1. Adelaide now tackles as a group and their tackles stick.
2. The Adelaide game plan isn't centred around Patrick Dangerfield. For better or for worse, Bernie Vince put the heat on Dangerfield in Round 3 and restricted Patrick’s output to a relatively miserly 16 disposals but that left the gate open for Rory Sloane’s 31 disposals, Scott Thompson's’ 30, David Mackay’s 23, Richard Douglas’s 22, and a fair average for the rest. This was a good moment for Adelaide – confirming that as important as Paddy is, the team doesn't need any one player to define its game.
3. Coach Walsh maintained his strategy of starting Eddie Betts on the defensive edge of the square at centre bounces. Eddie has one job to do at these bounces and that’s to run through the centre chaos after the bounce and, if he’s lucky, he’ll be Adelaide’s seventh player at the scene after the bounce... running through in a straight line towards goal. Occasionally the ball spills out his way and occasionally he gets possession, and a quick give and Adelaide has a cheap forward-fifty entry.
If it’s not successful, Eddie continues to run through to assume his position in Adelaide’s attacking half. It’s such a simple strategy. Such a predictable early first chess move. On Saturday, there were nineteen goals and four starts to the quarters which meant that Eddie did this move 23 times. It worked on four occasions in the sense that he gained possession during his run-through.
Two of them, I think, created scores.
Eddie always runs to the right-hand side of the ruck contest, without exception. And that means that if Jacobs is winning the contest, he has to palm to his right if he wants to use the Eddie run-through option. If the coaches are finessing this concept, you’d then assume that the opponent’s centremen will cover Eddie’s rightside movement, which then creates an open zone on Jacobs’ left. Will Jacobs and the centremen then counter-bluff for a left-side palm?
We'll watch this one, with a great deal of interest.
4. Every player plays every position. I enjoy watching Tex Walker spending so much time in the back half. I enjoy the race back to scoring positions, the stretching of footy meaning. This style demands hard work and extreme sustained fitness. Walsh wouldn't attempt it unless he knew that his players were capable of achieving it. So far, Adelaide has been able to sustain this increased workload. I like that. The season is long. Can they sustain it through winter? We will see.
5. I especially enjoyed watching another lovely game by Cam Ellis-Yolmen, Adelaide’s emerging star in the NAB summer games with good work in the first two rounds. He’s a tall indigenous player with silver trout attributes – acute football intelligence, deft gives, an immaculate understanding of the fall of the ball. On Saturday, this was his fourth AFL game and he had a defining moment.
As a relative newbie, he thinks his role is to get possession and then give it off as soon as he can to more accomplished players around him. The early Andrew McLeod was once like that – streaming into attack, heading towards the goals but choosing to handball the hot ball to someone else, rather than presuming the right to kick the goal himself. It took McLeod a couple of seasons to realise that he shouldn’t pass it over and that he was good enough to kick the goals himself.
On Saturday, Ellis-Yolmen broke from the centre-square with much space around him. He looked around for somebody to handball it to. There were a few teammates in his zone but they yelled at him: “You are clear... it’s yours... do it... do it!”
So he did. From the edge of the centre square he sank a lovely 65-70mm classic drop punt with balance and poise, as straight as a perfect cast into the ocean. Eddie Betts was on the goal-line and could have marked it but, instead, he bodied his opponent out of the way and Cam had a superb long goal in his memory bank for the rest of his life. Ellis-Yolmen knows, now, that his role is not only to feed others, but to also catch his own fish.
We should remember this moment. We may have been witnessing the birth of a champion.
Don't get me wrong. I did not dislike Brenton Sanderson and I was one of those who were reluctant to embrace Phil Walsh, especially after his first couple of disastrous interviews. Thankfully, the AFC linguist told Walsh that he should never refer to himself as a third person in any interview : "Phil Walsh doesn't believe that..." and that hasn't happened again. Thank god.
I was also bewildered that Walsh solved the potential captaincy crisis between Dangerfield and Sloan by appointing Taylor Walker, another mumbler, to this plumb media role. To outsiders, this double coup only seemed as if Mark Ricciuto was exercising his muscle by dumbing down the middleclass club in order to show other wannabe powerbrokers that he had the ability to exercise radical change.
Change for change's sake is often merely a waste of time. Often, nothing changes at all, only the baton-holders. In this case, it's not true. Phil Walsh has created a team which understands the essential nature of working together. I still don't like his press conferences but that hardly matters. Ross Lyons is also an unsatisfactory media performer but, honestly, who cares?
As for Tex, he's no longer a teenager running out onto the field in order to have a good time. He's become a deeply committed serious footballer. Some players wilt under a challenge; others bloom and Tex is in that latter category. He could take his game to an amazing level if the team around him is any good. All credit to Phil Walsh for turning that young man's mind around.
6. Brenton Sanderson started his Adelaide coaching term with all of his players on the same page and had a stunningily successful first year. We should never forget that, under Sanderson, Adelaide finished his first season one kick out of a grand final. After two years of injuries, contractual problems and other major distractions, Sando's players drifted away from his page. And maybe, according to Sando, he drifted from theirs. To Phil Walsh's immense credit, he has regalvanised this disparate whining self-interested bunch of full-of-it wannabes back into a slick, sharp, fit, self-accepting proud team.
Good stuff! I don't care if Phil and Tex mangle the language. Just keep kicking more goals than the other bastards in the paddock, please... with uncoachable beauty and sublime grace.
2. The Adelaide game plan isn't centred around Patrick Dangerfield. For better or for worse, Bernie Vince put the heat on Dangerfield in Round 3 and restricted Patrick’s output to a relatively miserly 16 disposals but that left the gate open for Rory Sloane’s 31 disposals, Scott Thompson's’ 30, David Mackay’s 23, Richard Douglas’s 22, and a fair average for the rest. This was a good moment for Adelaide – confirming that as important as Paddy is, the team doesn't need any one player to define its game.
3. Coach Walsh maintained his strategy of starting Eddie Betts on the defensive edge of the square at centre bounces. Eddie has one job to do at these bounces and that’s to run through the centre chaos after the bounce and, if he’s lucky, he’ll be Adelaide’s seventh player at the scene after the bounce... running through in a straight line towards goal. Occasionally the ball spills out his way and occasionally he gets possession, and a quick give and Adelaide has a cheap forward-fifty entry.
If it’s not successful, Eddie continues to run through to assume his position in Adelaide’s attacking half. It’s such a simple strategy. Such a predictable early first chess move. On Saturday, there were nineteen goals and four starts to the quarters which meant that Eddie did this move 23 times. It worked on four occasions in the sense that he gained possession during his run-through.
Two of them, I think, created scores.
Eddie always runs to the right-hand side of the ruck contest, without exception. And that means that if Jacobs is winning the contest, he has to palm to his right if he wants to use the Eddie run-through option. If the coaches are finessing this concept, you’d then assume that the opponent’s centremen will cover Eddie’s rightside movement, which then creates an open zone on Jacobs’ left. Will Jacobs and the centremen then counter-bluff for a left-side palm?
We'll watch this one, with a great deal of interest.
4. Every player plays every position. I enjoy watching Tex Walker spending so much time in the back half. I enjoy the race back to scoring positions, the stretching of footy meaning. This style demands hard work and extreme sustained fitness. Walsh wouldn't attempt it unless he knew that his players were capable of achieving it. So far, Adelaide has been able to sustain this increased workload. I like that. The season is long. Can they sustain it through winter? We will see.
5. I especially enjoyed watching another lovely game by Cam Ellis-Yolmen, Adelaide’s emerging star in the NAB summer games with good work in the first two rounds. He’s a tall indigenous player with silver trout attributes – acute football intelligence, deft gives, an immaculate understanding of the fall of the ball. On Saturday, this was his fourth AFL game and he had a defining moment.
As a relative newbie, he thinks his role is to get possession and then give it off as soon as he can to more accomplished players around him. The early Andrew McLeod was once like that – streaming into attack, heading towards the goals but choosing to handball the hot ball to someone else, rather than presuming the right to kick the goal himself. It took McLeod a couple of seasons to realise that he shouldn’t pass it over and that he was good enough to kick the goals himself.
On Saturday, Ellis-Yolmen broke from the centre-square with much space around him. He looked around for somebody to handball it to. There were a few teammates in his zone but they yelled at him: “You are clear... it’s yours... do it... do it!”
So he did. From the edge of the centre square he sank a lovely 65-70mm classic drop punt with balance and poise, as straight as a perfect cast into the ocean. Eddie Betts was on the goal-line and could have marked it but, instead, he bodied his opponent out of the way and Cam had a superb long goal in his memory bank for the rest of his life. Ellis-Yolmen knows, now, that his role is not only to feed others, but to also catch his own fish.
We should remember this moment. We may have been witnessing the birth of a champion.
Don't get me wrong. I did not dislike Brenton Sanderson and I was one of those who were reluctant to embrace Phil Walsh, especially after his first couple of disastrous interviews. Thankfully, the AFC linguist told Walsh that he should never refer to himself as a third person in any interview : "Phil Walsh doesn't believe that..." and that hasn't happened again. Thank god.
I was also bewildered that Walsh solved the potential captaincy crisis between Dangerfield and Sloan by appointing Taylor Walker, another mumbler, to this plumb media role. To outsiders, this double coup only seemed as if Mark Ricciuto was exercising his muscle by dumbing down the middleclass club in order to show other wannabe powerbrokers that he had the ability to exercise radical change.
Change for change's sake is often merely a waste of time. Often, nothing changes at all, only the baton-holders. In this case, it's not true. Phil Walsh has created a team which understands the essential nature of working together. I still don't like his press conferences but that hardly matters. Ross Lyons is also an unsatisfactory media performer but, honestly, who cares?
As for Tex, he's no longer a teenager running out onto the field in order to have a good time. He's become a deeply committed serious footballer. Some players wilt under a challenge; others bloom and Tex is in that latter category. He could take his game to an amazing level if the team around him is any good. All credit to Phil Walsh for turning that young man's mind around.
6. Brenton Sanderson started his Adelaide coaching term with all of his players on the same page and had a stunningily successful first year. We should never forget that, under Sanderson, Adelaide finished his first season one kick out of a grand final. After two years of injuries, contractual problems and other major distractions, Sando's players drifted away from his page. And maybe, according to Sando, he drifted from theirs. To Phil Walsh's immense credit, he has regalvanised this disparate whining self-interested bunch of full-of-it wannabes back into a slick, sharp, fit, self-accepting proud team.
Good stuff! I don't care if Phil and Tex mangle the language. Just keep kicking more goals than the other bastards in the paddock, please... with uncoachable beauty and sublime grace.
