Our credibility as an AFL Club has been beaten to a pulp over recent years. Every single day I hear and see the media and those influential footy people slag off about this club.

Lets face it, we shoot ourselves most times.

There is only one way out of this.....win bloody games.

Thanks for stating the bloody obvious other wise I would not have known.

There's a thread in this?

We should have been thinking about that in 2007,8 and 9

If we had our situation now may be vastly different.

But yes that is the only way out of be irrelevant as we were in 2012.

Confidence can take you a long way. There has been a greater emphasis on winning contested ball, hard ball gets and clearances under Neeld. If we can keep improving in that area - great. The next step is to start using the ball far more efficiently. We need to keep possession of the ball whilst attacking the goals - easier said than done of course.

You can't have too many poor to average kicks in your team. Ditto for decision making. The best teams don't often have many of these type of players in their teams. When picking their best 22, the match committee could place a limit on the amount of players who aren't good disposers of the ball. Maximum of 2? 3? 4? It might mean you have to leave a couple of 'goers' out of team but that's the price you might have to pay.

I've heard a number of times that the Hawks deliberately trade for or draft players who can kick the ball well and are good decision makers. Apparently their philosophy is that they can always teach these more skilful types to get better at winning their own ball.

We need to start hitting a lot more targets on a far more regular basis if we're going to challenge the middle tier teams. Turnovers are killers and we need to eliminate as many of these as possible. Our disposal needs to improve dramatically if we're wanting to win a fair percentage of games. It's going to be interesting to see how good all our new players are with their disposal in the games.(especially under pressure)

Nah, I think we should "accept mediocrity" a bit longer. If "186" showed us anything it's that the "reality bus" is running over our "culture" and we need to "buy in". Hopefully the new "Neeld type players" will take us some of the way...

Winning games is only half the answer.

What we really need to target is also making sure we don't lose them.

Plus, we should try to have a higher score than our opponent at the end of a game, as often as possible.

We obviously need to start winning games to gain respect .. However the things we need to work on straight away are stopping the absolute blowouts.. Losing by 15-25 points doesn't get anywhere near as much criticism as losing by 10 + goals. That is the thing we need to eradicate this year.

Thanks for the reminder!!

Heard a spokesman for one of the other clubs the other day, may have been Norf. He was saying one of the measures they were looking at was a percentage at the end of the year of greater than 100%. Makes sense really, means you are winning more than you are losing, and when yo do lose you are not being thrashed.

Winning the first game of the year is a big mementum changer. We haven't done it since 2005

Our credibility as an AFL Club has been beaten to a pulp over recent years. Every single day I hear and see the media and those influential footy people slag off about this club.

Lets face it, we shoot ourselves most times.

There is only one way out of this.....win bloody games.

Nah, it goes much deeper than that. Attitudes and behaviours have been tipped on their heads and standards are in place.

This is the way out of the mess. Winning is a by-product of getting the club culture right.

Very true...too long have we taken being in the league for granted and promoted ideas about patience, list management and other crap. Not to mention relying on draft picks to fix us eventually.

All us supporters need to know is that we are trying to win every game and win the premiership each season, it should be obvious but no one in our club ever says that

Winning games, duh! But as DT said above we have to make sure every team that beats us has to work their asses off to do it, no blow outs.