I'm sorry if this has been raised elsewhere, I couldn't see it...

It was a satisfying win, by the way. We played generally poorly but were a class above the Tige's. And players like Dunn, Green, Davey et al. shone when needed. Magic how Davey found space through the middle, especially in the 3rd qtr. What can you say about Frawley and Scully? Absolute champions.

What worried me the most was how poor we were at defensive pressure up forward. This was particularly evident when the opposition were kicking in. Invariably we conceded the first two possessions, which meant the ball got close to the centre with every behind we scored. Against the Hawks, that will cost us very dearly.

Down the other end, we rarely got a free kickout to a Melb player in space, unless it was deep in a pocket. The Tige's simply manned up and showed discipline in being accountable for each Melb player.

By contrast, we seemed to be relying on some zone defence up forward, but it wasn't working and it didn't change and didn't work all game. It's going to have to change and work next week!

When they kicked in, MFC were prepared to concede the first kick in to the pocket. I have no problem with that provided you bottle them up. However we did seem to give them an easy opportunity on the 2nd kick to or just outside 50. i thought we did well blocking the corridor and stopped them running through. I would have liked a little more pressure on their chip passing around the flanks. Richmond did not look convincing with it. But we did not like that convincing either. They got the odd kick in out to a spare man on the flank a couple of times which was annoying.

On our kicks, I thought the Tigers prepared and zoned well for 3 quarters. However I thought we did pretty well as the game wore on as Richmond did start to concede opportunities around outside the 50 metre arc.

The game was not much of a spectacle as both team flooded each others forward lines hard.

It got so much better over the course of the match it's not funny.

At one stage we scored directly from a Richmond kick in 3 times in succession.

The bigger issue is our own kick ins.

I disagree with the OP. I thought our offensive zone worked quite nicely 70 or 80% of the time. We seem to allow a short pass within our forward 50 and then look to close down all the space on the flanks and wings from there. It's a little bit St Kildaish in the making. We're getting there slowly. It's getting the ball out of our own defensive zone that we're not crash hot at. On Sunday Richmond's zone was weaker than previous teams, but Hawthorn's will be stronger. That will be a big test.