News Hinkley is staying -3 year contract extension.

[Powerage]

I remember it as you posted that he said kicking on their non dominate side, ie he kicks better on his left foot than 90% of the natural right footers in the team rather than 90% of the whole group. IIRC there was a discussion on how many players wont kick with their left and do dickie checkies and stuff up.

This is so true. It amazes me that players can be picked high up in the draft, but be completely unable to competently dispose of the ball on their non dominant side.

It has been proven in most sports that athletes struggle more when playing against left-handers, or those who are ambidextrous. Be it tennis, football, soccer etc.

It is so much easier to corral a player who can only dispose of the ball on one side. Players study their opponents closely, and they know who can dispose of the ball on both sides and who cannot.

Similarly it annoys me that our kicking accuracy does not appear to have improved significantly since 2013.

Kicking skills, and and the ability to dispose of the ball on the non-dominant side, should be something that significant time is spent on in football. Unfortunately, that certainly doesn't seem to be the case.

 

[Janus]

I remember it as you posted that he said kicking on their non dominate side, ie he kicks better on his left foot than 90% of the natural right footers in the team rather than 90% of the whole group. IIRC there was a discussion on how many players wont kick with their left and do dickie checkies and stuff up.

You're right - and it wasn't 90%, it was over 75%. It was, verbatim:

"I can kick better on my left - and I'm 50 - better than three quarters of our team. And it's because they don't train it at a young age, so they don't have the motor skills required...then you go try to train it at 20 and it's too hard to do. They can use it to get out of jail, but they can't use it effectively."

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Possibly unpopular opinion:

Practicing kicking is basically pointless once players get to the AFL. Set shot routine can be fixed, but raw kicking skills are basically locked in by the time players are drafted.....

That's just bulldust. You can improve and you have muscle memory and you need to practice to keep your skills up and improve them. To say nobody can improve between the ages of 18 and 30+ is bulldust. Look at what Shane Crawford said about working with David Rath at Hawthorn who started there in October 2004 and Crawf was around 30 years of age and had played 230 games. From that long David Rath story in 2012 and I posted in the Can't Kick Can'y play thread in May. Read the whole lot and you will see it was driven by Clarko who brought Rath in within a month of getting the job at the Hawks.

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/cant-kick-cant-play-football.1136236/page-4#post-50130487
Does this sounds familiar?
"Early on we were good at getting the ball. We just kept giving it back," Hawthorn legend Shane Crawford recalled. "But when Clarko came in we looked at a lot of video analysing how to fix things. "Whether it was through your core, or ball drop or over-balancing, those little things obviously work. "Hawthorn has gone from a side which turned the footy over a lot to a side quite amazing the way it uses the footy and dissects the opposition." The Hawks declined the Herald Sun's requests to speak to Rath this week.

Don't try and re-invent the wheel, but put some quality air in the tyre.
But, as familiar as the Hawks' masked man is with the kicking analysis technology, the beauty of Rath's teaching to the players was its simplicity, an observer said. "He was just very meticulous in the degrees of improvement in his kicking analysis with the guys," he said. "He wasn't trying to re-invent the wheel. It might just be a 1cm or 2cm change in your elbow position or something like that. "A lot of the time he was just stating the obvious and repeated behaviours became habitual."

#marginalgains

If we average 7 more efficient kicks per games across the whole season we go from 17th in efficiency disposal to 5th. How many close games did we lose this year??

#marginalgains

 

[El_Scorcho]

That's just bulldust. You can improve and you have muscle memory and you need to practice to keep your skills up and improve them. To say nobody can improve between the ages of 18 and 30+ is bulldust. Look at what Shane Crawford said about working with David Rath at Hawthorn who started there in October 2004 and Crawf was around 30 years of age and had played 230 games. From that long David Rath story in 2012 and I posted in the Can't Kick Can'y play thread in May. Read the whole lot and you will see it was driven by Clarko who brought Rath in within a month of getting the job at the Hawks.

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/cant-kick-cant-play-football.1136236/page-4#post-50130487
Does this sounds familiar?
"Early on we were good at getting the ball. We just kept giving it back," Hawthorn legend Shane Crawford recalled. "But when Clarko came in we looked at a lot of video analysing how to fix things. "Whether it was through your core, or ball drop or over-balancing, those little things obviously work. "Hawthorn has gone from a side which turned the footy over a lot to a side quite amazing the way it uses the footy and dissects the opposition." The Hawks declined the Herald Sun's requests to speak to Rath this week.

Don't try and re-invent the wheel, but put some quality air in the tyre.
But, as familiar as the Hawks' masked man is with the kicking analysis technology, the beauty of Rath's teaching to the players was its simplicity, an observer said. "He was just very meticulous in the degrees of improvement in his kicking analysis with the guys," he said. "He wasn't trying to re-invent the wheel. It might just be a 1cm or 2cm change in your elbow position or something like that. "A lot of the time he was just stating the obvious and repeated behaviours became habitual."

#marginalgains

If we average 7 more efficient kicks per games across the whole season we go from 17th in efficiency disposal to 5th. How many close games did we lose this year??

#marginalgains

#marginalgains indeed.

I'm just saying that totally rebuilding someone's kicking action to make it 5% better is a long and arduous process and we'd be better off using that time to absolutely nail down ball movement strategies to make the entire team a well oiled machine, because a good gameplan that players believe in will turn average kicks into good kicks.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

#marginalgains indeed.

I'm just saying that totally rebuilding someone's kicking action to make it 5% better is a long and arduous process and we'd be better off using that time to absolutely nail down ball movement strategies to make the entire team a well oiled machine, because a good gameplan that players believe in will turn average kicks into good kicks.

Yeah rebuilding someone from scratch would be a waste of time. Who suggested that? Its about being smart and working smart not just the mantra of working hard. Your mate Butcher proved we didn't work smart to help him. He had no problem kicking the ball accurately around the field, but it was all in his head when he kicked for goal. Working smart would have been working on his head as much as his ball drop, holding of the ball, his run up etc.

 

[El_Scorcho]

Yeah rebuilding someone from scratch would be a waste of time. Who suggested that? Its about being smart and working smart not just the mantra of working hard. Your mate Butcher proved we didn't work smart to help him. He had no problem kicking the ball accurately around the field, but it was all in his head when he kicked for goal. Working smart would have been working on his head as much as his ball drop, holding of the ball, his run up etc.

I did say at the start that things like set shot routines are different because they're easier to fix in isolation.

Basic kicking skills are really hard to make a significant difference with. How many players have started their career as an average kick and managed to turn themselves into a genuinely elite kick? Not many.

You can, however, make a bunch of players who have 7/10 kicking skills look like an elite kicking team by developing an elite gameplan and system of ball movement.

 

[pastmyprimus]

Part of the problem is that our best kicks play in defence (Hartlett and Houston) while the players who struggle (like Ollie, Boak and Ebert) are the very players who deliver a lot of the ball into our forward line. And the scene that scares me the most is seeing Impey charge towards the forward line with ball in hand.

 

[Portology]

That's just bulldust. You can improve and you have muscle memory and you need to practice to keep your skills up and improve them. To say nobody can improve between the ages of 18 and 30+ is bulldust. Look at what Shane Crawford said about working with David Rath at Hawthorn who started there in October 2004 and Crawf was around 30 years of age and had played 230 games. From that long David Rath story in 2012 and I posted in the Can't Kick Can'y play thread in May. Read the whole lot and you will see it was driven by Clarko who brought Rath in within a month of getting the job at the Hawks.

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/cant-kick-cant-play-football.1136236/page-4#post-50130487
Does this sounds familiar?
"Early on we were good at getting the ball. We just kept giving it back," Hawthorn legend Shane Crawford recalled. "But when Clarko came in we looked at a lot of video analysing how to fix things. "Whether it was through your core, or ball drop or over-balancing, those little things obviously work. "Hawthorn has gone from a side which turned the footy over a lot to a side quite amazing the way it uses the footy and dissects the opposition." The Hawks declined the Herald Sun's requests to speak to Rath this week.

Don't try and re-invent the wheel, but put some quality air in the tyre.
But, as familiar as the Hawks' masked man is with the kicking analysis technology, the beauty of Rath's teaching to the players was its simplicity, an observer said. "He was just very meticulous in the degrees of improvement in his kicking analysis with the guys," he said. "He wasn't trying to re-invent the wheel. It might just be a 1cm or 2cm change in your elbow position or something like that. "A lot of the time he was just stating the obvious and repeated behaviours became habitual."

#marginalgains

If we average 7 more efficient kicks per games across the whole season we go from 17th in efficiency disposal to 5th. How many close games did we lose this year??

#marginalgains

The Hawks both recruited for good kicks, as well as seeking to improve like no one before or since. You and El Scorcho both have a point.

Hawthorn seem to have assumed that improving an 'average' kick to a 'good' one is harder than or less 'impactful' on games than improving a 'good' kick to an 'elite' kick. Take your time and 'start with the best material' and later on as trade opened up, trade to the plan as well seems to have been their idea. Fair enough when rebuilding from the bottom. Fair enough if your whole long term plan is built on being able to chip your way through emerging zone structures even under pressure. I'd love to see a chart of where Hawthorn took their shots from at their peak, if they were harder or easier on average, or if a "# possessions in a chain per scoring shot" stat showed some evidence of them seeking to improve position at bit more than others did.

Allowing for the odd run of unimaginative kickouts (!) we seem to be good at clearing the D50 but poorer at entering F50 and at finishing and we have been like this throughout the Ken era. Is our 'problem' really the same one the hawks were solving?

Set shots are routine, analyze away ad infinitum.

Snap shots under pressure under fatigue, how much of that is going to improve by practice? Some folks are naturals. Maybe you spend some time looking for technical things that might help a few blokes, maybe you get a few little wins out of that but how often will they execute that correctly under pressure and fatigue? Here it seems to me El Scorcho has the point: getting to better positions, reducing the degree of difficulty just a bit is more likely to have a shorter time to impact.

And now the bits everyone neglects. In an already full program what things does Hinkley drop to make room for all this? How many extra resources does he need to do the ongoing "analysis"? Not just "here are your flaws, but here's how often you did this many of those things that fix it" To an extent that can be parallelized if you throw people and media at it. Do the lads consciously pick on this area as one "difference" between say seventh and second as you point out and agree to invest more of their own time in it because they exist to win premierships?

Do we have time for all this development as the Hawks set out to do more than a decade ago or in today's far more open trade environment do we just invest in more 'naturals' aka ... Motlop as quick fixes, and adjust the sails to suit?

 

[Chrizzt]

The best kick at goal on our list can not get a game.
That says it all to me about Ken.

FFS the guy kicked 3.3 and averaged 7 touches in his 3 games that were either big wins or a very competitive loss to the crows. People are making out like he was Tony bloody Lockett in those games and are bewildered as to why he got dropped.

 

[Janus]

Time to set up a Clairefontaine at 1 Port Road.

 

[Nemisis]

Reasons are not excuses

I with you - tried the "reasons are not excuses" in grade 7 and got an extra 3 canes on each hand. I was in the right but still got wacked!

 

[tribey]

FFS the guy kicked 3.3 and averaged 7 touches in his 3 games that were either big wins or a very competitive loss to the crows. People are making out like he was Tony bloody Lockett in those games and are bewildered as to why he got dropped.

He's better defensively than Plugger.

 

[Portology]

Time to set up a Clairefontaine at 1 Port Road.

at least its not a hamstring testing machine

 

[JimmyBeerCans]

He's better defensively than Plugger.

His laziness defensively should never be overshadowed by the trillion goals he kicked.

 

[Ford Fairlane]

He's better defensively than Plugger.

I don't know. Has he ever killed an opposition defender?

 

[AlbertonBloke]

I care if we win the next Showdown, I just don't see it happening.

The maybe who cares was in reference to the crows having a premiership hangover.
The last game we just didnt turn up

 

[AlbertonBloke]

As I have stated numerous times we should have been playing the kids earlier. We then wouldnt have been thrashed by the Crows, we would have had enthusiastic kids not worn out senior players with a loser mentality. The future is most defintely the kids. The problem with Ken is everything is done way too late and this has been a problem since 2015.

Ken put faith in some blokes to turn it around but they didnt. I dont think Marshall was ready and they were being a bit too conservative with Doogs.
But if Doogs got injured we would be calling for his head for bringing him in too early.Im not saying Ken is some kind of mesiah but im backing him in to win a flag with this squad barring severe injuries to key players.
If not i'll be there with the rest calling for his head.
Hes got a contract and we have to back our clubs play otherwise we are just another part of the problem i reckon

 

[240volt]

FFS the guy kicked 3.3 and averaged 7 touches in his 3 games that were either big wins or a very competitive loss to the crows. People are making out like he was Tony bloody Lockett in those games and are bewildered as to why he got dropped.

Yeah 3 games that's giving a guy a fair go my arse. They play clowns like Impey every week oh but he is Tony Lockett. It's all very simple mate you can't kick goals you can't win jack.

 

[Us against the rest]

Yeah 3 games that's giving a guy a fair go my arse. They play clowns like Impey every week oh but he is Tony Lockett. It's all very simple mate you can't kick goals you can't win jack.

I understand it's all part of Ken's grand plan but ffs how Impey gets games ahead of many players is mind boggling, what's the point if we don't kick goals, Impey doesn't even know how to snap a goal.

 

[Us against the rest]

Not exactly the model citizen off field either.

 

[240volt]

Not exactly the model citizen off field either.

All he does is runs around like a unregistered dog. We are a country mile away from a GF with this list and this coach.

 

[Us against the rest]

All he does is runs around like a unregistered dog. We are a country mile away from a GF with this list and this coach.

I have just posted my delistings and trades in the
List Management 2017 -Who Stays, Who Goes?

 

[tribey]

All he does is runs around like a unregistered dog. We are a country mile away from a GF with this list and this coach.

Nonsense.

In 3-4 years when Ryder, Boak, Gray, Dixon, Ebert, Hartlett, Pittard and Westhoff have the games and experience under their belts we'll be unstoppable. Don't count out Impey either.

Ken's got this.

 

[240volt]

Nonsense.

In 3-4 years when Ryder, Boak, Gray, Dixon, Ebert, Hartlett, Pittard and Westhoff have the games and experience under their belts we'll be unstoppable. Don't count out Impey either.

Ken's got this.

I see your point more games and experience.
Can't wait till next season!!

 

[Visenfest]

When the Crows had a mediocre coach and culture, they sacked the coach, grew a pair and set about improving their culture. We have a mediocre coach and culture, and just decided to double down. Go us.