Golumless
A bigger deal out west.
RD 12 - We lost the game and the centre clearances 18-13 with Anderson / Rowell toweling us up. Our midfield that day was Laird, Dawson, Sloane, Keays (with a touch of Pedlar/Rachele).
Rd 21 - We won the game and won the centre clearances 13-7. Our midfield that day was primarily Laird, Dawson, Crouch with Sloane/Schoenberg attending 35% and a touch of soligo.
For me the key difference is Crouch. We need to let him go head to head with Rowell.
Big time. A team that lacked a bit of grunt on the inside (i mean, we were ok, but were also overloading) "found" a guy in who could perform at a high level on minimal minutes. Especially now if we're looking to bring in Rankine into the midfield mix as a fourth, who whilst someone with the scope to be a serious ball winner on the inside*, isn't exactly the guy you want at the bottom of the pack. Crouch could well be the key to a deep finals run just as another reliable foil to Dawson/Rankine.
One of the sadder aspects of 2023 is had we looked into the Crouch well mid-season, we likely make the preliminary seeing just how much it did tighten up our game (well, that or our shooting cleaned up). Seeing we'd shown an ability to mix it with the big boys in Collingwood/Brisbane away, who knows how far we would have gone. This is a group who has shown it does like the bigger matches - and stumbles on the nothing ones.
I don't think we head to head him with Rowell though. It's almost a case of copy what we did in 2023 in the sense of Laird & Dawson gets 75-80%, Crouch gets 65-70% and you siphon some of the 5th-6th minutes into getting Rankine 55% of time in the CBA. It does suck we have Geelong next week so it's a bit hard to justify going full bore and using Dawson/Laird at 85-90% like we did against Sydney just to build some momentum into the season.
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