Opinion Matthew Nicks: Adelaide's Coach (Part 3) - The Biggest Loser

[1970crow]

Yes it would, because you'd get a fit Tex back instead of having him plow on and nurse injury all season

Nicks only looks to the upcoming Saturday

That's been our club for 15+ years.

 

[1970crow]

So do you have evidence that the club medical team advised that Lynch wasn't fit to play, and the coach over ruled them? Or is this just your agenda based speculation?

Senior players are trusted to know their bodies because they have been around a while? What a load of rubbish. Everyone knows their own body. And medical staff and equipment know their bodies even better.

I never said Lynch wasn't ruled fit to play and Nix selected him anyway. Nix would have been advised the extent of the injury and the expected limitations. At the very least, Nix knew he was selecting a sub that required a painkilling injection. Can't help you if you don't understand that experienced players get more say in selection when they have injury concerns, it's a widely understood fact.

 

[1970crow]

Without knowing what injuries he was carrying how would we know? A few games he didn't look right, but he had had periods though his whole career where he looked like this. Most players are playing though some kind of discomfort in the back end of the season.

I haven't read any medical reports or spoken to Nicks so we will never know.

What I do know is blaming Nicks, who isn't a sports doctor of any form, and claiming he only looks to the upcoming Saturday fits the agenda of wanting Nicks gone.

Everyone's got an agenda except me and Waynus. You're hilarious.

 

[GreyCrow]

Without knowing what injuries he was carrying how would we know? A few games he didn't look right, but he had had periods though his whole career where he looked like this. Most players are playing though some kind of discomfort in the back end of the season.

There were games where the better idea would have been to rest him. As you say he has played through injury before but there was also recognition his body was breaking when the coaches even mentioned resting him

I think the game in the West was a perfect time to rest him

I haven't read any medical reports or spoken to Nicks so we will never know.

What I do know is blaming Nicks, who isn't a sports doctor of any form, and claiming he only looks to the upcoming Saturday fits the agenda of wanting Nicks gone.

This is head in the sand analysis

1. Nicks would have heard the medical diagnosis - including resting players at times
2. He isnt some Div 7 coach with a guy who knows how to do massages as his medical trainer
3, There is ample evidence to suggest he only looks 1 week ahead
4. I dont need a medical degree to know some of our players entered games less than 75%

 

[Pilchard_Adams]

firstly 3 of the finals teams were below us on the ladder last season. Secondly no one is blaming Nicks for any of this.

Clearly you have totally misread every post on here.

As for 2023, Nicks refused to send players who were poorly performing back to the Sanfl. At one stage we selected the same 25 players for 16 weeks. Nicks merely rotated the same fringe players through Sub. We were only winning at 50% throughout that time. Instead of trying anything new he kept the same players. We were losing the centre clearances every week during this time. We had Crouch stuck in the Sanfl. Wasnt until after the bombers loss it kicked into his head he had to change it up. He brought in new players. This is what we are talking about. Stop defending the indefensible. We arent stupid. If we finished 15th this year and last year but he was pumping games into kids and talent identifying we can accept this.

And no, our onfield situation is all Nicks. Dont make stuff up.

Only 2 of the finalists were below us last season. This is what happens each year, some teams improve and some don't.

I know Nicks didn't do thilthorpes knee, worralls arm... you have obviously missed the point there. Do you expect a team with very shallow depth to perform the same when 3 or 4 of its more important players are not playing? That contributed to our position this season. Last season, we didn't have that problem.

And despite all your waff, weren't the crows one of the youngest if not the youngest 23 most rounds? How many kids do you want him to play, and remain some form of competitive?

I remember everyone screaming out for Strachan because any change seemed like good change from playing Obrien. Turns out the grass isn't always greener on the other side and Strachan can barely run out a half. We didn't know that, and I bet there are loads of these scenarios where we don't know the reason for something so we jump to conclusions that suit our agendas.

Half this board remind me of my x who would assume I was out with a woman every time I didn't reply to a text within what she deemed an acceptable time frame. Turns out I am just driving or sleeping after overtime...

Nicks has done plenty wrong, some on here just have a very unhealthy obsession with twisting every single thing back towards Nicks.

 

[Pilchard_Adams]

Using similar logic we were 14 missed kicks from finishing equal 17th.

We aren't the only team that had a few losses by smallish margins.

St Kilda lost 6 games by 10 points or less.

Essendon and Gold Coast also both lost around 3-4 games by a similar margin.

It's pretty normal for many games to end in a close result. The real challenge is.to become good enough as a side to be able to win thse close games.

This is why some of us are so frustrated because Nicks has done very little this year to build for 2025 to help bridge that gap.

This is true. Pick 4 certainly helps bridge the gap .

I'd say moving Laird out the middle, rankine and soligo more midfield time, sholl and Berry massive improvements, Jones and mcHenry on the outer, Keane developing will at least net a profit if he leaves, Fog and thilthorpe finishing the year really well have all been steps to bridge the gap next year.

We have 3 glaring holes in our side and potentially NB, pick 4 and cumming / luko can plug those holes. But we also need to improve our depth by chopping the dead wood.

 

[Pilchard_Adams]

I never said Lynch wasn't ruled fit to play and Nix selected him anyway. Nix would have been advised the extent of the injury and the expected limitations. At the very least, Nix knew he was selecting a sub that required a painkilling injection. Can't help you if you don't understand that experienced players get more say in selection when they have injury concerns, it's a widely understood fact.

So then, let's say all this is true. Should Nicks then be saying no I don't trust your opinion Lynch, you aren't playing. Isn't that why McGovern left the crows?

A lot more players are receiving pain killing injections than we know about.

 

[GreyCrow]

So then, let's say all this is true. Should Nicks then be saying no I don't trust your opinion Lynch, you aren't playing.

Yes he should. As any coach should. And the red flag should have been when the medico says '' we need 20 minutes to get him on the ground''

A lot more players are receiving pain killing injections than we know about.

Yes they are and I still laugh at McGuane trying to kick a football with a foot so filled with painkillers he couldnt feel it

On a personal level I worry about the potential for further damage . Pain is a sensor that something is wrong. Masking it can lead to more damage

 

[FR0GGY]

Half this board remind me of my x who would assume I was out with a woman every time I didn't reply to a text within what she deemed an acceptable time frame. Turns out I am just driving or sleeping after overtime...

Nicks has done plenty wrong, some on here just have a very unhealthy obsession with twisting every single thing back towards Nicks.

more likely you were busy defending Nicks

Because most things come back to selection or game plan, things Nicks is 100% responsible for.
And outside that he’s full of waffle and spin.

 

[Pilchard_Adams]

There were games where the better idea would have been to rest him. As you say he has played through injury before but there was also recognition his body was breaking when the coaches even mentioned resting him

I think the game in the West was a perfect time to rest him

This is head in the sand analysis

1. Nicks would have heard the medical diagnosis - including resting players at times
2. He isnt some Div 7 coach with a guy who knows how to do massages as his medical trainer
3, There is ample evidence to suggest he only looks 1 week ahead
4. I dont need a medical degree to know some of our players entered games less than 75%

Perhaps it would have been better to rest Tex. But i would tend to trust the medical staff would have player management programs for every player that run weeks into the future, if not months. Diets, gym routine, amount of running, it's all in there, tweaked constantly. Including the knowledge of Burgess who is meant to be amazing in his field.

So sorry, but I will trust their decisions over the theory that Nicks heard their advice and ignored it.

Nicks isnt the sporting equivalent of Dr Death...

 

[Pilchard_Adams]

Yes he should. As any coach should. And the red flag should have been when the medico says '' we need 20 minutes to get him on the ground''

Yes they are and I still laugh at McGuane trying to kick a football with a foot so filled with painkillers he couldnt feel it

On a personal level I worry about the potential for further damage . Pain is a sensor that something is wrong. Masking it can lead to more damage

I didn't know about that McGuane incident

Jonno Brown played a lot with pain killer injections and the scum Cornes tried punching him in the knee to affect the injury

 

[Pilchard_Adams]

more likely you were busy defending Nicks

Because most things come back to selection or game plan, things Nicks is 100% responsible for.
And outside that he’s full of waffle and spin.

I don't defend Nicks 100% and have said many occasions he has stuffed up.

The blame train is a hard beast to slow down and on this board its spiralling to the point where Nicks will be blamed for weather conditions and poor bounces of the ball soon.

I'll tell you a little story. When I was 16 (year 1999) I copped the worst grounding of my life. I was in deep deep trouble as our family phone bill was a few thousand dollars on the back of a multitude of phone calls to those sex lines that used to cost $5.99 per minute that were advertised in the paper. Mum and dad roasted me, embarrassed me in front of my grandparents and neighbour, all sorts. Everything pointed to me being the culprit as I was "the Horny teenage boy". 2nd month bill came in and the bill was the same, and I copped it again. Worse. But this time I checked the dates and times and a few of them were when I was at work. Turned out it was my younger sister doing it and she sat there and let me cop it while continuing to call the sex numbers.

Point of this is its perfectly fine to make assumptions but don't pass these off as fact without the evidence as sometimes what you believe to be true, isn't.

 

[FR0GGY]

I don't defend Nicks 100% and have said many occasions he has stuffed up.

The blame train is a hard beast to slow down and on this board its spiralling to the point where Nicks will be blamed for weather conditions and poor bounces of the ball soon.

I'll tell you a little story. When I was 16 (year 1999) I copped the worst grounding of my life. I was in deep deep trouble as our family phone bill was a few thousand dollars on the back of a multitude of phone calls to those sex lines that used to cost $5.99 per minute that were advertised in the paper. Mum and dad roasted me, embarrassed me in front of my grandparents and neighbour, all sorts. Everything pointed to me being the culprit as I was "the Horny teenage boy". 2nd month bill came in and the bill was the same, and I copped it again. Worse. But this time I checked the dates and times and a few of them were when I was at work. Turned out it was my younger sister doing it and she sat there and let me cop it while continuing to call the sex numbers.

Point of this is it’s perfectly fine to make assumptions but don't pass these off as fact without the evidence as sometimes what you believe to be true, isn't.

Unfortunately for nicks though, he is the head coach and is responsible for everything under him including game plan that was absolutely rubbish at the start of the year.
He is responsible for the selection of players (pretty sure you have said you can’t understand why Murphy is picked, can anyone?)
People making plenty of excuses for him, but no one seems to be able to give tangible evidence of why he is a good coach.
Even the club have basically said they extended him because they didn’t want noise.

 

[Smoooothy]

how about now? is he gone now?

 

[Multiballz]

I’m amazed what anyone sees in Milera. He is as vanilla as they come and shirks any body contact. Another 1st round bust.

Selective memory.
His decent games are high quality.
People just seem to forget all the worse than average he's dished up far outweighs his decent games.

 

[Drugs Are Bad Mackay?]

Without knowing what injuries he was carrying how would we know? A few games he didn't look right, but he had had periods though his whole career where he looked like this. Most players are playing though some kind of discomfort in the back end of the season.

I haven't read any medical reports or spoken to Nicks so we will never know.

What I do know is blaming Nicks, who isn't a sports doctor of any form, and claiming he only looks to the upcoming Saturday fits the agenda of wanting Nicks gone.

You've seen Daniel Talia play through a knee injury for an end-of-season run at some sympathy wins to save Nicks from a winless season

A decision that cost Talia his career (he never played again)

Does that go in?

Brodie Smith's back injury this year that he tried to play through?

People deny, deny, deny until years of terrible performances end in a review that spells out Oh yeah that was the case all along actually

 

[Multiballz]

Shouldn't. But it is when you look at our list. We haven't had the luxury of father and sons thrown at us each year for discounts, academy picks knocking down the door, or even A Grade drafting. Let alone covering the mass exodus from years gone by.

I think we are very lucky to have hit a few diamonds in the rough like Keane, Keays, Hinge for basically free.

Replacing even a middle level AFL hardened body with a skinny speculative draft pick is never a like for like. It

We need rebuild Part B, cut the failures and plug the gaps with Free Agents and trades while drafting for needs.

FWIW I don't think we have been good enough to play finals in the last 3 years. We are 4 or 5 players across the list short. We need to be able to cover injuries and poor form

Look at it from a different angle.

Do you believe Collingwood-
A)Wins the flag.
B)Makes the 8.
C) Just misses, if Nicks was their Coach last season?

If B or C, how many more years do you imagine it takes for him to get up to McRae level of Coaching?

 

[Multiballz]

So do you have evidence that the club medical team advised that Lynch wasn't fit to play, and the coach over ruled them? Or is this just your agenda based speculation?

Senior players are trusted to know their bodies because they have been around a while? What a load of rubbish. Everyone knows their own body. And medical staff and equipment know their bodies even better.

Hah, you do remember Lynchs reaction when he was told to mount up that day don't you? The body language during the game?

Hardly looked a player screaming "pick me, pick me". - He didn't want to be there.

 

[relapse]

This is true. Pick 4 certainly helps bridge the gap .

I'd say moving Laird out the middle, rankine and soligo more midfield time, sholl and Berry massive improvements, Jones and mcHenry on the outer, Keane developing will at least net a profit if he leaves, Fog and thilthorpe finishing the year really well have all been steps to bridge the gap next year.

We have 3 glaring holes in our side and potentially NB, pick 4 and cumming / luko can plug those holes. But we also need to improve our depth by chopping the dead wood.

Our draft pick this year won't have too much of an impact next season. Given how poorly we used Curtin this year, they're no certainty to even play regularly let alone make an impact next year.

Let's be realistic by the time whoever we pick at 4 is actually making an impact, Nicks won't be at the club.

ANB is an upgrade on Murphy, but our forward line is really the last thing we need to be worrying about.

At this point we have no idea who else is or isn't coming, but Pick 4 and ANB aren't going to be moving the needle in 2025 and I have massive concerns that Nicks hasn't invested anywhere near enough into 2025 for there to be an improvement.

 

[1970crow]

So then, let's say all this is true. Should Nicks then be saying no I don't trust your opinion Lynch, you aren't playing. Isn't that why McGovern left the crows?

A lot more players are receiving pain killing injections than we know about.

I don't think there's a single right answer. Brad Crouch was getting jabs in his groin to play out the 2017 season. As long as he's performing better than whoever would replace him and the injury isn't being made worse, it makes sense to keep going as we were contending for a flag. I remember a year when Thommo carried a hip/groin injury through to the end of the season. It was clear he was injured and at the time we had Lyons regularly getting it 30 odd times in the 2s and we weren't going to play finals. In that instance it was stupid to keep playing Thommo. With Lynch, we all knew he was carrying something because his form was poor, we weren't contending, so selecting him as the 'impact' player was really stupid. Whatever his injury was, he'd proven he wasn't able to carry it, so the value of his opinion is devalued.

Nathan Buckley was talking about this a couple of weeks ago on SEN. There's players that can't carry injuries where others can. He said he personally got better at it as his career progressed, but there are others that just can't do it at all. How players are performing is the key aspect, but then I'd say that in a rebuilding phase, you should always be looking at opportunities to get games into younger players. Giving a block of games whilst a first choice player recovers seems like the most obvious decision to make. But that's not how our club approaches these decisions and it pre-dates Nicks.

 

[1970crow]

Perhaps it would have been better to rest Tex. But i would tend to trust the medical staff would have player management programs for every player that run weeks into the future, if not months. Diets, gym routine, amount of running, it's all in there, tweaked constantly. Including the knowledge of Burgess who is meant to be amazing in his field.

So sorry, but I will trust their decisions over the theory that Nicks heard their advice and ignored it.

Nicks isnt the sporting equivalent of Dr Death...

You're arguing against a point that nobody has made. Nobody has suggested that their was medical advice to not play someone. The advice would be about degrees of injury and performance limitation. If you're playing in a grand final a 60% peak Tex is most likely a better option than a 100% Burgess. It's perfectly normal to jab him up and make that decision in that scenario. But if you're 15th on the ladder and the season is shot, you wouldn't necessarily make the same decision. What I've found with our club is that we always make the same decision, rebuilding or contending, we play the injured player and accept the discount on their performance rather than give a kid a go and get the experienced player right.

Sloane not going in for an op on his finger so he could play out a dead season even though he knew he was risking full function returning by not having the op straight away. It's not a Nicks thing, it's a club thing.

 

[MRB37]

Hah, you do remember Lynchs reaction when he was told to mount up that day don't you? The body language during the game?

Hardly looked a player screaming "pick me, pick me". - He didn't want to be there.

I dunno why there's an argument about it. We tried to be clever and put in an injured player as the sub because we didn't want someone inexperienced to miss a SANFL game to fill a position we didn't want to/hope we'd have to use.

Then we did and we looked like noodle heads for it.

 

[Pugsley]

how about now? is he gone now?

He is still looking for the fly.

 

[WetCrow1991]

New nickname for Nicksy. The floater. Shit that won't go away.

 

[AFC979810]

I remember everyone screaming out for Strachan because any change seemed like good change from playing Obrien. Turns out the grass isn't always greener on the other side and Strachan can barely run out a half. We didn't know that, and I bet there are loads of these scenarios where we don't know the reason for something so we jump to conclusions that suit our agendas.

Sure there is a lot of stuff we don't know, however results speak for themselves.

I am not sure about agenda's - but we now have plenty of evidence that Nicks isn't a good coach.

There have been 61 coaches who have coached 100+ games of AFL. Nicks has the 7th worst winning % of all these coaches.

If Nicks survives to the end of 2025 - he will be the only coach in VFL/AFL history to coach 127+ games with the same club and not play finals.

Nicks has done plenty wrong, some on here just have a very unhealthy obsession with twisting every single thing back towards Nicks.

He is the head coach. Our results are his fault first and foremost.