ZoBlitz
The Ghost Who Walks
- Moderator
- #1
If you want to skip my long form piece about how Ross Lyon is ruining football that was sparked off by the latest close scoring “classic” between the Saints and the Suns, please skip eight gifs down but honestly if you’ve read any of my previews since 2016, you kinda know what you’re going to get. Actually, you could probably just read one of them as the material is pretty much the same…
Honestly, it's Paul Roos’ fault. Or more correctly, it's the 2005 West Coast Eagles' fault. If the Sydney Swans don't pinch a premiership against an Eagles side that had a spectacular midfield but had weaknesses elsewhere, maybe Sydney assistant coach Ross Lyon learns a different lesson that football is about scoring goals not creating the dullest spectacle possible, where you might get lucky on the big day against infinitely more watchable sides. And then perhaps Roos doesn't return later to infect a new generation in Simon Goodwin so we don’t have to enjoy the fun of seeing a side take millions of defensive intercept marks but have no idea what to do after that (although that particular symptom of the Paul Roos disease might be cured by the Melbourne board sooner rather than later going off recent results).
It's difficult to put into words how depressing it is to see how modern footy has evolved just in the time I've been a fan in the last three decades. Rodney Eade developed the modern flood in the 1990s which was taken up by Terry Wallace and Grant Thomas in the 2000s to help inexperienced teams or teams lacking talent lose by less than they would normally. Incidentally the 2002 56-all draw at Docklands between Thomas’ Saints and Eade's Swans I would deem “the worst game of Australian rules football ever filmed”. I'd need to rewatch (if I ever had some kind of breakdown where that seemed like a sensible way to spend my time) but Thomas was more to blame for that particular atrocity, surprisingly.
Paul Roos’ tactic de jour was clogging the stoppages to create rolling mauls seen more in union than in a sport where you're trying to kick a ball between two posts multiple times a game. Maybe it was a directive by Sydney's administration to pack in the league and union fans? Regardless it was so awful to watch that even AFL CEO Demetriou called the game style “unattractive” and “wouldn't win many games” during the 2005 season. It would be annoying if that comment spurred on the side to ultimate victory that season because while Demetriou was not ultimately right that season, history has generally not been kind to ultra-defensive, clogging teams in terms of winning the ultimate prize.
Ross Lyon’s “coaching” revolves around clogging the backline and springing out of defence to catch the opposition side napping, sometimes literally as Ross Lyon’s coached games are the most boring experience known to man. How two teams in modern football can only kick 14 goals in a game of football at Marvel is almost some kind of perverted skill by itself, but Ross managed it last weekend against the Suns. Fourth lowest scoring game ever at Docklands (it’s really third if you consider that the “leading” score is from a shortened 2020 game). Would you like to know who the coaches were for the lowest scoring game ever at Docklands for a non-shortened game? Shockingly, it was Ross Lyon and Rodney Eade back in 2010.
But maybe I’m being unfair. Let’s listen to David Mission, current Executive General Manager of Football at St. Kilda: “I’ve been with Ross a long time and at no point is there an absolute focus on defence and a lack of focus on scoring… We’re a team who wants to score as much as possible”. Well, I guess Mission would know, he has a long involvement in the AFL at various clubs. Now let’s see, what other clubs did he work at? Worked as High Performance Manager at the Swans for seven years under hmmm Rodney Eade and Paul Roos and then he moved to St. Kilda for four years where he was also High Performance Manager under, now let’s see, Ross Lyon. Ah but his next job was with Melbourne as Elite Performance Manager under Mark Neeld so that’s slightly different… until Paul Roos and eventually Simon Goodwin took over. And then he returned after a career elsewhere to work with Ross again. Now considering all that, would David Mission even know what a team “…who wants to score as much as possible” looks like?
One small joy I have from Ross’ return to coaching is that if he were to hold on for 44 more games as St. Kilda coach, he will set the VFL/AFL record for most games coached without winning a premiership. Unsurprisingly, he’ll be taking the mantle from Rodney Eade, a spiritual mentor. He does at least hold the current record of coaching the greatest number of grand finals without winning one which is a testament to his abilities to consistently focus on ruining his chances of winning a premiership by sticking to his one and only game plan. If you coach to keep scoring low then your margins of error are tiny, so poor inaccuracy in front of goal or a ball bouncing the wrong way can really cost you on the important day in usually September. Whereas big scoring, attacking sides can dig themselves out of trouble with quick scores or put teams away with bursts of goals. Instead, it’s the “dig up stupid” approach of trying to come from behind when you fundamentally don’t know how to score quickly or at all.
You might have assumed he wouldn’t be able to go back to his usual “tricks” with the 6-6-6 rule and the other variously ineffectual attempts by the AFL to increase scoring (psst, the 6-6-6 didn’t increase scoring but it makes commentators think it does which is the important thing I guess?).
I’m baffled why any club would want to hire him but I’m more baffled as to why St. Kilda wanted a second chance to feel the pain. And even if you don’t have an issue with destructive influence Ross has on football generally, coaches who have failed at their first club and gone onto to win a premiership with a subsequent club hasn’t happened in the AFL since the 90s. Just, why??
I try to not let Ross and his ilk irritate me as much as it clearly does but deep down it just offends me as someone who fundamentally believes that football is about kicking big scores. That wining 5-3 is more interesting than winning 1-0. I want to see forwards kick bags and see zipping movement of the ball up and down the field with little or no stoppages. What Lyons and Roos have never wanted to do is coach a side to play “football”, they want to coach teams to not lose or possibly not lose by too much. Go do something else with your life if you’re given the responsibility to coach an Australian rules club and you don’t want to focus on kicking more goals but instead, you’d prefer to concentrate on clogging up the game and making it unwatchable for everyone.
Ok, so what was I talking about? Oh yeah, I was doing a preview, wasn’t I? Let’s get back on track.
Brisbane too good, game incredibly crappy to watch, Lions by 12.
Alright fine, let’s talk about the game.
Well good luck to you if you’ve been tipping us correctly this season because it has been a rollercoaster. We’ve played some magnificent football amongst some putrid displays often within the same game, sometimes the same quarter. You have performances like last week’s against the Western Bulldogs or Melbourne earlier in the season and contrast them with the efforts against GWS or Hawthorn. We’ve kicked our 9th highest score in the history of the merged club as well as being kept to our 7th lowest in the one season. It’s a real head scratcher.
Weirdly if you just looked at the pure statistics and ignored the win-loss column, we’re actually tracking quite well in a number of various statistical categories that predict possible premiership contenders. Looking at the Wheelo Ratings Premiership Metrics that look at statistical areas where ten of the last twelve premiers have featured in the top 6 of those stats in that season, we rank second behind Sydney.
Purely looking at stats, we lead in inside 50 differentials, are second in contested possession differential (behind Carlton), fourth in clearance differential and perhaps a reason why we haven’t won as many games as we should have this season, is while our expected scores for the season rank us third in the AFL, we’ve struggled to kick anywhere near that accurately. For those non-nerds amongst us, expected scores are the number of goals you should expect to kick from a position on the field based on previous attempts from that position, taking into account the type of shot and type of opposition pressure. Instead, we seem to be trying to set a record for hitting the post and kicking out of bounds on the full.
Accuracy this season has been a killer. If you assumed that every team kicked their expected score every week, we’d be sitting third on the ladder rather than quite a few positions further down from that. We’ve ebbed and flowed with our accuracy since we began our recent finals year in 2019 where we kicked a very numerically pleasing 307 goals and 307 behinds. We got worse in 2020 (we kicked a goal in 46% of our shots on goal that recorded at least a point), better in 2021 (55%), even better in 2022 (57%) and the last two years have been a drop off with 53% and 49% last year and this year respectively. But like our up-and-down game scores, we’ve had our third most accurate goal kicking game in Brisbane Lions merged history (78.79% against Richmond) and our fourth worst (23.53% against Geelong).
Probably the other main story of the season is all our knee injuries and the opportunities it’s provided for some fresh faces on the field. One ACL injury in a year is tragic but to see four new ones this season is simply hard to imagine. Linc, in particular, is one of my favourite Lions players so fingers crossed he can bounce back to his best next season, as well as the rest of the ACL rehab crew. That being said, at least we’ve been able to take a glimpse at the next generation with Bruce Reville, who will be cursed with Lions crowds not knowing when to time out the Bruce chant when he gets the ball/kicks the ball/vaguely is around the ball. He’s demonstrated his kicking skills and his hard tackling and has slotted in as one of the wing regulars. It’ll be interesting to see whether that ends up being his final position in future seasons.
Everyone knows Logan Morris’ story by now. I happened to watch the later part of his VFL game on the day of his AFL debut and I felt he looked closer to needing a week off to recover as he was gassed in the last then getting a debut, but he backed up excellently considering the situation. He’s managed to kick a goal every game since debut which is hard enough in modern football but even harder for a fresh-faced rookie key position player. It suggests a player that knows how to get to the right position which you can always use in a forward line, especially this year when we’ve struggled at times to connect our midfield to our forward line.
So, what about last week? An amazing performance (even if the Bulldogs tend to yo-yo as much as we do in recent times) especially considering we haven’t beaten them in Victoria since 2014 and even then, after you take into account our 2012 win at Docklands, you’d have to go back to 2004 for our last win against them in Victoria. On top of all that it was our biggest win against them since 2012. On a personal note, last week was the first time I’d seen the Lions beat the Bulldogs live in Victoria since I moved to Melbourne in 2011 as I missed the 2014 result due to an engagement party and the 2012 game for reasons I can’t remember now. This leaves Geelong, Hawthorn and Richmond as teams I’ve yet to see beaten live in Victoria. At the rate we’re going, I might see us beat Geelong at Kardinia before we beat Hawthorn anywhere though.
Last week contained a supreme performance by one of the whipping boys around here, Eric Hipwood, who equalled his six goal best effort against Port Adelaide in 2019 and Carlton in 2018. Hippy has struggled this season like many of our forwards, but it’s sometimes forgotten about how important his performances have been in finals for us and we are a better side with him in it. Hopefully he can build upon his performance this round although kicking three goals against a Ross Lyon side is about the same as kicking six against “normally coached” sides so expectations should probably be lowered.
Jarrod Berry has continued his rich vein of form having been moved back inside from his customary wing position of recent years. I must admit I’m not always the biggest fan of Bez being played in the middle as his clearance work can be inconsistent at times, but he seems to have found some balance in his play and has continued to show promise with his tagging work while also working hard to be damaging working the other way. Surprisingly, this is the first season where Bez is averaging more than 20 disposals a game and he is certainly providing value from them at the moment. The great impetus of a contract year, maybe! It’s unfortunate that Bont will probably still manage to poll three votes because umpires stink.
Damn, Lachie Neale is the man. It’s a shame that I think niggles have probably affected his recent seasons because much like Michael Voss in his day, he still seems to perform at a high level despite any restrictions on his body. His performance against the Bulldogs was a tour de force which he also capped off with a couple of goals which is perhaps one of the few criticisms you could lower on the “moral” three-time Brownlow medallist, in that he doesn’t hit the scoreboard very regularly. I could watch him spin around in a circle with traffic all around and end up in the same space but with no opponents around him all day.
Last but not least, Dayne Zorko. He didn’t look too far off retirement at the end of last season but he’s possibly hovering around All Australian squad contention with his move to the quarterback role in defence. He’s somehow looking fitter and healthier than he has in years and he’s averaging more possessions now than he ever did as a midfielder. He also seems to have hit that balance between being competitive and “losing his nut regularly and giving away stupid free kicks” which shows you that it’s never too late to learn.
Enough stalling, I should probably talk about St. Kilda. I mean, there’s not much I can say particularly as I refuse to watch their games and only vaguely care about Saints players as it relates to my Supercoach players (I’m not checking to see how often I’ve re-used that joke). Their wins have either been against terrible sides or good sides playing terribly (so we’re not safe…). They average a depressing 71 points a game which is only a few points better than North and West Coast which is poor considering they are in a completely different list profile position.
Jack Steele is still trying to keep the dream alive, Jack Sinclair perhaps hasn’t hit the heights of previous years considering his interrupted preseason and Max King is still developing, although good luck developing as a key forward with Ross Lyon. Rowan Marshall has had another good year so Oscar will have to be on his toes and hopefully continue on from last week’s great performance where he had big money man Tim English looking pretty pedestrian.
I am not going to enjoy watching this game as regardless of what club he’s been coaching and who’s been coaching us, we always seem to play down to Ross Lyon’s level, and it becomes a trying experience for everyone involved. We also can’t afford inaccuracy or inefficient inside 50 entries otherwise it may be one of those 8.16 to 6.4 type games that everyone hates and no remembers two weeks later.
Final tip: Brisbane too good, game incredibly crappy to watch, Lions by 12.
Honestly, it's Paul Roos’ fault. Or more correctly, it's the 2005 West Coast Eagles' fault. If the Sydney Swans don't pinch a premiership against an Eagles side that had a spectacular midfield but had weaknesses elsewhere, maybe Sydney assistant coach Ross Lyon learns a different lesson that football is about scoring goals not creating the dullest spectacle possible, where you might get lucky on the big day against infinitely more watchable sides. And then perhaps Roos doesn't return later to infect a new generation in Simon Goodwin so we don’t have to enjoy the fun of seeing a side take millions of defensive intercept marks but have no idea what to do after that (although that particular symptom of the Paul Roos disease might be cured by the Melbourne board sooner rather than later going off recent results).
It's difficult to put into words how depressing it is to see how modern footy has evolved just in the time I've been a fan in the last three decades. Rodney Eade developed the modern flood in the 1990s which was taken up by Terry Wallace and Grant Thomas in the 2000s to help inexperienced teams or teams lacking talent lose by less than they would normally. Incidentally the 2002 56-all draw at Docklands between Thomas’ Saints and Eade's Swans I would deem “the worst game of Australian rules football ever filmed”. I'd need to rewatch (if I ever had some kind of breakdown where that seemed like a sensible way to spend my time) but Thomas was more to blame for that particular atrocity, surprisingly.
Paul Roos’ tactic de jour was clogging the stoppages to create rolling mauls seen more in union than in a sport where you're trying to kick a ball between two posts multiple times a game. Maybe it was a directive by Sydney's administration to pack in the league and union fans? Regardless it was so awful to watch that even AFL CEO Demetriou called the game style “unattractive” and “wouldn't win many games” during the 2005 season. It would be annoying if that comment spurred on the side to ultimate victory that season because while Demetriou was not ultimately right that season, history has generally not been kind to ultra-defensive, clogging teams in terms of winning the ultimate prize.
Ross Lyon’s “coaching” revolves around clogging the backline and springing out of defence to catch the opposition side napping, sometimes literally as Ross Lyon’s coached games are the most boring experience known to man. How two teams in modern football can only kick 14 goals in a game of football at Marvel is almost some kind of perverted skill by itself, but Ross managed it last weekend against the Suns. Fourth lowest scoring game ever at Docklands (it’s really third if you consider that the “leading” score is from a shortened 2020 game). Would you like to know who the coaches were for the lowest scoring game ever at Docklands for a non-shortened game? Shockingly, it was Ross Lyon and Rodney Eade back in 2010.
But maybe I’m being unfair. Let’s listen to David Mission, current Executive General Manager of Football at St. Kilda: “I’ve been with Ross a long time and at no point is there an absolute focus on defence and a lack of focus on scoring… We’re a team who wants to score as much as possible”. Well, I guess Mission would know, he has a long involvement in the AFL at various clubs. Now let’s see, what other clubs did he work at? Worked as High Performance Manager at the Swans for seven years under hmmm Rodney Eade and Paul Roos and then he moved to St. Kilda for four years where he was also High Performance Manager under, now let’s see, Ross Lyon. Ah but his next job was with Melbourne as Elite Performance Manager under Mark Neeld so that’s slightly different… until Paul Roos and eventually Simon Goodwin took over. And then he returned after a career elsewhere to work with Ross again. Now considering all that, would David Mission even know what a team “…who wants to score as much as possible” looks like?
One small joy I have from Ross’ return to coaching is that if he were to hold on for 44 more games as St. Kilda coach, he will set the VFL/AFL record for most games coached without winning a premiership. Unsurprisingly, he’ll be taking the mantle from Rodney Eade, a spiritual mentor. He does at least hold the current record of coaching the greatest number of grand finals without winning one which is a testament to his abilities to consistently focus on ruining his chances of winning a premiership by sticking to his one and only game plan. If you coach to keep scoring low then your margins of error are tiny, so poor inaccuracy in front of goal or a ball bouncing the wrong way can really cost you on the important day in usually September. Whereas big scoring, attacking sides can dig themselves out of trouble with quick scores or put teams away with bursts of goals. Instead, it’s the “dig up stupid” approach of trying to come from behind when you fundamentally don’t know how to score quickly or at all.
You might have assumed he wouldn’t be able to go back to his usual “tricks” with the 6-6-6 rule and the other variously ineffectual attempts by the AFL to increase scoring (psst, the 6-6-6 didn’t increase scoring but it makes commentators think it does which is the important thing I guess?).
I’m baffled why any club would want to hire him but I’m more baffled as to why St. Kilda wanted a second chance to feel the pain. And even if you don’t have an issue with destructive influence Ross has on football generally, coaches who have failed at their first club and gone onto to win a premiership with a subsequent club hasn’t happened in the AFL since the 90s. Just, why??
I try to not let Ross and his ilk irritate me as much as it clearly does but deep down it just offends me as someone who fundamentally believes that football is about kicking big scores. That wining 5-3 is more interesting than winning 1-0. I want to see forwards kick bags and see zipping movement of the ball up and down the field with little or no stoppages. What Lyons and Roos have never wanted to do is coach a side to play “football”, they want to coach teams to not lose or possibly not lose by too much. Go do something else with your life if you’re given the responsibility to coach an Australian rules club and you don’t want to focus on kicking more goals but instead, you’d prefer to concentrate on clogging up the game and making it unwatchable for everyone.
Ok, so what was I talking about? Oh yeah, I was doing a preview, wasn’t I? Let’s get back on track.
Brisbane too good, game incredibly crappy to watch, Lions by 12.
Alright fine, let’s talk about the game.
Well good luck to you if you’ve been tipping us correctly this season because it has been a rollercoaster. We’ve played some magnificent football amongst some putrid displays often within the same game, sometimes the same quarter. You have performances like last week’s against the Western Bulldogs or Melbourne earlier in the season and contrast them with the efforts against GWS or Hawthorn. We’ve kicked our 9th highest score in the history of the merged club as well as being kept to our 7th lowest in the one season. It’s a real head scratcher.
Weirdly if you just looked at the pure statistics and ignored the win-loss column, we’re actually tracking quite well in a number of various statistical categories that predict possible premiership contenders. Looking at the Wheelo Ratings Premiership Metrics that look at statistical areas where ten of the last twelve premiers have featured in the top 6 of those stats in that season, we rank second behind Sydney.
Purely looking at stats, we lead in inside 50 differentials, are second in contested possession differential (behind Carlton), fourth in clearance differential and perhaps a reason why we haven’t won as many games as we should have this season, is while our expected scores for the season rank us third in the AFL, we’ve struggled to kick anywhere near that accurately. For those non-nerds amongst us, expected scores are the number of goals you should expect to kick from a position on the field based on previous attempts from that position, taking into account the type of shot and type of opposition pressure. Instead, we seem to be trying to set a record for hitting the post and kicking out of bounds on the full.
Accuracy this season has been a killer. If you assumed that every team kicked their expected score every week, we’d be sitting third on the ladder rather than quite a few positions further down from that. We’ve ebbed and flowed with our accuracy since we began our recent finals year in 2019 where we kicked a very numerically pleasing 307 goals and 307 behinds. We got worse in 2020 (we kicked a goal in 46% of our shots on goal that recorded at least a point), better in 2021 (55%), even better in 2022 (57%) and the last two years have been a drop off with 53% and 49% last year and this year respectively. But like our up-and-down game scores, we’ve had our third most accurate goal kicking game in Brisbane Lions merged history (78.79% against Richmond) and our fourth worst (23.53% against Geelong).
Probably the other main story of the season is all our knee injuries and the opportunities it’s provided for some fresh faces on the field. One ACL injury in a year is tragic but to see four new ones this season is simply hard to imagine. Linc, in particular, is one of my favourite Lions players so fingers crossed he can bounce back to his best next season, as well as the rest of the ACL rehab crew. That being said, at least we’ve been able to take a glimpse at the next generation with Bruce Reville, who will be cursed with Lions crowds not knowing when to time out the Bruce chant when he gets the ball/kicks the ball/vaguely is around the ball. He’s demonstrated his kicking skills and his hard tackling and has slotted in as one of the wing regulars. It’ll be interesting to see whether that ends up being his final position in future seasons.
Everyone knows Logan Morris’ story by now. I happened to watch the later part of his VFL game on the day of his AFL debut and I felt he looked closer to needing a week off to recover as he was gassed in the last then getting a debut, but he backed up excellently considering the situation. He’s managed to kick a goal every game since debut which is hard enough in modern football but even harder for a fresh-faced rookie key position player. It suggests a player that knows how to get to the right position which you can always use in a forward line, especially this year when we’ve struggled at times to connect our midfield to our forward line.
So, what about last week? An amazing performance (even if the Bulldogs tend to yo-yo as much as we do in recent times) especially considering we haven’t beaten them in Victoria since 2014 and even then, after you take into account our 2012 win at Docklands, you’d have to go back to 2004 for our last win against them in Victoria. On top of all that it was our biggest win against them since 2012. On a personal note, last week was the first time I’d seen the Lions beat the Bulldogs live in Victoria since I moved to Melbourne in 2011 as I missed the 2014 result due to an engagement party and the 2012 game for reasons I can’t remember now. This leaves Geelong, Hawthorn and Richmond as teams I’ve yet to see beaten live in Victoria. At the rate we’re going, I might see us beat Geelong at Kardinia before we beat Hawthorn anywhere though.
Last week contained a supreme performance by one of the whipping boys around here, Eric Hipwood, who equalled his six goal best effort against Port Adelaide in 2019 and Carlton in 2018. Hippy has struggled this season like many of our forwards, but it’s sometimes forgotten about how important his performances have been in finals for us and we are a better side with him in it. Hopefully he can build upon his performance this round although kicking three goals against a Ross Lyon side is about the same as kicking six against “normally coached” sides so expectations should probably be lowered.
Jarrod Berry has continued his rich vein of form having been moved back inside from his customary wing position of recent years. I must admit I’m not always the biggest fan of Bez being played in the middle as his clearance work can be inconsistent at times, but he seems to have found some balance in his play and has continued to show promise with his tagging work while also working hard to be damaging working the other way. Surprisingly, this is the first season where Bez is averaging more than 20 disposals a game and he is certainly providing value from them at the moment. The great impetus of a contract year, maybe! It’s unfortunate that Bont will probably still manage to poll three votes because umpires stink.
Damn, Lachie Neale is the man. It’s a shame that I think niggles have probably affected his recent seasons because much like Michael Voss in his day, he still seems to perform at a high level despite any restrictions on his body. His performance against the Bulldogs was a tour de force which he also capped off with a couple of goals which is perhaps one of the few criticisms you could lower on the “moral” three-time Brownlow medallist, in that he doesn’t hit the scoreboard very regularly. I could watch him spin around in a circle with traffic all around and end up in the same space but with no opponents around him all day.
Last but not least, Dayne Zorko. He didn’t look too far off retirement at the end of last season but he’s possibly hovering around All Australian squad contention with his move to the quarterback role in defence. He’s somehow looking fitter and healthier than he has in years and he’s averaging more possessions now than he ever did as a midfielder. He also seems to have hit that balance between being competitive and “losing his nut regularly and giving away stupid free kicks” which shows you that it’s never too late to learn.
Enough stalling, I should probably talk about St. Kilda. I mean, there’s not much I can say particularly as I refuse to watch their games and only vaguely care about Saints players as it relates to my Supercoach players (I’m not checking to see how often I’ve re-used that joke). Their wins have either been against terrible sides or good sides playing terribly (so we’re not safe…). They average a depressing 71 points a game which is only a few points better than North and West Coast which is poor considering they are in a completely different list profile position.
Jack Steele is still trying to keep the dream alive, Jack Sinclair perhaps hasn’t hit the heights of previous years considering his interrupted preseason and Max King is still developing, although good luck developing as a key forward with Ross Lyon. Rowan Marshall has had another good year so Oscar will have to be on his toes and hopefully continue on from last week’s great performance where he had big money man Tim English looking pretty pedestrian.
I am not going to enjoy watching this game as regardless of what club he’s been coaching and who’s been coaching us, we always seem to play down to Ross Lyon’s level, and it becomes a trying experience for everyone involved. We also can’t afford inaccuracy or inefficient inside 50 entries otherwise it may be one of those 8.16 to 6.4 type games that everyone hates and no remembers two weeks later.
Final tip: Brisbane too good, game incredibly crappy to watch, Lions by 12.
No wonder the Suns only managed 48 points: there was absolutely no movement forward of the ball. It's like they immediately conceded that no matter how many sideways passes they did, they would eventually just go long down the line, long down the line, or long down the line 
and whether anyone steps up if Neale struggles to break the tag, will be the main factors influencing whether we see another strong and impressive performance, or whether we are forced to watch a game which will immediately be fed to the shredder (win or lose).
