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chaosball32
Debutant
- May 1, 2024
- 113
- 441
- AFL Club
- Fremantle
The emotion of Saturday has now subsided a bit, whilst I’m still pretty peeved we blew a top 2 spot on the ladder in such a tight season, there’s no use dwelling on it
What has become a worrying trend this year is our inability to close out tight games. We were in winning positions late in the Carlton, Port, Sydney and Hawthorn games and went into shutdown mode too early in each of these games and it cost us in 3 out of 4 of these games and very nearly cost us against Sydney too. We more or less ran out of legs in the latter 2 games but the Hawks absolutely steamrolled us in the last 10 minutes, particularly in the stoppages and the contested ball, our defenders couldn’t keep up with the repeat entries and started losing almost every 1-on-1, and our lack of urgency when we did have possession and instead opting to chip around our d50 for several minutes didn’t exactly instil confidence. We rolled over and died, sort of like in the Bulldogs game, but the difference was this game was very much still alive
Just wondering what has changed since 2022, the reason we were a top 4 team that year wasn’t our ability to finish off teams but rather how good we were in the late and tight game situations, it’s how we beat Adelaide, Geelong, Hawthorn and GWS and the Bulldogs in the EF, partly thanks to our supreme fitness and our ability to not lose our heads and go into safe and conservative mode. That has since seemed to have evaporated. I know the list turnover has been somewhat significant since then but our older guys aren’t stepping up and our younger guys aren’t dealing with the pressure, and then you get what happened Saturday
What has become a worrying trend this year is our inability to close out tight games. We were in winning positions late in the Carlton, Port, Sydney and Hawthorn games and went into shutdown mode too early in each of these games and it cost us in 3 out of 4 of these games and very nearly cost us against Sydney too. We more or less ran out of legs in the latter 2 games but the Hawks absolutely steamrolled us in the last 10 minutes, particularly in the stoppages and the contested ball, our defenders couldn’t keep up with the repeat entries and started losing almost every 1-on-1, and our lack of urgency when we did have possession and instead opting to chip around our d50 for several minutes didn’t exactly instil confidence. We rolled over and died, sort of like in the Bulldogs game, but the difference was this game was very much still alive
Just wondering what has changed since 2022, the reason we were a top 4 team that year wasn’t our ability to finish off teams but rather how good we were in the late and tight game situations, it’s how we beat Adelaide, Geelong, Hawthorn and GWS and the Bulldogs in the EF, partly thanks to our supreme fitness and our ability to not lose our heads and go into safe and conservative mode. That has since seemed to have evaporated. I know the list turnover has been somewhat significant since then but our older guys aren’t stepping up and our younger guys aren’t dealing with the pressure, and then you get what happened Saturday