here and now.
To me it's becoming nearly as much of a no-brainer as playing with only two tall forwards.
Time for our coaching group to swallow their pride and nut up. The future is here and now.
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- Mar 12, 2003
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He's better overhead than probably most of us give him credit for as well. Remember him getting a free in a one on one aerial contest inside 50 v Richmond and against Adelaide was able to halve a number of overhead contests when outnumbered or out of position.
I acknowledge it's not a key part of an inside mid's arsenal, but he's certainly a lot better than Neale in this regard and definitely doesn't lack courage in the air.
I acknowledge it's not a key part of an inside mid's arsenal, but he's certainly a lot better than Neale in this regard and definitely doesn't lack courage in the air.
Agree 100%, Dev was a massive accumulator of the ball in his draft year when he won player of the National Championships, IMO he is a Lachie Neale type with a better defensive game, probably wont get to Lachie's overall level but I think he could be a more than handy role player inside and on transition both ways .... at least until Ashcroft gets back half way through next season.
Morbidly_Obese
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Nunez
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Would rather Dev.
- Oct 13, 2015
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Big few weeks coming for Cam Bruce. The stat sheet since losing Ashcroft absolutely makes a mockery of the performance of our midfield.
Yes, we may have "won" centre clearances 15-12, but the vast majority of our "wins" were scrambled/high hack kicks forward, or sideways. Compare that with Adelaide's wins which were more often than not comprehensive and clean, straight out the front.
Then of course we have our "around the ground" stoppages, which are equally a mess but at least the stat sheet supports that.
It is unfathomable that we needed Ashcroft so much. Compare this to when we lost Neale after a third of the 2021 season... We actually looked better during that period, and with the benefit of hindsight a great deal of credit has to go to Dale Tapping for that. Indeed, it was only when Neale returned that the wheels started to fall off in that season.
I'm hardly an expert in midfield setups. I mean to be honest I'm hardly an expert in any of it but I feel far more comfortable discussing forward line setups, having coached that to at least some extent in the past.
But the three aspects I was really concerned about on Saturday were
And don't get me started on our tackling, or lack thereof
- the setups, as above;
- the gaping holes in our mid zone defence, allowing Adelaide to waltz through almost at will and set up really soft scoring opportunities; and
- The complete absence of any numbers getting front and centre to marking contests in general play. I mean, watch the replay, it is so stark. It's been the obvious place to go since Ron Barassi started coaching this back in the 70s, and heck we even won the 2002 Grand Final on the back of that very instruction. But we weren't able or didn't want to do it at all on Saturday.
One thing I did pick up live at the game. Cam Rayner, for the couple of centre bounces he was in at, lined up on the front side of the circle. What on earth do we expect to happen here? Surely we want him on the back side of the circle, charging through the pack and out the front?
If we're starting anyone at the front, make it Zorko or Dev, who can charge BACK through the contest area, either pressuring/tackling, or gathering, and then being able to feed back to the oncoming Wilmot/Coleman/McKenna if Rayner has already gone past. Dunkley or Neale can start at the back of the contest and hold there like a close in fielder in cricket, ready to move laterally to cut off an opposition attack.
That would be my simpleton approach to our midfield setups right now. Probably flawed, but would it really be any worse than what we saw on Saturday?
It's frustrating that the problem is clearly evident, but finding a solution is not at all straightforward.
I'd like to think we could solve this by giving Dev some solid centre bounce time, but I'm just not sure how much difference one player will make right now. It certainly wouldn't be fair on him to go in there with 2 rounds to play, having hardly played in there at all this year.
I'm pleased Fages finally highlighted the fact that we looked fatigued, and normally I'd agree with him. I'd say yep, 6 day break, long trip back from Perth, fair enough for us to be a bit flat. But that doesn't explain
- How we had 11 shots to 3 in the last quarter against St Kilda last year after exactly the same trip (and St Kilda at that stage of the season had a better record than Adelaide do now); or
- All our other fadeouts we've had this season. I mean, all these excuses are starting to wear a bit thin. First we had the lights go out, then we had a bit of "cue in the rack", then we had some "our situational training needs some work", then we had "oh they're a good team, they're always going to come at us", now we have "6 day break, coming back from Perth". And this week I suppose it will be "oh well we know that Collingwood are such a great last quarter team". At the end of the day I'm a bit of a data guy, and when you draw the line of best fit through all those excuses it screams pretty loud and clear, "we just ain't fit enough". And you can draw that same line right through the recent showings of our VFL team too.
Credit where it's due tho. Our situational training has clearly made a difference. We handled the final few minutes of Saturday's game extremely well. It's a bit of a high wire act being camped in your defensive 50 like that... Much better to play the same way down in your own attacking 50.
The best example I've ever seen of this is when Collingwood beat Melbourne late last year. Go back and watch the replay... The ball spends the final 7 minutes of actual playing time (so 10+ minutes of real time) in Collingwood's forward 50, with them holding a 7 point lead or so. Ball up after throw in after ball up. So ugly it's beautiful.
But of course you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig. A 22 point lead midway through the last quarter playing at home in warm conditions should have become a 6-7 goal win, and this has become the story of our season. We shouldn't need to spend the last 5 minutes of the game camped in our defensive 50, hanging on for dear life.
But it's becoming more and more graphic the longer the season goes, so much so that even the Vic media have clued into it, with Hudson, King and Dixon all making a song and dance about it in the last 48 hours. You can bet your life every team we play between now and the end of the year will be arming themselves with this knowledge, the same as teams (including us) did against Melbourne last year.
I want to end on a good note tho
Smashed for disposals and uncontested ball (ie "the outside"), beaten at inside 50s, clearances. You take that set of numbers and put it into any of our recent seasons, and we're losing pretty badly.
The fact we still won (or even got close) on Saturday is a tribute to the methods we spent all summer training. Our ability to score from fast turnover is the one thing keeping us in games, it is sustainable under pressure and in September, and it looks like whatever we do achieve between now and October will be almost completely attributable to that.
Good post. I’d add that we’ve played games with too many stoppages the last month, over 80 total in each game (I think champion data says the comp average is in the 60s). As a result we have had less chances to turn the ball over and score and we’ve been forced into an arm wrestle.
Adelaide have forced us into this twice by clamping Neale and preventing clean clearances and clearance dominance. While Will wasn’t averaging a crazy number of clearances, I recall that at one stage he was #1 in the comp for his clearances turning into possession for us - I.e a mark or an open chain via a handball/kick.
Our raw clearances are down and our effectiveness from them is down. Need to correct the raw numbers and take territory so we can set up and force turnovers higher up the ground.
Thankfully in some respects Collingwood won’t want to play a stoppage game against us and won’t change how they play for us, so while we could get exposed by their transition game it also creates opportunities.
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I just wish he had a bit more composure to help compensate for his limitations disposing of the ball.
I'm not a huge wrap for him at present but he does crack in as hard as he can and it's not inconceivable that with a few more games under his belt he could improve his disposal.
Some players are just never able too . He seems a reasonably intelligent sort of player so I think with him there's some hope.
The thing that has ground my gears the most about umpiring over the past year or three has been the reluctance to pay holding the balls on players who take possession and just clutch the ball to their chests when tackled - and we're the biggest culprits at it.
If you are rewatching the clearances in the center again, count how many times our player that's attacking the ball come from the goal side of the contest to the defensive side. I feel like it happens more times then not, and is normally Neale doing it.
If you think of the circle as a clock and our goals being at 3oclock, we normally position roughly 3, 12 and 6 and that's normally Neale / McCluggage / Dunkley. Neale then moves from 3 to the center when Oscar tries to tap it to his feet. He's then looking to give it to 12, who then tries to give it to 6 for the clearance.
The problem is this strategy gets us going backwards or sideways. The person at 6 (defensive side of the circle) never goes in for the ball like you are suggesting Rayner does.
Most likely because Oscar is not a good enough ruckman to win the tap so decisively.
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Was listening to the ESPN podcast today and they were talking about CBA’s and they said that out of all players in the AFL this year, when Zac Bailey attends a centre bounce we have the highest clearance percentage in the league at 50%.
Max Gawn was second at 49.7%
We need to get 3KZ to email that stat to Chris Fagan, apparently he has a direct line.
The first time I saw Rayner line up in the middle, he lined up at 3, then we had two players line up at 8 and 9.
I commented to people I was sitting with that the set up looked wrong, and Cam should be at 8.
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I have that #2 on my list behind not paying off the ball holding free kicks. And we are also one of the biggest culprits of that (except for once against the Demons in 2021 when we got pinged a few times and inexplicably went away from holding/grabbing petracca and oliver and got rinsed).
- May 3, 2015
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Coincidentally there was a similar stat about Lester and centre clearances a few years back
Dalions
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I was going to bring that up but I thought that would spark another conversation entirely.
KissKiss
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He basically never went back into the middle after that came out. Think it was off a very low number of clearances and he may have said he didn't like playing midfield or something similar
Gadzorks
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Are you auditioning for role as 3kz's bff?
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