Where will we finish in 2025?

[McLuggages]

I'm keen to see the strategic developments the game takes in 2025. I forecast a year ago that we would see a lot more of the defensive forward role, and by the end of the season I think pretty much every team had a go-to lock-down defensive forward. Some did a better job than others, fortunately ours did an amazing job by and large, in a role I earmarked for Cal way back in July 2023.

One of the key trends we saw emerge throughout 2024 was what essentially amounts to a reversal of the Malthouse full ground press first implemented in and around 2010 at Collingwood. Depending on who was talking, it was described as a lengthening of the field, or a disconnect, where a key forward would almost completely decouple himself from the rest of the team's setup.

Geelong front ran this trend early in the season during their 7 game winning streak, Hawthorn jumped on board midseason, and we finally got into the swing of things, altho it took until September to finally nail it.

Up to that point we lurched violently between looking sensational ball-in-hand and getting opened up alarmingly easily. In hindsight I guess it was a steep learning curve for a group which really had only learnt and known the "control" style of game, and hadn't really shown in preseason any real signs of seeking to introduce any other styles of play.

So I reckon we are going to see more teams adopt this style of play where they essentially completely open up the middle of the ground by committing as many numbers as they can into "cheating" positions forward of the ball. Almost back to the future in a way, with forwards playing as, well, forwards. Who'd have thought!

What I'm really interested to see is how teams combat this in a defensive sense. I posted a year ago about how it should be possible to move the ball from one end to the other completely unimpeded. We're not there yet but we've moved there faster than what I thought at the time.

I think ultimately, the end game is we're going to see teams from a defensive standpoint almost completely do away with a mid-ground zone defence. Wherever possible, teams are going to commit maximum numbers to the source to use pressure to cut off any forward thrust before it even starts. Failing that, the next chance you will get to thwart a scoring opportunity will be in the defensive 50. So it will be a mix of on ball pressure with basically some defensive flooding, with not much in between.

Possibly we already started moving that way late in the season. We were #1 or #2 for inside 50 differentials for most of the season, but at times were quite leaky when it got inside our defensive 50. But come finals, we had the same number of entries as Carlton, 7 more than GWS, 7 LESS than Geelong, and only 2 more than Sydney. We were just way more efficient with our inside 50s or, perhaps more accurately, exceptionally stingy whenever we conceded inside 50s against.

Unlike our new and improved ball movement, this is something we definitely worked on in preseason. I noticed even in the intra club matches we were very good at getting someone (often Frog) into a goalkeeper like position, and I hadn't really seen our guys do that so regularly or reliably before. I guess we compromised on it at stages during the season in an attempt to get our malfunctioning attack back up and running.

Maybe from our point of view, I'm keen to see how well we are able to meld together our contrasting methods of ball movement. I think our kick-mark (control) method will remain our bedrock. It can probably be improved further, and will probably need to be in order to reduce the regularity with which we are forced to kick long down the line, particularly if we play smaller in our forward line.

But I'm looking forward to see how we're able to sprinkle in some of the magic dust (chaos) we saw in the finals. I don't think the team will look to attack with a split personality of playing kick-mark for a half and then all guns blazing for a half, like we did against say Geelong in the Prelim. Think more McCluggage's kick to Frog to set up our first goal in the Grand Final. Or Charlie's goal from the pocket in the first quarter. Both patient build ups, before we saw an opportunity and exploded forward to take advantage of it. Kind of a "slow, sloow, slooow ok GO" approach.

I think overall the game is in reasonable shape. It's not perfect; there's a handful of rules I'd change, and they're none of the ones the AFL is talking about changing, to the surprise of nobody. But hopefully we see some more adventurous footy and another uptick in scoring.

Interesting analysis - I hadn't thought of it like this.

I was kind of led to believe that Hawthorn was becoming the new 'meta strategy'. An army of small and tall running players, dominating ground balls and running the field. Sort of an evolution of the Orange Tsunami? It'll be interesting how they progress and develop next year.

I agree the game is in a good spot - most of the finalists have some nuances to their game, so there isn't 1 way to win it - if anything we were the outlier - one of the lowest pressure teams, the highest kicking team, uncontested marks. I doubt we change too much, and I also doubt too many teams copy us - it's taken Fagan years to refine the style and build the list capable of playing this way.

 

[Nunez]

This is the spiritual equivalent to my philsophy for rebuilding a struggling team:

Get good players, be good.

We should be co-coaches