Yep. People like to pull the “he’s not fit enough and that’s why they’re not picking him” card but there’s zero evidence to support that, it’s just an echo chamber assumption. If anything in his bnf year for the Maggie’s he covered the ground fine, and the poster (who I can’t recall) that tried to post some in depth stats to burn Hayes showed Hayes got to as many ruck contests as prime lycett was getting to lol.
This doesn’t mean I think he’s real fit, but there’s no suggestion that it’s an issue in his game or that it is the reason why he’s not getting picked. If it was an issue … what the **** would his returns be if he did get fit lol. 80 hitouts?
What we do have evidence of is that Hayes is well behind lycett in clearance and ground ball winning ability, and the ability to get involved in chains of play. He just doesn’t follow up, doesn’t get down when the ball is there and doesn’t tackle all that much after the ruck.
These are the things that we know from years of listening to Hinkley that he likes, we know lycett does well, that our coaches celebrated when finlayson had that stretch in ruck. We also are opting to put mids into the ruck at times over many other tall options in our team.
Hayes isn’t getting picked because Hinkley rates those things that Hayes is poor at as important, and doesn’t rate hitouts as worth anything much.
And I think he’s wrong.
Years of watching lycett getting 15d on a good day where 99% of those touches are either links in handball play that aren’t very valuable or dinky handpasses inside the contest to another port player like wines who’s immediately under pressure and has to either do another under pressure handpass to another nearby player or a rushed kick in hope
At lycetts peak we moaned about our midfield constantly being under pressure shovelling handpass after handpass until we turn it over or kick to a forward line that’s had forever and a day to set up to cover the kick
Meanwhile the other way we watch the other teams midfield waltz out of midfield cleanly and quickly and get it to a 1 on 1 contest before we can blink much less set up there how we like.
During these times I constantly pointed out our rucks inability to get clear hitouts to advantage and preference to knock the ball down inside the contest (if he got to it at all) and our slow midfielders not being explosive enough to exit a stoppage. Why I was very vocal before when rozee was forward that he must become a mid.
Now we’ve addressed one half of the issue, and how much better does our midfield look getting the ball out? You can see the quality of clearances is far better with mids who can get away from congestion.
The other half is a ruck who can put the ball on the best place for our mids to get it out as often as possible.
