Review Round 21, 2024 - St. Kilda vs. Brisbane Lions

[Tom14]

It was the Saints terribly slow ball movement where they looked sideways at very opportunity, which was down to our excellent defensive setup and Ross' coaching. Combine that with our quick efficient movement, that's why we lost that stat. Uncontested possession differentials are often more of an indication of play style than anything else, I feel.

Unless it is like the port game in round 1 last year where we lost uncontested ball by a historic amount (60 plus from memory) I don’t think it matters.

 

[StevoJenkins]

Our touted lack of fitness on this board by some including me does not seem to be an issue, we look to be running out games strongly.

Seems like our red time/4th quarter issues seemed to be mostly form related

I think it's better management and coaching to accommodate for a lack of runners in the lineup. Instead of leaving a buggered Charlie out there, we actually used the sub to get him off and put fresh legs out, whereas before they deployed the sub halfway in the fourth. There's also been a considerable change in personnel due to injuries that's forced more swapping of players in the midfield and a better use of rotations (from what I've noticed).

 

[Section 5]

It was really interesting to see that despite the mauling we gave them in contested possession, we still lost uncontested possession by 13. This is more like how our games looked a couple of years ago, where we'd dominate around the ball but then get beaten on the spread. This year, whenever we've won contested ball we've usually won uncontested by even more.

So just a bit of an anomaly compared to the rest of the season. Maybe a lot of this was caused by St Kilda's insistence to chip the ball around at times for not a whole lot of forward momentum. Our mid-ground team defence was excellent in restricting this for most of the game.

Marks: The Lions with 2242 and Saints with 2023 are the only 2 teams that have broken the 2000 marks for the year.
The big difference is what you end up doing with those possessions after the mark.
We are 2nd on the ladder, and they are 14th so i think it's easy to say we use those possessions a bit better.

The Saints took more marks than us on the weekend 122-107. That could account for the extra uncontested possessions.
In our previous meeting we took 151 marks to their 84 so maybe Ross Lyon went into the game to rectify that stat.

 

[Nunez]

It was the Saints terribly slow ball movement where they looked sideways at very opportunity, which was down to our excellent defensive setup and Ross' coaching. Combine that with our quick efficient movement, that's why we lost that stat. Uncontested possession differentials are often more of an indication of play style than anything else, I feel.

Trust you to have a counterpoint on a Ross Lyon team stat.