Review Round 11, 2024 - Hawthorn vs. Brisbane Lions

Who were your five best players against Hawthorn?

  • Total voters
    88
  • Poll closed .

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wantok said:
Yes his intercept marking in general play has been good but we are talking the 666 set up here. I cannot see the logic in giving an opposition player a free hit at marking and most probably a kick at goal inside 50. The CHB should be side by side, leaning into the CHF maintaining front shoulder postion. Generally annoying the forward getting inside his head space. When the ball is bounced lean harder on them. I can assure you they find it very difficult to jog off in front of you to accept the quick kick. If it's a pass at least it will be contested. You also can suck them in for a holding free as they try to get past.

On SM-A525F using BigFooty.com mobile app
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Chol can lead anywhere he wants, make multiple leads etc. If you really think just standing beside and leaning into a good quality forward is going to ensure they don't get on a lead, I don't know what to say. Chol is a strong athletic bloke, he is pushing back just as hard but his advantage is that he can go whichever way he wants the moment he gets a bit of separation.
 
wantok said:
Yes his intercept marking in general play has been good but we are talking the 666 set up here. I cannot see the logic in giving an opposition player a free hit at marking and most probably a kick at goal inside 50. The CHB should be side by side, leaning into the CHF maintaining front shoulder postion. Generally annoying the forward getting inside his head space. When the ball is bounced lean harder on them. I can assure you they find it very difficult to jog off in front of you to accept the quick kick. If it's a pass at least it will be contested. You also can suck them in for a holding free as they try to get past.

On SM-A525F using BigFooty.com mobile app
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I think you are underestimating how hard/impossible it is to defend that scenario. Nightmare for any backman.
 

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Grasshopper17 said:
🤷
View attachment 2003490
Click to expand...
Clearly dunks is fast but people mistake being fast for acceleration all the time. Those first few steps decide if you look quick or not on TV.

ETA: as an example, remember when in the 2012 GF everyone got excited to see Rioli chase down Jetta, accept what happened after the first few meters when they both got to near full speed was that Jetta streaked away with ease.
 
Last edited:
Well.

I still believe.

Yes, I know statistically it has probably never been done from this position etc etc.....I don't care.

I cannot and will not relinquish that hope and belief until it is mathematically impossible for us to make the eight.

I'm not in a position to watch the games due to where I live, I can only access some highlights, which don't really tell much of a story, so forgive me for such enthusiasm and optimism.

But...miracles happen.
 
SeaOfFire said:
Well.

I still believe.

Yes, I know statistically it has probably never been done from this position etc etc.....I don't care.

I cannot and will not relinquish that hope and belief until it is mathematically impossible for us to make the eight.

I'm not in a position to watch the games due to where I live, I can only access some highlights, which don't really tell much of a story, so forgive me for such enthusiasm and optimism.

But...miracles happen.
Click to expand...
Literally did happen just last year, so there's that for starters if you're retaining hope. :)
 
I've accepted that this year in terms of us contending is finished unless we somehow go on a miracle run. What I want out of the rest of our season is investing more games into the young guns and improving the mental side of our game.

We're one of the weakest sides when we're trailing behind on the scoreboard, I want us to build a culture where we're more mentally resilient, composed and can show some heart and resolve when teams build a lead on us.
 
TL;DR:

  • Missed tackles
  • Corridor red mist
  • Multiple players flying for the same mark inside 50
  • First possession --> Clearance

Some great analysis in here from lots of people, but I think Kernel Kurtz's tackling master class is just about my favourite.

It's interesting that when you look at a lot of the key indicators from Sunday's game, they've all been close and we've only just been behind. But we've lost almost ALL of them:

  • Clearances: lost by 1
  • Intercepts: won by 1, but our LOWEST number of intercepts for the year. This comes back to my concerns pre-game that if we gave them the ball, we would struggle to get it back, and this came to pass.
  • Inside 50s: lost by 2
  • Converting inside 50s to shots at goal: lost 53% (this is actually one of our best results for the season) to 57%
  • Expected score: 85 v 95 approx (depending on which source you use)

So add up all these little losses and you come out with a 25 point defeat. I mean, in a lot of areas the game looks like a game played on our terms. We take 106 marks, take 11-6 contested marks, even lay more tackles inside 50, which I find hard to believe.



But clearly none of us here are kidding ourselves. We conceded 16 marks inside 50 and took only 13 of our own. That's the highest tally we've conceded for the season. Obviously none of our defenders covered themselves in glory on Sunday, but they certainly weren't helped by our inability to stick our tackles further afield. We actually nailed one midway through the 2nd quarter (nothing spectacular; I think we might have got a ball up out of it) and it stuck out like dogs' balls at the time.

That initiated a period of the game where we barely missed a tackle, for a bit over a quarter, and wouldn't you know it, we kicked 6 goals to 1 during that time. Then we just rolled over again in the last quarter and went back to how we were playing at the start of the game. The difference in our ability to nail tackles during that period across the 2nd and 3rd quarters was so noticeable compared to the rest of the game.

I listened to a chat between Isaac Smith and Damien Hardwick on the weekend, where Hardwick made a very interesting point about how as your team evolves, you continue to add layers to your game plan etc. This can mean you start spending 80% of your time on 20% of the game, so you move away from the fundamentals of what makes you a good team. I think that's what we've done, to the point where the fundamentals, the foundations of what can make us a good team, have been set aside to focus on things like ball movement.

It's all important, but when you build a bridge, you don't just build it, go "ah that's pretty good", walk away and the job's done. The bridge, throughout the course of its life, needs regular maintenance, not to improve it, but simply to ensure it remains safe, functional and keeps its aesthetic. There's a real parallel with our footy team - it looks like we don't spend enough time, consistently, on nailing our fundamentals.

So missed tackles was the main thing for me. If we'd nailed more of them, that in itself would have been the difference. Hawthorn scored 9 of their 15 goals from stoppage - the way they were just able to walk out of congestion was pretty jarring, particularly as we've seen it before and it looks like nothing is ever really done about it.



When we DID get it I actually thought we moved the ball pretty well. We were able to get into the corridor pretty regularly, and if you can do that, the ground should open up and you should be able to get a shot at goal quite comfortably. Unfortunately, it looks like we're all black and white at the moment. We're either "go sideways, be patient but alert, tack your way down the field", which we have shown we're quite adept at, or we're "let's get into the corridor, go a million miles an hour and kick it as long as possible inside 50". If we have peak Tom Hawkins up there, great, but we don't.

If you have the ball running through the centre square you have the entire width of the ground available to use. USE that width. Where's a leading forward (tall or small) coming up at the ball, either directly, or at a 45° angle leading towards the boundary on either side? That's the nuance, the shades of grey, the colour even, we need to employ more in our ball movement. Also, if you DO use that width, that is width the opposition can't use on the rebound, because you'll have your numbers there. When you attack via the corridor with no changing of angles, you open up BOTH sides of the field to be hurt on the counter attack. That's very hard to defend.

None of this is reactionary or revisionist from me here - I brought it up in the lead up to the Melbourne game and on Sunday we saw plenty of instances where it would have worked better than simply bombing long inside 50.



So it's a high risk strategy, and I'm not convinced we get full bang for buck playing that way, partly because of the abilities of our key forwards, but also because we just have so little discipline in and around contested marking situations in our forward line. How many times did we have multiple guys flying for the same mark inside 50? Not only do you spoil your team mate in a better position to take the mark, but we leave no representation at ground level to scoop up any crumbs. This is not new issue, it's afflicted us terribly in the past, and it seems to have come back into our game after I thought we addressed it pretty well in 2023.

I get that the opposition are regularly trying to generate a spare man to create a 2 on 1 marking contest, or even a 1 on 0 in the air. But that doesn't give our small forwards carte blanche to fly over the top! That puts the onus on them to stop that from happening in the first place. I don't care how short or tall you are - it's not about marking the ball yourself, it's simply about preventing the "spare" from being able to impact the contest. Jed McEntee is 176cm, but that didn't stop him doing an outstanding job in this regard on the 190cm Tom Stewart a couple of weeks ago. It's not about your height, it's about your attitude.

I'd be schooling up Cal Ah Chee, or even Cam Rayner, in this regard. Both have shown a real lack of consistency throughout their careers, and I feel this would really bring a focus to their game that might bring out the best in them. You can still have an impact in an attacking sense, but use making life miserable for a guy who wants to intercept all day long as your starting point. That way you can point to "yeah maybe I've had a quiet day, but James Sicily had a stinker". And then if you DO get on the scoreboard, well it throws everything your opponent wants to do defensively into disarray.



The last thing I've got is something Daniel Hoyne brought up on SEN last night. Apparently Lachie Neale is the WORST player in the competition at turning a first possession at stoppage into a clearance, and Josh Dunkley is 3rd worst. This was a pretty mind-boggling stat when I heard it, but I guess if we're trying to backwards-rationalise, to me it really comes back to the fact that we insist on feeding the ball backwards out of congestion. This not only does all the things I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but it also leaves all our stoppage numbers forward of the ball, dictating that if we DO cough it up from that point, we allow our opposition an easy exit out the front. And we saw that far too often on Sunday.

WE need to be the ones coming out the front. Take the tackler on, if you can't break through, arms above your head, feed out to a runner. You commit an opponent AND if you DO lose possession from there, you're in a much better position to defend, simply because the ball was going FORWARDS up to that point, and thus your stoppage numbers should not all be ahead of the ball.



It's amazing how even though first and foremost we are critical of Sunday's EFFORT (and rightly so), there's still so many areas we can identify where we need to improve strategically. To me it only lends credence to the notion that we need to find more and better ways of working smarter, rather than harder all the time.
 
Grasshopper17 said:
TL;DR:

  • Missed tackles
  • Corridor red mist
  • Multiple players flying for the same mark inside 50
  • First possession --> Clearance

Some great analysis in here from lots of people, but I think Kernel Kurtz's tackling master class is just about my favourite.

It's interesting that when you look at a lot of the key indicators from Sunday's game, they've all been close and we've only just been behind. But we've lost almost ALL of them:

  • Clearances: lost by 1
  • Intercepts: won by 1, but our LOWEST number of intercepts for the year. This comes back to my concerns pre-game that if we gave them the ball, we would struggle to get it back, and this came to pass.
  • Inside 50s: lost by 2
  • Converting inside 50s to shots at goal: lost 53% (this is actually one of our best results for the season) to 57%
  • Expected score: 85 v 95 approx (depending on which source you use)

So add up all these little losses and you come out with a 25 point defeat. I mean, in a lot of areas the game looks like a game played on our terms. We take 106 marks, take 11-6 contested marks, even lay more tackles inside 50, which I find hard to believe.



But clearly none of us here are kidding ourselves. We conceded 16 marks inside 50 and took only 13 of our own. That's the highest tally we've conceded for the season. Obviously none of our defenders covered themselves in glory on Sunday, but they certainly weren't helped by our inability to stick our tackles further afield. We actually nailed one midway through the 2nd quarter (nothing spectacular; I think we might have got a ball up out of it) and it stuck out like dogs' balls at the time.

That initiated a period of the game where we barely missed a tackle, for a bit over a quarter, and wouldn't you know it, we kicked 6 goals to 1 during that time. Then we just rolled over again in the last quarter and went back to how we were playing at the start of the game. The difference in our ability to nail tackles during that period across the 2nd and 3rd quarters was so noticeable compared to the rest of the game.

I listened to a chat between Isaac Smith and Damien Hardwick on the weekend, where Hardwick made a very interesting point about how as your team evolves, you continue to add layers to your game plan etc. This can mean you start spending 80% of your time on 20% of the game, so you move away from the fundamentals of what makes you a good team. I think that's what we've done, to the point where the fundamentals, the foundations of what can make us a good team, have been set aside to focus on things like ball movement.

It's all important, but when you build a bridge, you don't just build it, go "ah that's pretty good", walk away and the job's done. The bridge, throughout the course of its life, needs regular maintenance, not to improve it, but simply to ensure it remains safe, functional and keeps its aesthetic. There's a real parallel with our footy team - it looks like we don't spend enough time, consistently, on nailing our fundamentals.

So missed tackles was the main thing for me. If we'd nailed more of them, that in itself would have been the difference. Hawthorn scored 9 of their 15 goals from stoppage - the way they were just able to walk out of congestion was pretty jarring, particularly as we've seen it before and it looks like nothing is ever really done about it.



When we DID get it I actually thought we moved the ball pretty well. We were able to get into the corridor pretty regularly, and if you can do that, the ground should open up and you should be able to get a shot at goal quite comfortably. Unfortunately, it looks like we're all black and white at the moment. We're either "go sideways, be patient but alert, tack your way down the field", which we have shown we're quite adept at, or we're "let's get into the corridor, go a million miles an hour and kick it as long as possible inside 50". If we have peak Tom Hawkins up there, great, but we don't.

If you have the ball running through the centre square you have the entire width of the ground available to use. USE that width. Where's a leading forward (tall or small) coming up at the ball, either directly, or at a 45° angle leading towards the boundary on either side? That's the nuance, the shades of grey, the colour even, we need to employ more in our ball movement. Also, if you DO use that width, that is width the opposition can't use on the rebound, because you'll have your numbers there. When you attack via the corridor with no changing of angles, you open up BOTH sides of the field to be hurt on the counter attack. That's very hard to defend.

None of this is reactionary or revisionist from me here - I brought it up in the lead up to the Melbourne game and on Sunday we saw plenty of instances where it would have worked better than simply bombing long inside 50.



So it's a high risk strategy, and I'm not convinced we get full bang for buck playing that way, partly because of the abilities of our key forwards, but also because we just have so little discipline in and around contested marking situations in our forward line. How many times did we have multiple guys flying for the same mark inside 50? Not only do you spoil your team mate in a better position to take the mark, but we leave no representation at ground level to scoop up any crumbs. This is not new issue, it's afflicted us terribly in the past, and it seems to have come back into our game after I thought we addressed it pretty well in 2023.

I get that the opposition are regularly trying to generate a spare man to create a 2 on 1 marking contest, or even a 1 on 0 in the air. But that doesn't give our small forwards carte blanche to fly over the top! That puts the onus on them to stop that from happening in the first place. I don't care how short or tall you are - it's not about marking the ball yourself, it's simply about preventing the "spare" from being able to impact the contest. Jed McEntee is 176cm, but that didn't stop him doing an outstanding job in this regard on the 190cm Tom Stewart a couple of weeks ago. It's not about your height, it's about your attitude.

I'd be schooling up Cal Ah Chee, or even Cam Rayner, in this regard. Both have shown a real lack of consistency throughout their careers, and I feel this would really bring a focus to their game that might bring out the best in them. You can still have an impact in an attacking sense, but use making life miserable for a guy who wants to intercept all day long as your starting point. That way you can point to "yeah maybe I've had a quiet day, but James Sicily had a stinker". And then if you DO get on the scoreboard, well it throws everything your opponent wants to do defensively into disarray.



The last thing I've got is something Daniel Hoyne brought up on SEN last night. Apparently Lachie Neale is the WORST player in the competition at turning a first possession at stoppage into a clearance, and Josh Dunkley is 3rd worst. This was a pretty mind-boggling stat when I heard it, but I guess if we're trying to backwards-rationalise, to me it really comes back to the fact that we insist on feeding the ball backwards out of congestion. This not only does all the things I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but it also leaves all our stoppage numbers forward of the ball, dictating that if we DO cough it up from that point, we allow our opposition an easy exit out the front. And we saw that far too often on Sunday.

WE need to be the ones coming out the front. Take the tackler on, if you can't break through, arms above your head, feed out to a runner. You commit an opponent AND if you DO lose possession from there, you're in a much better position to defend, simply because the ball was going FORWARDS up to that point, and thus your stoppage numbers should not all be ahead of the ball.



It's amazing how even though first and foremost we are critical of Sunday's EFFORT (and rightly so), there's still so many areas we can identify where we need to improve strategically. To me it only lends credence to the notion that we need to find more and better ways of working smarter, rather than harder all the time.
Click to expand...

On the stoppage stat, I think it’s 100% because our game plan prefers us to cause a stoppage over taking risk. Our players will always hold the ball up in open play or get it over the boundary to reset into a stoppage. In stoppage we seem to want to keep it in if we can’t get it out somewhat cleanly. What you said of course applies as well.

I actually think the interpretation changes will hurt our game plan since we are probably the worst team in the comp for not exactly making genuine attempts to get rid of the ball at times. I think it’ll be for the better if we can start taking the game on more especially in open play.
 
buttermuffs said:
On the stoppage stat, I think it’s 100% because our game plan prefers us to cause a stoppage over taking risk. Our players will always hold the ball up in open play or get it over the boundary to reset into a stoppage. In stoppage we seem to want to keep it in if we can’t get it out somewhat cleanly. What you said of course applies as well.

I actually think the interpretation changes will hurt our game plan since we are probably the worst team in the comp for not exactly making genuine attempts to get rid of the ball at times. I think it’ll be for the better if we can start taking the game on more especially in open play.
Click to expand...
Yeah I think you nailed it.

And it sort of baffles me at the moment why we persist with it so rigidly given that our clearance work isn't so crash hot...
 
notliondown said:
Yeah I think you nailed it.

And it sort of baffles me at the moment why we persist with it so rigidly given that our clearance work isn't so crash hot...
Click to expand...
Since we said we were going to do things a bit differently at the start of the year to try to get that bit of improvement to win a flag our players appear genuinely confused as to whether they should do what has been instinctively ingrained into them over the previous few years ( a game plan that we still embrace overall) and engaging in the opportunities that our tweaks ,or what we said we'd now try to do ,present.

Knowing when to go and when not to isn't as easy as saying do it . You need the confidence built up from having it work for you when you do and more importantly the footy smarts to be able to recognise what's best.

We've got ourselves in a bit of a mess over this which seeps away at your confidence and contributes to our lapses in concentration which have been a feature of nearly every game this year.
 
One change i would like to see is around stoppages.
We have for years been around about the best clearance team in the AFL.
Still number 1 in 2024 to round 11, not that this stat has helped our win/loss record.
We get extra numbers around stoppages like some other teams. That helps in getting those stoppage/clearance stats.
But this leaves us with 1 less player along the wing center or defense area.
Any rushed kick out from a defense/wing stoppage is mostly gobbled up by opposition players, certainly in top 8 teams.
What makes it worse is that the intercept is usually a gun defense player in the AFL who will use his disposal to advantage.
We really can't let players like Stewart, Sicily, Jones (this week), Moore, Pearce etc be roaming around on their own.
But we continue to allow this to happen.

When we do regain possession from a defense kick, we are 1 player short until we wait for our guys to get forward and at least even up the numbers.
This holds up play and makes it easier for the opposition defense to get set again seeing they are already 1 player extra to start with.
Then we wonder why a long kick into the forward 50 is the option as finding a decent lead in a very crowed forward 50 is a hard kick to nail.

I won't hold my breath for a change but i would like to see one.
 

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Section 5 said:
One change i would like to see is around stoppages.
We have for years been around about the best clearance team in the AFL.
Still number 1 in 2024 to round 11, not that this stat has helped our win/loss record.
We get extra numbers around stoppages like some other teams. That helps in getting those stoppage/clearance stats.
But this leaves us with 1 less player along the wing center or defense area.
Any rushed kick out from a defense/wing stoppage is mostly gobbled up by opposition players, certainly in top 8 teams.
What makes it worse is that the intercept is usually a gun defense player in the AFL who will use his disposal to advantage.
We really can't let players like Stewart, Sicily, Jones (this week), Moore, Pearce etc be roaming around on their own.
But we continue to allow this to happen.

When we do regain possession from a defense kick, we are 1 player short until we wait for our guys to get forward and at least even up the numbers.
This holds up play and makes it easier for the opposition defense to get set again seeing they are already 1 player extra to start with.
Then we wonder why a long kick into the forward 50 is the option as finding a decent lead in a very crowed forward 50 is a hard kick to nail.

I won't hold my breath for a change but i would like to see one.
Click to expand...
I'm scratching my head as to why we keep doing this but the way we set up limits any alternative.

Hard to think it's not a coaching issue.
 
Section 5 said:
One change i would like to see is around stoppages.
We have for years been around about the best clearance team in the AFL.
Still number 1 in 2024 to round 11, not that this stat has helped our win/loss record.
We get extra numbers around stoppages like some other teams. That helps in getting those stoppage/clearance stats.
But this leaves us with 1 less player along the wing center or defense area.
Any rushed kick out from a defense/wing stoppage is mostly gobbled up by opposition players, certainly in top 8 teams.
What makes it worse is that the intercept is usually a gun defense player in the AFL who will use his disposal to advantage.
We really can't let players like Stewart, Sicily, Jones (this week), Moore, Pearce etc be roaming around on their own.
But we continue to allow this to happen.

When we do regain possession from a defense kick, we are 1 player short until we wait for our guys to get forward and at least even up the numbers.
This holds up play and makes it easier for the opposition defense to get set again seeing they are already 1 player extra to start with.
Then we wonder why a long kick into the forward 50 is the option as finding a decent lead in a very crowed forward 50 is a hard kick to nail.

I won't hold my breath for a change but i would like to see one.
Click to expand...
I think the clearance stat is misleading really... I'd like to see some sort of efficiency rating on it somehow. We tend to dish out quickly... and often to a player in a contest or the opposition. Worse is we tend to have a lot of players getting sucked into being the first receiver and that leaves us exposed through the middle of the ground over and over.
 
notliondown said:
I think the clearance stat is misleading really... I'd like to see some sort of efficiency rating on it somehow. We tend to dish out quickly... and often to a player in a contest or the opposition. Worse is we tend to have a lot of players getting sucked into being the first receiver and that leaves us exposed through the middle of the ground over and over.
Click to expand...

The clubs all have these stats
 
martinson said:
Since we said we were going to do things a bit differently at the start of the year to try to get that bit of improvement to win a flag our players appear genuinely confused as to whether they should do what has been instinctively ingrained into them over the previous few years ( a game plan that we still embrace overall) and engaging in the opportunities that our tweaks ,or what we said we'd now try to do ,present.

Knowing when to go and when not to isn't as easy as saying do it . You need the confidence built up from having it work for you when you do and more importantly the footy smarts to be able to recognise what's best.

We've got ourselves in a bit of a mess over this which seeps away at your confidence and contributes to our lapses in concentration which have been a feature of nearly every game this year.
Click to expand...
I think 110% describes Hugh this year. His indecision is crippling and often leads to him being tackled or have pressured disposals that inevitably lead to turn over. It's not only him but his fall this year reflects more on his state of mind that anything else.

Confidence is huge thing for us now and regaining it across all sections of the ground seems paramount. New players don't help with continuity but its a bigger issue than that.

This year will make or break some players... this is the first time they find themselves challenged both on the ladder and most likely internally. It'll be interesting to see who rises to the challenge.
 
notliondown said:
I think 110% describes Hugh this year. His indecision is crippling and often leads to him being tackled or have pressured disposals that inevitably lead to turn over. It's not only him but his fall this year reflects more on his state of mind that anything else.

Confidence is huge thing for us now and regaining it across all sections of the ground seems paramount. New players don't help with continuity but its a bigger issue than that.

This year will make or break some players... this is the first time they find themselves challenged both on the ladder and most likely internally. It'll be interesting to see who rises to the challenge.
Click to expand...
Well Andrews is for a start. Does his level best every week to hold things together.
 
Grasshopper17 said:
TL;DR:

  • Missed tackles
  • Corridor red mist
  • Multiple players flying for the same mark inside 50
  • First possession --> Clearance

Some great analysis in here from lots of people, but I think Kernel Kurtz's tackling master class is just about my favourite.

It's interesting that when you look at a lot of the key indicators from Sunday's game, they've all been close and we've only just been behind. But we've lost almost ALL of them:

  • Clearances: lost by 1
  • Intercepts: won by 1, but our LOWEST number of intercepts for the year. This comes back to my concerns pre-game that if we gave them the ball, we would struggle to get it back, and this came to pass.
  • Inside 50s: lost by 2
  • Converting inside 50s to shots at goal: lost 53% (this is actually one of our best results for the season) to 57%
  • Expected score: 85 v 95 approx (depending on which source you use)

So add up all these little losses and you come out with a 25 point defeat. I mean, in a lot of areas the game looks like a game played on our terms. We take 106 marks, take 11-6 contested marks, even lay more tackles inside 50, which I find hard to believe.



But clearly none of us here are kidding ourselves. We conceded 16 marks inside 50 and took only 13 of our own. That's the highest tally we've conceded for the season. Obviously none of our defenders covered themselves in glory on Sunday, but they certainly weren't helped by our inability to stick our tackles further afield. We actually nailed one midway through the 2nd quarter (nothing spectacular; I think we might have got a ball up out of it) and it stuck out like dogs' balls at the time.

That initiated a period of the game where we barely missed a tackle, for a bit over a quarter, and wouldn't you know it, we kicked 6 goals to 1 during that time. Then we just rolled over again in the last quarter and went back to how we were playing at the start of the game. The difference in our ability to nail tackles during that period across the 2nd and 3rd quarters was so noticeable compared to the rest of the game.

I listened to a chat between Isaac Smith and Damien Hardwick on the weekend, where Hardwick made a very interesting point about how as your team evolves, you continue to add layers to your game plan etc. This can mean you start spending 80% of your time on 20% of the game, so you move away from the fundamentals of what makes you a good team. I think that's what we've done, to the point where the fundamentals, the foundations of what can make us a good team, have been set aside to focus on things like ball movement.

It's all important, but when you build a bridge, you don't just build it, go "ah that's pretty good", walk away and the job's done. The bridge, throughout the course of its life, needs regular maintenance, not to improve it, but simply to ensure it remains safe, functional and keeps its aesthetic. There's a real parallel with our footy team - it looks like we don't spend enough time, consistently, on nailing our fundamentals.

So missed tackles was the main thing for me. If we'd nailed more of them, that in itself would have been the difference. Hawthorn scored 9 of their 15 goals from stoppage - the way they were just able to walk out of congestion was pretty jarring, particularly as we've seen it before and it looks like nothing is ever really done about it.



When we DID get it I actually thought we moved the ball pretty well. We were able to get into the corridor pretty regularly, and if you can do that, the ground should open up and you should be able to get a shot at goal quite comfortably. Unfortunately, it looks like we're all black and white at the moment. We're either "go sideways, be patient but alert, tack your way down the field", which we have shown we're quite adept at, or we're "let's get into the corridor, go a million miles an hour and kick it as long as possible inside 50". If we have peak Tom Hawkins up there, great, but we don't.

If you have the ball running through the centre square you have the entire width of the ground available to use. USE that width. Where's a leading forward (tall or small) coming up at the ball, either directly, or at a 45° angle leading towards the boundary on either side? That's the nuance, the shades of grey, the colour even, we need to employ more in our ball movement. Also, if you DO use that width, that is width the opposition can't use on the rebound, because you'll have your numbers there. When you attack via the corridor with no changing of angles, you open up BOTH sides of the field to be hurt on the counter attack. That's very hard to defend.

None of this is reactionary or revisionist from me here - I brought it up in the lead up to the Melbourne game and on Sunday we saw plenty of instances where it would have worked better than simply bombing long inside 50.



So it's a high risk strategy, and I'm not convinced we get full bang for buck playing that way, partly because of the abilities of our key forwards, but also because we just have so little discipline in and around contested marking situations in our forward line. How many times did we have multiple guys flying for the same mark inside 50? Not only do you spoil your team mate in a better position to take the mark, but we leave no representation at ground level to scoop up any crumbs. This is not new issue, it's afflicted us terribly in the past, and it seems to have come back into our game after I thought we addressed it pretty well in 2023.

I get that the opposition are regularly trying to generate a spare man to create a 2 on 1 marking contest, or even a 1 on 0 in the air. But that doesn't give our small forwards carte blanche to fly over the top! That puts the onus on them to stop that from happening in the first place. I don't care how short or tall you are - it's not about marking the ball yourself, it's simply about preventing the "spare" from being able to impact the contest. Jed McEntee is 176cm, but that didn't stop him doing an outstanding job in this regard on the 190cm Tom Stewart a couple of weeks ago. It's not about your height, it's about your attitude.

I'd be schooling up Cal Ah Chee, or even Cam Rayner, in this regard. Both have shown a real lack of consistency throughout their careers, and I feel this would really bring a focus to their game that might bring out the best in them. You can still have an impact in an attacking sense, but use making life miserable for a guy who wants to intercept all day long as your starting point. That way you can point to "yeah maybe I've had a quiet day, but James Sicily had a stinker". And then if you DO get on the scoreboard, well it throws everything your opponent wants to do defensively into disarray.



The last thing I've got is something Daniel Hoyne brought up on SEN last night. Apparently Lachie Neale is the WORST player in the competition at turning a first possession at stoppage into a clearance, and Josh Dunkley is 3rd worst. This was a pretty mind-boggling stat when I heard it, but I guess if we're trying to backwards-rationalise, to me it really comes back to the fact that we insist on feeding the ball backwards out of congestion. This not only does all the things I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but it also leaves all our stoppage numbers forward of the ball, dictating that if we DO cough it up from that point, we allow our opposition an easy exit out the front. And we saw that far too often on Sunday.

WE need to be the ones coming out the front. Take the tackler on, if you can't break through, arms above your head, feed out to a runner. You commit an opponent AND if you DO lose possession from there, you're in a much better position to defend, simply because the ball was going FORWARDS up to that point, and thus your stoppage numbers should not all be ahead of the ball.



It's amazing how even though first and foremost we are critical of Sunday's EFFORT (and rightly so), there's still so many areas we can identify where we need to improve strategically. To me it only lends credence to the notion that we need to find more and better ways of working smarter, rather than harder all the time.
Click to expand...
Ha ha , Tackling masterclass, cheers that brought a smile to my face.
You make a lot of good points as pretty much everybody here on this topic.

The talk on our stoppage set ups are very interesting to say the least.
Bottom line is as you say fundamentals , and they need to be executed, and would hope work rate is up there at the top.
I'll have a proper read tonight while watching Home and away.
 
Interesting thread.

Seems broad agreement that we have finally tried a bit if a re-jig this year but not pulled it off.

My broken-record contribution is we really need to poach someone with some proven gameplan ideas as a 2ic.

BUT ALSO reading this thread got me thinking.

Would the most radical thing we could do to improve our midfield go for a new ruckman?

Fagan is clearly a bargain basement ruck type. Oscar is value for money. He’s no star though.

What would we look like with a really mobile ruckman who has genuine craft in his tapwork?

I was just watching De Koning for example get a free, cruise on to his left, get closed in but just calmly hit a target on the run.

I know it’s s cliche but an ‘extra mid’ ruck really can be transformational.

Who would it be? I mean Grundy was a bargain wasn’t he! I’d like to think we asked but doubt it.

Strikes me that that best rucks are either a) monsters like gawn who can sit behind play marking everything and winning easy hitouts or b) super mobile types who add to the midfield.

I’ve loved oscar’s intent and effort. He is no dud. But he is clearly neither of them.

Ruck is a pretty important position. Is it not time at the end of 2024 to think ruck might be holding us back from winning a flag?
 
Timetoroarlike44 said:
Interesting thread.

Seems broad agreement that we have finally tried a bit if a re-jig this year but not pulled it off.

My broken-record contribution is we really need to poach someone with some proven gameplan ideas as a 2ic.

BUT ALSO reading this thread got me thinking.

Would the most radical thing we could do to improve our midfield go for a new ruckman?

Fagan is clearly a bargain basement ruck type. Oscar is value for money. He’s no star though.

What would we look like with a really mobile ruckman who has genuine craft in his tapwork?

I was just watching De Koning for example get a free, cruise on to his left, get closed in but just calmly hit a target on the run.

I know it’s s cliche but an ‘extra mid’ ruck really can be transformational.

Who would it be? I mean Grundy was a bargain wasn’t he! I’d like to think we asked but doubt it.

Strikes me that that best rucks are either a) monsters like gawn who can sit behind play marking everything and winning easy hitouts or b) super mobile types who add to the midfield.

I’ve loved oscar’s intent and effort. He is no dud. But he is clearly neither of them.

Ruck is a pretty important position. Is it not time at the end of 2024 to think ruck might be holding us back from winning a flag?
Click to expand...
In some ways. Yes.
 
Timetoroarlike44 said:
Interesting thread.

Seems broad agreement that we have finally tried a bit if a re-jig this year but not pulled it off.

My broken-record contribution is we really need to poach someone with some proven gameplan ideas as a 2ic.

BUT ALSO reading this thread got me thinking.

Would the most radical thing we could do to improve our midfield go for a new ruckman?

Fagan is clearly a bargain basement ruck type. Oscar is value for money. He’s no star though.

What would we look like with a really mobile ruckman who has genuine craft in his tapwork?

I was just watching De Koning for example get a free, cruise on to his left, get closed in but just calmly hit a target on the run.

I know it’s s cliche but an ‘extra mid’ ruck really can be transformational.

Who would it be? I mean Grundy was a bargain wasn’t he! I’d like to think we asked but doubt it.

Strikes me that that best rucks are either a) monsters like gawn who can sit behind play marking everything and winning easy hitouts or b) super mobile types who add to the midfield.

I’ve loved oscar’s intent and effort. He is no dud. But he is clearly neither of them.

Ruck is a pretty important position. Is it not time at the end of 2024 to think ruck might be holding us back from winning a flag?
Click to expand...

Who? They don't grow on trees.
 
Grasshopper17 said:
🤷
View attachment 2003490
Click to expand...
have been known to play up those trackers, even mentioned by a player recently, so would like to see a few weeks on speeds stats on Dunks, but if accurate 34 is pretty quick and if correct I was wrong. Maybe he was fatigued but from memory there is a GWS player in that 3rd Q and recently Hawks player where Dunks is making no impression and they are running away from him.
 

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Review Round 11, 2024 - Hawthorn vs. Brisbane Lions

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