AFL Autopsy R20: Smashed by the Saints, and the season is cooked.

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Went into this season with people expecting us to be bottom 2, and have only been in a position for finals this late because of the efforts of the boys early.

To forget that is to do a disservice to them.

It was clear we made in-roads in regards to effort and intensity compared to the previous year, with blowouts being less frequent and comebacks being more prevalent, but as with developing teams sometimes that can't be every week.

Matches like this will provide more feedback and evidence to drop a few. Just need to pick ourselves up and keep adjusting.
 
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They stink so much that they knocked the Swans over recently.

Didn’t we lead the Swans with 8 minutes left in Sydney this year?

They suck and they are one dimensional, any side worth their salt will shut down the running game and make them do something different.
 
Where is our Jurgen Klopp?

WE WANT TO BELIEVE

FFS get Brett Kirk or Nigel Lappin to help develop the kids

Some of the vets need putting out to pasture

Need some leaders to SHOW THEM HOW TO WIN and how a real team prepares, trains and performs like Hodgey
 
Percentage doesn’t lie they say and it’s true ..we’re bottom four at moment. Years of poor drafting keeps hurting us. Very disappointing
We're not even bottom 4

We just lost to 15th after losing to 14th last week.

Norf would absolutely thrash us right now.

West Coast would beat us

And I seriously have my doubts we could even beat Richmond.
 

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People will meltdown over this round and last round. Another late season collapse. Are we not fit enough. Did we start getting over-confident. Folks, all season, this team has clearly not been much better than the established bottom 6 teams. Rounds 11 and 12 were enough to know this wasn't a serious team. You had no excuse other than being delusional if you thought otherwise. We were lucky to beat these teams when we played them earlier in the season. These loses are, in the end, probably good things because now we can't be delusional. We've still got a long way to go and as far as I know, the club itself doesn't think much different. But winning games can sometimes lead to you drinking your own bathwater. We've got no reason to do that now, and that's good. I'm not smart enough to pinpoint the exact problems and the exact solutions beyond "we need better players because we're not a good team" and that's as true today as it was 4 weeks ago when we were third on the ladder.

For most of the season, there's been a clear bottom 6 teams. That has been slightly shaken up recently, but I don't think that's disrespectful to those other teams, which are the Hawks, Crows, Saints, Eagles, North and Richmond. So how did we perform against them?

R2, we only won against the Hawks due to an insanely good goal-kicking performance, and a bad one from them

R4, we won against the Saints by 4 points. Close games are coin tosses. It's been proven in nearly every sport, and the AFL is no different. A team's performance in close games is, essentially, not a predictable feature going forward. A team can win a bunch of close games one season, and the very next season lose them all. This was also a game that at 3/4 time, we had kicked 8.5 to the Saints 8.12. We were clearly the better team in the last quarter of that game, but we were lucky to still be within 10 points by that point of the game.

R7, we won against the Crows by 3 points. This was of course the game where Sam Draper was not pinged for something that he should have been and allowed us to win it. So the obvious example of how close games are coin tosses. We got the lucky call. Now, we should not have allowed the game to be close, we had kicked 8.14 to 3/4 time but in the end this is another game against a bottom 6 team that we were lucky to win

R9 against West Coast, we won by 6 points. I have spoken enough about this. This was a disgraceful game that plenty of people refused to admit was a terrible performance because we won.

R11 against North, we won by 40 points, but got outscored in two quarters by a winless team. This was basically an one quarter performance. Again, I still some people try to defend this by saying well North have been better since that point. They have won two games for the season.

R12 against Richmond, we won by 12 points against a team that had lost 8 straight or whatever to that point. The gap was one point with a couple mins to go in the 3rd quarter and 5 points with about 10 mins to go.

R16 against West Coast, we won by 30 points, albeit with Q4 junk time goals. The Eagles were within 10 to 20 points from about the middle of the 3rd quarter to the middle of the last quarter, before we finally broke through. This was after we were up by 23 at HF only for them to close the gap to as little as four points during the third quarter.

R20 and R21 against the Crows and Saints. Well we lost.

If you spend all season just barely beating bottom 6 teams, and then you start losing to them too, that's probably a good sign that the team isn't much better than those teams.

We've been through this ride for the last 15 years. Sack a coach, make the finals in that coach's first or second season, get pumped in that final, get over-confident and think the team will do even better the next season and when that doesn't happen, sack the coach and do it all over again. As far as I'm concerned, thank god we're not wasting our time in the finals again and we can confront what's been obvious all season
That's all good and I agree - but why not 'play the kids' (I hate that saying)?? What do we get by persisting with a) players who are done, and b) players woefully out of form?
The way it's going, this will be worse than last season and I really don't think that was part of the plan.
 
Who doesn't want this list blown up? And I'm talking scorched earth, including the captain, if he wanted it.

Doesn’t matter who’s on the list. If you keep changing your coach and strategies every two years you’ll never have success.

It takes time and you need to see it out.

Knights
Hird
Bomber
Hird
Worsfold
Worsfold / Rutten
Rutten
(Wild goose chase for Clarkson)
Scott

Essendon could blow the list up but they’d just change tack after a couple of years. They can’t stick to it.

The only one who got a decent amount of time of the above was Worsfold… and he was a dud.

  • Find the right people
  • Give them the time

It’s the only way.
 
Nick Hind was playing great footy, was demoted to sub, played great footy as a sub omitted to the VFL what is this club rewarding? If they don’t see Hind in the future WTF are doing with Hep Goldy Kelily Lav Stringer McGrath in the side?
 
Doesn’t matter who’s on the list. If you keep changing your coach and strategies every two years you’ll never have success.

It takes time and you need to see it out.

Knights
Hird
Bomber
Hird
Worsfold
Worsfold / Rutten
Rutten
(Wild goose chase for Clarkson)
Scott

Essendon could blow the list up but they’d just change tack after a couple of years. They can’t stick to it.

The only one who got a decent amount of time of the above was Worsfold… and he was a dud.

  • Find the right people
  • Give them the time

It’s the only way.
Hawthorn says hi!
 

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AFL Autopsy R20: Smashed by the Saints, and the season is cooked.

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