Let's review the season as painful as it will be

[DERRINALPHIL]

The last two games have been depressing, so depressing, but now the season is over what is your opinions on our team and players.

I could go through each player but the player threads cover this very well so I will start it off with some random thoughts.

We have not shown any appreciable improvement for years!!!!

My surprise player for this year was Corr, who I have bagged multiple times, but this year he was a handy defender. Not good, only handy which was several lengths better then I ever hoped he could be.

Xerri was the special bonus for the year, the steak knives but my biggest disappointment was Paul Curtis, a player I had great hopes for. I am now doubtful he will have an AFL career.

I saw no great hope in the new coach.

What do you think?

 

[Hazey1977]

I just cannot understand how we're so far behind every other club in every area of the game.... Still!

Sent from my SM-G781B using BigFooty.com mobile app

 

[Gasometer]

Sheeze
Chom
George
Larkey
Xerri
Ldu
Scott
Jy
McK
Durs
Arch
Curtis
Bull


Something to work with

We are 9-12 second and third tiers away from stringing wins together

 

[Gasometer]

I just cannot understand how we're so far behind every other club in every area of the game.... Still!

Sent from my SM-G781B using BigFooty.com mobile app

See my post

No depth

 

[RossHenshaw]

 

[Ashley B]

This season along with about the last 4 of 5 seasons is going in here Now what’s that code again

 

[travelli]

When we cut half our list in 2019/2020 we butchered our culture and played for draft picks.

It doesn't work. We have bottomed out worse than Melbourne ever did.

 

[scottywiper]

An abject disappointment. Just one surprise win would have been nice.
Five years in and same amount of wins and worse percentage.
First half of year was putrid, as was last three weeks.
A few good weeks after bye have conned a lot of people who should know better.
Remarkable that five years in we still have about 20 list cloggers and only a handful of elite youngsters.
When people at the club rave about a player like Drury, I question everything we are doing.
Positives - Sheezel is amazing. The ray of light.
Wardlaw is promising but really tapered off after concussion.
Xerri a massive improver. Well done son.
Same for Archer.
Comben had a good year, hopefully moves forward.
LDU was good at times, but his kicking lets him down.
McKercher a nice player, surely could have been used on ball at some point.
Rest of them, meh. Some more meh than others. Would have liked to see more of Hardeman and W Dawson.
Disagree with opening poster, Curtis looks a very good future player, especially in a very bad team.
Rawlings and Clayton should not be there for draft, but sadly probably will be.
Watching D Ambrosio and Newcombe, two blokes we could have had for nothing, tear us apart was just amazing.
I actually felt more confident at the end of Noble's first season than I do now.
I think we are in for years more pain.

 

[B4Bear]

So who gets the axe on Monday?

I am not sure we can cut too deeply, hev]ce why it will be peripheral players and not, for example ‘Luke Mac’.

 

[The acurate one]

Personally Curtis is a positive for me. 30 goals in the side with the least amount of forward fifties is a great effort.

I’ll let the dust settle before I give my likes, didnt minds, disliked and hated.

 

[Pagans Paddock99]

The last two games have been depressing, so depressing, but now the season is over what is your opinions on our team and players.

I could go through each player but the player threads cover this very well so I will start it off with some random thoughts.

We have not shown any appreciable improvement for years!!!!

My surprise player for this year was Corr, who I have bagged multiple times, but this year he was a handy defender. Not good, only handy which was several lengths better then I ever hoped he could be.

Xerri was the special bonus for the year, the steak knives but my biggest disappointment was Paul Curtis, a player I had great hopes for. I am now doubtful he will have an AFL career.

I saw no great hope in the new coach.

What do you think?

Xerri went from 2nd ruckman to All Australian.

Curtis kicked more goals the Zurhaar and has played 50 games?

Corr was good for the last half of the year but was non-existent the first half? Is it a surprise to want your most experienced defender to hold their own when their competition for spots includes K Dawson, Pink, W Dawson, Nyuon? He done what is expected of your most experienced KPD.

LMac went backwards and can only hope Bergman, Goater and/or Hardeman take his spot off him. More a reflection of the next wave rather than him.

Sheezel stamped himself as our best player.

LDU is a jet that needs some help…

My biggest question is what is it that will actually make us compete again?

Logue, Corr, Comben, Archer should be AFL standard…

Xerri, LDU, Sheezel, Wardlaw, McKercher, Powell should be AFL standard…

Larkey, Zurhaar, Duursma, Curtis should be AFL standard…

That leaves 8 players that are not part of our starting 22 in round 1!

What current AFL players would make the difference between 17th placed and competing for finals?

Max King as a key forward? Pick 2 and 20?

Kossie Picket as a small forward? F1 and Powell?


We could have had a crack at Ginnivan, Bobby hill, Bedford the last couple of years and supposedly were close to landing Ed Richard’s but only offered 3 years?

Where does the immediate improvement come from?

We need that circuit breaker like when the dogs got rid of Griffen and their 1st for Tom Boyd which everyone laughed at, and they won a flag the next year!

It’s going to be a long summer….

RIP season 2024.





Sent from my iPhone using BigFooty.com

 

[Shermanator]

Northball..

 

[DERRINALPHIL]

An addendum on Curtis. I was hoping he would show enough that he could be an elite onballer.

 

[danj]

Maybe we need a coordinated letter campaign through social media to the club expressing our collective disappointment and some none negotiable changes:

---

New Capt no cocaptains
Change of recruitment/list management staff
Change of high performance staff
Resignation of all current board members if we are bottom 6 at end of next season

Otherwise we’ll run a campaign to not renew memberships for the 2026 season.

The rot has to stop somewhere and surely the mob who kept North south can rally to Make North Great Again

 

[Shinboner1]

****ing disgrace

 

[Forever North]

Another rubbish, embarrassing and soul destroying season. Those ‘good performances’ after the bye will probably end up being fools gold. We are miles behind even the 3rd tier teams (St.Kilda, Adelaide, GC). At times I contemplate whether Clarko’s heart is really in it and whether he regrets taking on this mostly shit truck bunch of unmotivated hacks. Apart from 5-6 of them the rest are for the tip. The past 2 weeks have been diabolical and disgraceful. Players checked out, already at the beach clubs in Mykonos, rather than playing for their career and pride.

 

[Only Forwards]

This thread is far too close to the end of the last game to get any sort of objectively reasoned posts about our season that would constitute an actual review.

You want the vibe?

It was a failure by basically all measures.

 

[see see]

If Richmond didn't have such a bad run with injuries, we would've finished a couple of games clear on the bottom of the ladder.

 

[Billy Not Really]

It’s such a huge problem that I think this runs so much deeper than we realise, like we are a rabble, a delusional one.

Failure of a season. One step forwards two steps back is how following this club has felt.

 

[Elite Master]

If Richmond didn't have such a bad run with injuries, we would've finished a couple of games clear on the bottom of the ladder.

Even so our % is worse.

 

[hcd199]

Regression and complacency, complacency and regression. Everyone's especially down on the club right now after a diabolical last three rounds, but really that was just an extension of the problems that were apparent throughout the entire season (yes, including the fabled period "after the bye"). We continued with the culture of just expecting improvement to be the natural outcome of showing up, of heads dropped at the slightest signs of adversity and jubilation at the merest semblance of being on the trajectory of a normal rebuilding side for a month or two. We failed to set any standards and still fell short of them.

You could definitely pluck out a few players and say we saw meaningful improvement from them, but I feel like almost all of them come with significant caveats. Xerri proved completely capable of being the #1 ruck and playing with full intent and impact, but he still lacks in terms of his stoppage craft and general game-sense; his role in our sudden and unexpected midfield malaise - the part of the ground we were supposedly stacked with talent and could bank on while we built the bookends - gets overlooked due to his individual stats sheer and individual improvement. Archer coming on in the second half of the year is probably the one unqualified success story of the season. Corr's turnaround from about Round 8 onwards into being quite dependable one-on-one was very welcome, though not entirely without the brainfades, and hardly the augur of a brighter future that a 30-year-old proved capable. Top-line younger players developing in line with expectations for their age/stage of career or better, despite disrupted continuity (Wardlaw) or defensive limitations (McKercher). Players like Pink and Teakle, without being even close to superstars, offering a basic level of structural functionality that helped to provide glimmers of a gameplan during that halcyon period of honourable losses. Tucker moving to more of a lockdown defensive role second half of the year seems a fit. Hansen showed a bit when few others did in the last two weeks, I didn't see it with him before but maybe something there?

None of the individual growth really amounted to anything collectively though, and there were plenty who regressed and had down or at least indifferent years. I'm less concerned about the individual downs (Scott never quite suited the backline role we trialled early, Simpkin visibly not returning quite right after the Webster hit) and more bothered by what feels like a collective disdain for accountability - the ease of opposition clearances was damning on our midfield group's defensive disinterest, too often a number of our forwards conceded possession hoping for the cheap ball out the back rather than making a genuine contest, frequently we had players caught HTB in open space through lack of awareness (and presumably lack of talk)... all amounting to a side very much the opposite of "hard to beat when they come out to play".

Ultimately failure begets more failure, so it's not totally surprising to see everything break down together - when the team struggles and whatever system we have collapses, cohesion is lost and players retreat into doing all they know how to do independently, which only muddles us further. But pair the often limp efforts on the field with the nauseating sense still permeating from just about all involved at the club that all of this is just a normal part of the difficult process of rebuilding and that we're unquestionably on track, and it really starts to look ugly. I could stomach the stagnation in actual results (for now at least) if there were clear signs that the team as a whole were bedding in a good gameplan, honing their skills, or even just giving their all, but none of that is the case - we're softer, dumber and more rudderless than ever before.

The last five years, purely in terms of results, is now comfortably the worst 5-season span of any side in the AFL era - our success rate of 14.49% from 2020-2024 easily behind Sydney 1990-1994 (19.44%), let alone more recent 'successful' resurgences people like to compare ours to (Melbourne's worst, 2011-2015, was 23.18%; Brisbane 2014-2018 hit 21.82%; Carlton 2015-19 23.64%). Literally the only spans worse in VFL/AFL history are the Saints' infamous earliest years, University, us and Hawthorn upon joining or shortly after, post-WWII St Kilda, and mid-1960s Fitzroy. So it's bewildering to me, not to mention galling and concerning, that the narrative coming from the club basically hasn't moved since the comment 4-5 years back from Ben Buckley (or whoever else it might have been) that we're now finally financially stable enough to afford a rebuild - from the outset, it felt like a kind of supporter mentality remark rather than a clear and purposeful staking out of direction, and half a decade on it seems the entire club is now suffused with the same shrugging determinism and vague faith that 'it will turn', leaving the when and how to be somebody's else problem just like our players all stand around waiting for a teammate to go and win the ground ball to hand it to them (felt like this happened at least twice in today's game alone, one leading directly to an opponent goal).

Lauding our ascent to mere mediocrity for a handful of weeks post-bye just cemented my sense that we've collectively embraced a loser mentality - relief and a sense of promise are fine, and especially in a patch as grim as this I get the desire to sell hope, but ultimately we were dropping winnable games against middling opponents, and our actual wins came unimpressively against weak opponents we've already proven ourselves capable of beating. It's hard to get excited by our spate of re-signings throughout the year when the players are all passengers desperately in need of drivers; even Clarkson as coach, who warranted the faith of the longer contract given his experience and successes, has shown little so far to repay that commitment, and next year feels pretty pivotal for his position with us too.

TL;DR - despite some positives on an individual player level, this season was a catastrophic failure and a clear step backwards without any real system or path forward to show for it, and the narrative from the club being largely either that improvement is imminent, or that losing this badly this often is just an inevitable normal part of rebuilding, just confirms how deep the cultural rot has become. A season I'm delighted to see the back of; bring on AFLW!

 

[zoomba23]

First tier of players (stars):
Sheezel
LDU
Xerri

Second tier of players (locked-in, some may and some may not become stars):
Archer
Comben
Larkey
Scott
Wardlaw
McKercher
Corr
Logue

Lobotomy potentially required:
Everyone else

On paper, it contained the best run of games we've had in a while.

Emotionally, it contained the soul-crushing realisation that the same inhibitions that pervaded this club in 2022 and 2023 are alive and well. Without the excuse of a lack of top-end talent or coaching instability this time.

The weight of the shitness feels immovable at the moment. It's nightmarish. I imagine the players feel the same, broken campaigners that they are, and will return to preseason and train in the same dissociative manner that they've done the past couple of years. And go through the same light physical rituals under the guise of 'improving standards' and 'attaining PBs.' And take the same ten weeks to get the season up and running.

3/10. Would've gotten a 4.5 before the last 2 games

 

[zoomba23]

Regression and complacency, complacency and regression. Everyone's especially down on the club right now after a diabolical last three rounds, but really that was just an extension of the problems that were apparent throughout the entire season (yes, including the fabled period "after the bye"). We continued with the culture of just expecting improvement to be the natural outcome of showing up, of heads dropped at the slightest signs of adversity and jubilation at the merest semblance of being on the trajectory of a normal rebuilding side for a month or two. We failed to set any standards and still fell short of them.

You could definitely pluck out a few players and say we saw meaningful improvement from them, but I feel like almost all of them come with significant caveats. Xerri proved completely capable of being the #1 ruck and playing with full intent and impact, but he still lacks in terms of his stoppage craft and general game-sense; his role in our sudden and unexpected midfield malaise - the part of the ground we were supposedly stacked with talent and could bank on while we built the bookends - gets overlooked due to his individual stats sheer and individual improvement. Archer coming on in the second half of the year is probably the one unqualified success story of the season. Corr's turnaround from about Round 8 onwards into being quite dependable one-on-one was very welcome, though not entirely without the brainfades, and hardly the augur of a brighter future that a 30-year-old proved capable. Top-line younger players developing in line with expectations for their age/stage of career or better, despite disrupted continuity (Wardlaw) or defensive limitations (McKercher). Players like Pink and Teakle, without being even close to superstars, offering a basic level of structural functionality that helped to provide glimmers of a gameplan during that halcyon period of honourable losses. Tucker moving to more of a lockdown defensive role second half of the year seems a fit. Hansen showed a bit when few others did in the last two weeks, I didn't see it with him before but maybe something there?

None of the individual growth really amounted to anything collectively though, and there were plenty who regressed and had down or at least indifferent years. I'm less concerned about the individual downs (Scott never quite suited the backline role we trialled early, Simpkin visibly not returning quite right after the Webster hit) and more bothered by what feels like a collective disdain for accountability - the ease of opposition clearances was damning on our midfield group's defensive disinterest, too often a number of our forwards conceded possession hoping for the cheap ball out the back rather than making a genuine contest, frequently we had players caught HTB in open space through lack of awareness (and presumably lack of talk)... all amounting to a side very much the opposite of "hard to beat when they come out to play".

Ultimately failure begets more failure, so it's not totally surprising to see everything break down together - when the team struggles and whatever system we have collapses, cohesion is lost and players retreat into doing all they know how to do independently, which only muddles us further. But pair the often limp efforts on the field with the nauseating sense still permeating from just about all involved at the club that all of this is just a normal part of the difficult process of rebuilding and that we're unquestionably on track, and it really starts to look ugly. I could stomach the stagnation in actual results (for now at least) if there were clear signs that the team as a whole were bedding in a good gameplan, honing their skills, or even just giving their all, but none of that is the case - we're softer, dumber and more rudderless than ever before.

The last five years, purely in terms of results, is now comfortably the worst 5-season span of any side in the AFL era - our success rate of 14.49% from 2020-2024 easily behind Sydney 1990-1994 (19.44%), let alone more recent 'successful' resurgences people like to compare ours to (Melbourne's worst, 2011-2015, was 23.18%; Brisbane 2014-2018 hit 21.82%; Carlton 2015-19 23.64%). Literally the only spans worse in VFL/AFL history are the Saints' infamous earliest years, University, us and Hawthorn upon joining or shortly after, post-WWII St Kilda, and mid-1960s Fitzroy. So it's bewildering to me, not to mention galling and concerning, that the narrative coming from the club basically hasn't moved since the comment 4-5 years back from Ben Buckley (or whoever else it might have been) that we're now finally financially stable enough to afford a rebuild - from the outset, it felt like a kind of supporter mentality remark rather than a clear and purposeful staking out of direction, and half a decade on it seems the entire club is now suffused with the same shrugging determinism and vague faith that 'it will turn', leaving the when and how to be somebody's else problem just like our players all stand around waiting for a teammate to go and win the ground ball to hand it to them (felt like this happened at least twice in today's game alone, one leading directly to an opponent goal).

Lauding our ascent to mere mediocrity for a handful of weeks post-bye just cemented my sense that we've collectively embraced a loser mentality - relief and a sense of promise are fine, and especially in a patch as grim as this I get the desire to sell hope, but ultimately we were dropping winnable games against middling opponents, and our actual wins came unimpressively against weak opponents we've already proven ourselves capable of beating. It's hard to get excited by our spate of re-signings throughout the year when the players are all passengers desperately in need of drivers; even Clarkson as coach, who warranted the faith of the longer contract given his experience and successes, has shown little so far to repay that commitment, and next year feels pretty pivotal for his position with us too.

TL;DR - despite some positives on an individual player level, this season was a catastrophic failure and a clear step backwards without any real system or path forward to show for it, and the narrative from the club being largely either that improvement is imminent, or that losing this badly this often is just an inevitable normal part of rebuilding, just confirms how deep the cultural rot has become. A season I'm delighted to see the back of; bring on AFLW!

POTY mate

 

[Zondor]

Regression and complacency, complacency and regression. Everyone's especially down on the club right now after a diabolical last three rounds, but really that was just an extension of the problems that were apparent throughout the entire season (yes, including the fabled period "after the bye"). We continued with the culture of just expecting improvement to be the natural outcome of showing up, of heads dropped at the slightest signs of adversity and jubilation at the merest semblance of being on the trajectory of a normal rebuilding side for a month or two. We failed to set any standards and still fell short of them.

You could definitely pluck out a few players and say we saw meaningful improvement from them, but I feel like almost all of them come with significant caveats. Xerri proved completely capable of being the #1 ruck and playing with full intent and impact, but he still lacks in terms of his stoppage craft and general game-sense; his role in our sudden and unexpected midfield malaise - the part of the ground we were supposedly stacked with talent and could bank on while we built the bookends - gets overlooked due to his individual stats sheer and individual improvement. Archer coming on in the second half of the year is probably the one unqualified success story of the season. Corr's turnaround from about Round 8 onwards into being quite dependable one-on-one was very welcome, though not entirely without the brainfades, and hardly the augur of a brighter future that a 30-year-old proved capable. Top-line younger players developing in line with expectations for their age/stage of career or better, despite disrupted continuity (Wardlaw) or defensive limitations (McKercher). Players like Pink and Teakle, without being even close to superstars, offering a basic level of structural functionality that helped to provide glimmers of a gameplan during that halcyon period of honourable losses. Tucker moving to more of a lockdown defensive role second half of the year seems a fit. Hansen showed a bit when few others did in the last two weeks, I didn't see it with him before but maybe something there?

None of the individual growth really amounted to anything collectively though, and there were plenty who regressed and had down or at least indifferent years. I'm less concerned about the individual downs (Scott never quite suited the backline role we trialled early, Simpkin visibly not returning quite right after the Webster hit) and more bothered by what feels like a collective disdain for accountability - the ease of opposition clearances was damning on our midfield group's defensive disinterest, too often a number of our forwards conceded possession hoping for the cheap ball out the back rather than making a genuine contest, frequently we had players caught HTB in open space through lack of awareness (and presumably lack of talk)... all amounting to a side very much the opposite of "hard to beat when they come out to play".

Ultimately failure begets more failure, so it's not totally surprising to see everything break down together - when the team struggles and whatever system we have collapses, cohesion is lost and players retreat into doing all they know how to do independently, which only muddles us further. But pair the often limp efforts on the field with the nauseating sense still permeating from just about all involved at the club that all of this is just a normal part of the difficult process of rebuilding and that we're unquestionably on track, and it really starts to look ugly. I could stomach the stagnation in actual results (for now at least) if there were clear signs that the team as a whole were bedding in a good gameplan, honing their skills, or even just giving their all, but none of that is the case - we're softer, dumber and more rudderless than ever before.

The last five years, purely in terms of results, is now comfortably the worst 5-season span of any side in the AFL era - our success rate of 14.49% from 2020-2024 easily behind Sydney 1990-1994 (19.44%), let alone more recent 'successful' resurgences people like to compare ours to (Melbourne's worst, 2011-2015, was 23.18%; Brisbane 2014-2018 hit 21.82%; Carlton 2015-19 23.64%). Literally the only spans worse in VFL/AFL history are the Saints' infamous earliest years, University, us and Hawthorn upon joining or shortly after, post-WWII St Kilda, and mid-1960s Fitzroy. So it's bewildering to me, not to mention galling and concerning, that the narrative coming from the club basically hasn't moved since the comment 4-5 years back from Ben Buckley (or whoever else it might have been) that we're now finally financially stable enough to afford a rebuild - from the outset, it felt like a kind of supporter mentality remark rather than a clear and purposeful staking out of direction, and half a decade on it seems the entire club is now suffused with the same shrugging determinism and vague faith that 'it will turn', leaving the when and how to be somebody's else problem just like our players all stand around waiting for a teammate to go and win the ground ball to hand it to them (felt like this happened at least twice in today's game alone, one leading directly to an opponent goal).

Lauding our ascent to mere mediocrity for a handful of weeks post-bye just cemented my sense that we've collectively embraced a loser mentality - relief and a sense of promise are fine, and especially in a patch as grim as this I get the desire to sell hope, but ultimately we were dropping winnable games against middling opponents, and our actual wins came unimpressively against weak opponents we've already proven ourselves capable of beating. It's hard to get excited by our spate of re-signings throughout the year when the players are all passengers desperately in need of drivers; even Clarkson as coach, who warranted the faith of the longer contract given his experience and successes, has shown little so far to repay that commitment, and next year feels pretty pivotal for his position with us too.

TL;DR - despite some positives on an individual player level, this season was a catastrophic failure and a clear step backwards without any real system or path forward to show for it, and the narrative from the club being largely either that improvement is imminent, or that losing this badly this often is just an inevitable normal part of rebuilding, just confirms how deep the cultural rot has become. A season I'm delighted to see the back of; bring on AFLW!

Yep. Quality Post.

 

[amaz199]

Regression and complacency, complacency and regression. Everyone's especially down on the club right now after a diabolical last three rounds, but really that was just an extension of the problems that were apparent throughout the entire season (yes, including the fabled period "after the bye"). We continued with the culture of just expecting improvement to be the natural outcome of showing up, of heads dropped at the slightest signs of adversity and jubilation at the merest semblance of being on the trajectory of a normal rebuilding side for a month or two. We failed to set any standards and still fell short of them.

You could definitely pluck out a few players and say we saw meaningful improvement from them, but I feel like almost all of them come with significant caveats. Xerri proved completely capable of being the #1 ruck and playing with full intent and impact, but he still lacks in terms of his stoppage craft and general game-sense; his role in our sudden and unexpected midfield malaise - the part of the ground we were supposedly stacked with talent and could bank on while we built the bookends - gets overlooked due to his individual stats sheer and individual improvement. Archer coming on in the second half of the year is probably the one unqualified success story of the season. Corr's turnaround from about Round 8 onwards into being quite dependable one-on-one was very welcome, though not entirely without the brainfades, and hardly the augur of a brighter future that a 30-year-old proved capable. Top-line younger players developing in line with expectations for their age/stage of career or better, despite disrupted continuity (Wardlaw) or defensive limitations (McKercher). Players like Pink and Teakle, without being even close to superstars, offering a basic level of structural functionality that helped to provide glimmers of a gameplan during that halcyon period of honourable losses. Tucker moving to more of a lockdown defensive role second half of the year seems a fit. Hansen showed a bit when few others did in the last two weeks, I didn't see it with him before but maybe something there?

None of the individual growth really amounted to anything collectively though, and there were plenty who regressed and had down or at least indifferent years. I'm less concerned about the individual downs (Scott never quite suited the backline role we trialled early, Simpkin visibly not returning quite right after the Webster hit) and more bothered by what feels like a collective disdain for accountability - the ease of opposition clearances was damning on our midfield group's defensive disinterest, too often a number of our forwards conceded possession hoping for the cheap ball out the back rather than making a genuine contest, frequently we had players caught HTB in open space through lack of awareness (and presumably lack of talk)... all amounting to a side very much the opposite of "hard to beat when they come out to play".

Ultimately failure begets more failure, so it's not totally surprising to see everything break down together - when the team struggles and whatever system we have collapses, cohesion is lost and players retreat into doing all they know how to do independently, which only muddles us further. But pair the often limp efforts on the field with the nauseating sense still permeating from just about all involved at the club that all of this is just a normal part of the difficult process of rebuilding and that we're unquestionably on track, and it really starts to look ugly. I could stomach the stagnation in actual results (for now at least) if there were clear signs that the team as a whole were bedding in a good gameplan, honing their skills, or even just giving their all, but none of that is the case - we're softer, dumber and more rudderless than ever before.

The last five years, purely in terms of results, is now comfortably the worst 5-season span of any side in the AFL era - our success rate of 14.49% from 2020-2024 easily behind Sydney 1990-1994 (19.44%), let alone more recent 'successful' resurgences people like to compare ours to (Melbourne's worst, 2011-2015, was 23.18%; Brisbane 2014-2018 hit 21.82%; Carlton 2015-19 23.64%). Literally the only spans worse in VFL/AFL history are the Saints' infamous earliest years, University, us and Hawthorn upon joining or shortly after, post-WWII St Kilda, and mid-1960s Fitzroy. So it's bewildering to me, not to mention galling and concerning, that the narrative coming from the club basically hasn't moved since the comment 4-5 years back from Ben Buckley (or whoever else it might have been) that we're now finally financially stable enough to afford a rebuild - from the outset, it felt like a kind of supporter mentality remark rather than a clear and purposeful staking out of direction, and half a decade on it seems the entire club is now suffused with the same shrugging determinism and vague faith that 'it will turn', leaving the when and how to be somebody's else problem just like our players all stand around waiting for a teammate to go and win the ground ball to hand it to them (felt like this happened at least twice in today's game alone, one leading directly to an opponent goal).

Lauding our ascent to mere mediocrity for a handful of weeks post-bye just cemented my sense that we've collectively embraced a loser mentality - relief and a sense of promise are fine, and especially in a patch as grim as this I get the desire to sell hope, but ultimately we were dropping winnable games against middling opponents, and our actual wins came unimpressively against weak opponents we've already proven ourselves capable of beating. It's hard to get excited by our spate of re-signings throughout the year when the players are all passengers desperately in need of drivers; even Clarkson as coach, who warranted the faith of the longer contract given his experience and successes, has shown little so far to repay that commitment, and next year feels pretty pivotal for his position with us too.

TL;DR - despite some positives on an individual player level, this season was a catastrophic failure and a clear step backwards without any real system or path forward to show for it, and the narrative from the club being largely either that improvement is imminent, or that losing this badly this often is just an inevitable normal part of rebuilding, just confirms how deep the cultural rot has become. A season I'm delighted to see the back of; bring on AFLW!

Had to reluctantly like this post. Not just because of the last three weeks alone but the overall picture.

The players haven't been able to execute at a basic-level standard consistently enough. Yes, the post-bye performances were good, but was that us running on some Red Bull? Was that us having a decent crack when we actually wanted to and then shat the bed when the season was closing to an end?

What does this playing group want? What do they require in order for them to play football properly and at least get the fundamentals right? They've had Clarko for 2 years now. I'm not giving them the Clarko taking leave bullshit. They've had him for long enough. What do they need to succeed?

We've brought in a proven operator in Michael Barlow, Monkey has made Xerri a completely different player, Xavier Clarke came in with heaps of experience in forward coaching, Jed Adcock came from a team playing one of the best defensive structures in the AFL. So what do the group need? What is left?

The players need to take ownership and grow some balls. Be a man for once. Take responsibility!

I'm exhausted from watching the team get spanked nearly every week and then get teased with a few wins when they actually try. I've got grey hairs already from it. Maybe I care more than they do.