threenewpadlocks
Brownlow Medallist
I'm trying to measure Beveridge by the things that's fair for him to control. He can't control if oppositions kick well at goal, for instance, and a bit better luck for that across the season would have gotten us to the top four. The loss to Sydney when we had in-game injuries was a bit of a bummer (especially at the time people thought it could mean we could miss finals), but many were in the post-match thread talking about how unlucky we were to lose that, because Sydney found a way to kick 16.6 for that game, for example. If we were fair to Bevo in the aftermath of the game, we can be equally fair to the ultimate implications of whether he did or didn't coach us to top 4 by the end of the season.Agree. But you've been framing the argument that if we had won 1 more game and if he had won x amount of finals and that we're/he's disadvantaged because of the draw etc, etc.
It's quite obvious that you think he's a good coach. You have been apologizing and putting a positive spin on everything he and the club have done for as long as I can be bothered to remember.
Your entitled to your opinion and that's fine. I'd rate at least 5 coaches that made finals as better coaches tactically than Bevo.
Many of the things that he can control (like how to set up the team in pre-season, tactically, and decisions of where to play players) distribute themselves randomly, to some extent, across games. I've made this point a million times before, but less more likely to win games in the future, if in the previous two games before that one, we won one game by 10 points and a second by 20, as opposed to losing one game by 5 points and winning another by 55. I'm not saying there's no skill in coaching to a win on game day - if the numbers were +10/+20 and -5/4+0, I think that's fair enough to call the first set of margins better. But not compared to -5/+55.
We had the second-best percentage on the year. I'm not saying it means that we were the second-best team on the year, because it's a somewhat imprecise measurement, because running up scores against non-finals teams isn't really equal to how you measure up in competitive games against other best teams (fair enough). But it's also not a completely worthless measurement and you shouldn't discount it too much, so I would argue that that pushes us down to being the second best team (measured by percentage) to at worst the fourth or fifth best-team on the year. so the fact that it merely manifested itself to sixth on the ladder is somewhat unlucky and, to some extent, out of Bevo's control. Additionally, we were unfortunate to play a team that also had good form in the second half of the year in finals at their home ground (Hawthorn), rather than play a team with patchier second-half of the season form, like GWS, Sydney, Geelong or Carlton, all whom we beat in the second half of the year.