Autopsy The surprisingly mature post loss discussion.

[Johnny_Dogg4]

18 i50 for 2 behinds.... thats what lost us the game
on top of them and we put no score pressure

 

[Struggle]

Dickson has been so poor this year, ran around like a headless chook today, barely sighted with the ball besides that late goal. I know he's only a mid sized forward but he has no impact in the air or in the contest at all, at least bring it to ground or create contact with the opposition.

Can't keep his feet and throws his head back at the slightest contact looking for a free. Looks cooked

 

[Anja_Nees]

I can understand some of the outrage but it's over the top. This year basically has 2007 written all over it.

In 2006 we made the second week of finals despite a diabolical run of injuries (including an ACL to Murph). The following year we had four or five blokes back in the side who were underdone and our run and gun gameplay was worked out. Held up half a season and then imploded.

This year is much the same. Wallis, Murphy, Dicko, Roughead, Morris and Red have all missed close enough to half the season and are below full fitness and form. Others are in bad form either because of niggles, partying or old age.

It's caught up with us and we may miss the eight but honestly so what. It's not embracing mediocrity when you just won it. 17 teams would love a premiership hangover this year.

We'll be back, probably next year. We might need to pension a few off, poach a free agent or two and blood some kids but the talent is still there. It's not the coaches. I think we've just hit the wall.

 

[darthbards]

The decision to select Honey puzzles me. You can actually see the fear in Honey's eyes when gets a set shot. Can only assume picking Honey was an Ayce final chance pick.

The poor bastard can't finish at VFL level. Why would you expect any different at AFL level? Unlucky for Honey but his two first half easy misses went up the other end for goals. Four goal turnaround....

I like that he tries. But fair dinkum he can't ever be picked again??? Shirley.

Liam Picken is burning his credits in the bank quicker than a dodgy derivative trader...

Cordy, CD, Dahl, Rough, Wallis, Bont, Libba ok.

Stringer pisses me off at times. Really shirks contact at times. And JJ needs to HTFU.

I can see why they picked Honey but he let himself down in a few ways which was disappointing.
Spot on with JJ,looks like he's reached a point in his career where teams have found a real weakness and him and the club need to adjust to this.

Sadly I do agree with the Stringer annoyance. I find the annoyance dramatically amplified because of Stringers tendency to put on the psuodo tough guy persona. Very disappointing his attack on the football most of the time,and fake tough guy antics aren't really something that appeals.

 

[Johnny_Dogg4]

Can't keep his feet and throws his head back at the slightest contact looking for a free. Looks cooked

he was like that last year, it took him like 3 months to start playing with a bit of freedom in his movement

 

[Johnny_Dogg4]

I can understand some of the outrage but it's over the top. This year basically has 2007 written all over it.

In 2006 we made the second week of finals despite a diabolical run of injuries (including an ACL to Murph). The following year we had four or five blokes back in the side who were underdone and our run and gun gameplay was worked out. Held up half a season and then imploded.

This year is much the same. Wallis, Murphy, Dicko, Roughead, Morris and Red have all missed close enough to half the season and are below full fitness and form. Others are in bad form either because of niggles, partying or old age.

It's caught up with us and we may miss the eight but honestly so what. It's not embracing mediocrity when you just won it. 17 teams would love a premiership hangover this year.

We'll be back, probably next year. We might need to pension a few off, poach a free agent or two and blood some kids but the talent is still there. It's not the coaches. I think we've just hit the wall.

ive thought about that so many times,
again murph poor guy
we did get aker, welsh, hudson, hall to fill in the holes a bit. we might need to do the same

hopefully then we go on a run like 08-10, win a flag

 

[Mattdougie]

Dunkley is played as a forward and burns so many chances its not funny. I have every faith he will get better and be a good player for us in the future but atm he is not best 22. Although his mongrel and strength could have been useful at points today.

Fact of the matter, we have to play these players (dale , webb and Jong) as they are the best we have at the moment. Hence the point about my post, this is almost our strongest squad and the last two weeks we copped a massive hiding. Bad signs, we cant rely on blokes coming back from injury to bolster us.

I think you're off base on Williams. He has the potential to replace JJ if we lose him. He will be a good player.

Ok let's look at the players and how they are going compare to last year And being honest it's so obvious why we are down

Biggs - miles off last year
Roberts - not good enough
JJ - miles off last year
Wood - miles off last year
Moyd - cooked
Cordy - going only OK in different role
Hamling - gone
Hunter - horrible
McRae - probably the only constant
Libba - struggling
Dahl - ok but not great
Bont - something not right
Picken - horrible
Stringer - look back similar to last year
Rough - miles off
Dickson - gone back to normal Dicko
Toyd - struggling
Smith - struggling
McLean - rubbish
Dunkley - injured
Daniel - improving lately
Bev - struggling

That's 22 GF players and a coach and a tots of two at the same level.

Now let's lol at "new" players we expected to help us improve this year

Murphy - body is done?
Crameri - injured
Redpath - was only ok before injury why did some expect anything different
Cloke - blamed for everything like his days at the pies but gets awful delivery and is double teamed
Jong - no comment
Webb - not ready
Williams - not ready
Dale - average don't think he will make it
English - miles off being ready
Honey - absolutely not good enough
Campbell - worse than Honey

How can we expect to do anything with this?

 

[hazza21]

Did Bev get out coached today? We started 2 players on each wing and as a result ran with a 4 man forward line (often all smalls). They also played a 4 man forward line but sent their 2 extras to defence, therefore making it 8 on 4 in our 50.

Seeing as though we couldn't score do you think Bev should've swapped his tactics at some point? This continued the whole game. I'm sure our decision making and disposal was more of an issue but I can't see how this setup helped. Did anyone else notice/ have an issue with this?

* sorry if this has already been discussed, didn't have it in me to check BF until now. I took a snap of it but it's too big of a file to upload.

 

[Bazzas Lovechild]

On the plus side...Caleb was great, Morris is Morris. Macrae, Wallis, Hunter and Dahl seemed to be trying their guts out. Libba a good return. Genuinely surprised to see Bont score in the 90s in dt points. Thought he couldn't get into the game.

 

[Dogs_r_barking]

The comparison between last year and this year is stark. Firstly credit to Melbourne the played well.

But, we are so slow, so hesitant, gone are our fast accurate handballs, gone is the certainty that we know what we are doing and where we are going, gone is our almost sixth sense of where our players are with a hand backward. The constant handballs backwards, even hand balling into our fifty, what the???

If this is a new game plan it's terrible. Go back to what worked and start hunting again.

We've gotta stop letting other teams work us out and start working them out! Who is our opposition analyst? Start putting some work into negating our opponents' strengths instead of depending on our old worn-out game plan to keep working, when it obviously isn't!

We lost one of our analysts to GWS.

 

[Ozil]

I can understand some of the outrage but it's over the top. This year basically has 2007 written all over it.

In 2006 we made the second week of finals despite a diabolical run of injuries (including an ACL to Murph). The following year we had four or five blokes back in the side who were underdone and our run and gun gameplay was worked out. Held up half a season and then imploded.

This year is much the same. Wallis, Murphy, Dicko, Roughead, Morris and Red have all missed close enough to half the season and are below full fitness and form. Others are in bad form either because of niggles, partying or old age.

It's caught up with us and we may miss the eight but honestly so what. It's not embracing mediocrity when you just won it. 17 teams would love a premiership hangover this year.

We'll be back, probably next year. We might need to pension a few off, poach a free agent or two and blood some kids but the talent is still there. It's not the coaches. I think we've just hit the wall.

Best post in this thread.

 

[Bazzas Lovechild]

Ok let's look at the players and how they are going compare to last year And being honest it's so obvious why we are down

Biggs - miles off last year
Roberts - not good enough
JJ - miles off last year
Wood - miles off last year
Moyd - cooked
Cordy - going only OK in different role
Hamling - gone
Hunter - horrible
McRae - probably the only constant
Libba - struggling
Dahl - ok but not great
Bont - something not right
Picken - horrible
Stringer - look back similar to last year
Rough - miles off
Dickson - gone back to normal Dicko
Toyd - struggling
Smith - struggling
McLean - rubbish
Dunkley - injured
Daniel - improving lately
Bev - struggling

That's 22 GF players and a coach and a tots of two at the same level.

Now let's lol at "new" players we expected to help us improve this year

Murphy - body is done?
Crameri - injured
Redpath - was only ok before injury why did some expect anything different
Cloke - blamed for everything like his days at the pies but gets awful delivery and is double teamed
Jong - no comment
Webb - not ready
Williams - not ready
Dale - average don't think he will make it
English - miles off being ready
Honey - absolutely not good enough
Campbell - worse than Honey

How can we expect to do anything with this?

Based on today your ratings are correct but for the season you are too harsh.

Players have been up and down. I remain hopeful but not confident that they can lift and show what they are capable of.

I reckon we are starting to see some of the downsides of Bevo as a coach. As good as he's been i think he is extraordinarily stubborn on certain issues to the teams detriment. The tagging (or our unwillingness to tag) issue is a big one for me. Perhaps im wrong on this but it looks that way from the outside. His early and quick success has perhaps instilled in him a belief that he knows better than anyone else.

This being said he still gets a bronze statue out the front of Western oval for the Premiership!

 

[Bazzas Lovechild]

18 i50 for 2 behinds.... thats what lost us the game
on top of them and we put no score pressure

Ouch. Knew our forward line was non functional but that is diabolical.

 

[_M_16_]

Honestly, I am disappointed but not even worried one big. Way too much overreaction and perhaps some over estimated how good we were last year. Don't get me wrong, we played really well last year, choked teams with our pressure despite not hitting the scoreboard hard, and surprised them with our break neck disposal. Our end of season win/loss record would have gotten us into the top 4 about 60%-75% of the time since the year 2000. And we played one of the best finals series by any team in history

But the reality was, we won it well before we were meant to. Even Jason McCartney admitted he did not expect us to contend for another couple of seasons, myself probably a little longer than that. Our age profile and experience in terms of games played for a majority of the players was well off the typical premiership profile of many teams. We rode on the back of some of our veterans having close to career best seasons and a game style that was different

Now this year some teams have followed the same blue print, teams know how to beat us by putting the heat on us which we are not used to, forcing us into rushed and poor disposal, flooding the backline, and swarming numbers back behind us once they force the turnover. Many of those playing well then are not playing well now

Looking on the bright side, our list has greater depth and a wider variety of top end young talent or those with potential, more than most teams. If 80% of those become good to handy AFL players, and other teams have the same success rate, we will have more better players still. Not to mention I expect the league to become more even and closer in the years ahead. No team screams out flooded with youngsters that they will dominate, good teams like Adelaide and Geelong rely on the most senior/older players who wont be around by the time our list reaches the right profile. And I am not even that convinced about GWS powerhouse tag yet, because they face a big salary cap battle to keep all their top ranked youngsters.

We still need to plug a few holes, a genuine tap winning ruckman, forwards who can take a mark, another key defender, and more midfield grunt, but with some pace and good kicking skills

We won the flag last year, our first in over 60 years, they are very hard to win. The way people are reacting now is being too negative, and not looking to the bright sides. We are acting like we have been s**t for a few years now. I see this as this decades 2008 Hawthorn. Will be disappointed if we miss the finals. But it may be what the team needs, a long preseason and some more good draft picks. We probably partied too hard and long last year as well

 

[_M_16_]

Ouch. Knew our forward line was non functional but that is diabolical.

Or 3 marks inside 50 to 15 for the game. That's been our most damning statistic all season in regards to the forward line issue

 

[1961grandfinal]

Did Bev get out coached today? We started 2 players on each wing and as a result ran with a 4 man forward line (often all smalls). They also played a 4 man forward line but sent their 2 extras to defence, therefore making it 8 on 4 in our 50.

Seeing as though we couldn't score do you think Bev should've swapped his tactics at some point? This continued the whole game. I'm sure our decision making and disposal was more of an issue but I can't see how this setup helped. Did anyone else notice/ have an issue with this?

We didnt make any adjustment to their line up on the back of the square at every centre bounce.

It was 5 on 1 or 6 on 2 as we started both our half forwards on the side of the square, they streamed through the middle on so many occasions and not one response over the four quarters.

Left us wondering too.

 

[ScragCity]

Lets just play the kids and tank for picks. It has worked well for Melbourne obviously.

 

[Pagnoccolo C]

Anyone notice Mcrae/Bontempelli/Liberatore/JJ just give up on chasing guys today or was it just me?

Whole team wouldn't chase. Either not fit enough or not interested enough. Embarrassing.

 

[Bazzas Lovechild]

Lets just play the kids and tank for picks. It has worked well for Melbourne obviously.

Melbourne played really well today. They will make finals (unlike us) but will go out first round. Not good enough ...yet.

 

[_M_16_]

3 marks inside 50, to 15 all game

Go through most games this season and you will find its a common trend, teams even out mark us too easily around the ground, our talls have hands like feet. So we cannot control the tempo of the game, or take enough set shots at goals

 

[1961grandfinal]

Mitch Hannan, more than a high flyer who clunked a few; his skills and pace would have fitted into our forward line

He has certainly improved his game from the VFL last year.

 

[Struggle]

Mitch Hannan, more than a high flyer who clunked a few; his skills and pace would have fitted into our forward line

He has certainly improved his game from the VFL last year.

Skills and pace? Forward line? What are these things?

 

[DognBones]

Of course we were very poor today but, on the other hand, Melbourne was very impressive. They have a very good game plan based, would you believe, on manic pressure around the ball, fast breaks from stoppages and disciplined, accurate kicking to position. The latter was evident when time and again they kicked the ball to hot spots in the forward 50. I think they have a bright future with most of their team young and skilful.
As for us, if a side can match us or better us around the contest, our lack of pace and kicking ability really show out and we look extremely vulnerable.
Today exemplified just how many poor kicks we have in the team. Not sure how we can turn this around this season but we really do need to fill some holes with trades and draftees at seasons end.

 

[Johnny_Dogg4]

Another goal less quarter
You can't expect to win too many games

This is becoming a pattern

 

[threenewpadlocks]

It's shit footy, but I'd back in Bevo to turn around this team as much more likely than Peter Rhode