On 27/09/2017 at 00:00, Dr. Gonzo said:

It's not about hypotheticals its about viewing the season holistically. Considering we went so close to finals with so many injuries to key players I think was a decent effort all things considered. Are we really that far off the top 4/8 teams? I don't think we're that far off at all, the main issue is getting the players in the right headspace and having a decent run with injuries.

Not taking away anything from your initial post, Goodwin has things he needs to continue to develop. He's not the total package but I think supporters tend to jump at shadows sometimes when they're understandably furious after the turn up in last game. We need to continue on the path were on, it's the right path. I hope we don't panic and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I also think Goodwin seems to have a good rapport with the players, has shown an ability to be a strategic thinker about how the game is played and is a capable of not polished media performer.

Dr. G. You just cannot say it was a good effort overall with the performances of Round 22 & 23 as they were. 

We were in the finals and took the foot off the gas before the end

That must be unacceptable at all times, otherwise we are all wasting our time. 

Imagine this week if WE were painting the CBD Red and Blue as Tiger Supporters are doing to Richmond. 

Goodwin as Senior Coach still has massive problems on Game Day, Pre Match. 

The team is just not prepared correctly. 

Yes i saw some improvement this year, but overall it was a failure, that can be fixed, but i don’t want to hear about our young list again. 

AFL is a young persons sport. Toughen up or fail

  On 27/09/2017 at 03:53, Sir Why You Little said:

Dr. G. You just cannot say it was a good effort overall with the performances of Round 22 & 23 as they were. 

We were in the finals and took the foot off the gas before the end

That must be unacceptable at all times, otherwise we are all wasting our time. 

Imagine this week if WE were painting the CBD Red and Blue as Tiger Supporters are doing to Richmond. 

Goodwin as Senior Coach still has massive problems on Game Day, Pre Match. 

The team is just not prepared correctly. 

Yes i saw some improvement this year, but overall it was a failure, that can be fixed, but i don’t want to hear about our young list again. 

AFL is a young persons sport. Toughen up or fail

It's the reality of the situation so it doesn't really matter if you're sick of hearing it or not unfortunately.

Noone is denying that the way we finished the year leaves a bitter taste. But all things considered Goodwin gets a pass mark for 2017. He'll learn from it, he is still developing too - it was his first season after all. If he doesn't and the team starts going backwards and we start seeing the same mistakes then pressure will mount but when you're best players are all under 23 (a couple in only their 2nd full seasons) of course we're not gonna be worldbeaters yet. 

I have faith the club is on the right track and my disappointment at the last game and missing finals won't detract from that. All things being equal we should be pushing for top 4/6 next year. I'm interested to see what moves are made in trade week/offseason to get us there.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:13, Dr. Gonzo said:

It's the reality of the situation so it doesn't really matter if you're sick of hearing it or not unfortunately.

Noone is denying that the way we finished the year leaves a bitter taste. But all things considered Goodwin gets a pass mark for 2017. He'll learn from it, he is still developing too - it was his first season after all. If he doesn't and the team starts going backwards and we start seeing the same mistakes then pressure will mount but when you're best players are all under 23 (a couple in only their 2nd full seasons) of course we're not gonna be worldbeaters yet. 

I have faith the club is on the right track and my disappointment at the last game and missing finals won't detract from that. All things being equal we should be pushing for top 4/6 next year. I'm interested to see what moves are made in trade week/offseason to get us there.

But you are not factoring in that in Round 22 we were 6 goals in front and then stopped (almost) against the bottom side, and then Round 23 The Filth were down about 9 players and smashed us in the first Quarter, Game over. 

Goodwin better learn from it fast and get it right because so far he has failed, and considering he had 2 years under Lord Roos to learn all he could, this is very concerning

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:30, Sir Why You Little said:

But you are not factoring in that in Round 22 we were 6 goals in front and then stopped (almost) against the bottom side, and then Round 23 The Filth were down about 9 players and smashed us in the first Quarter, Game over. 

Goodwin better learn from it fast and get it right because so far he has failed, and considering he had 2 years under Lord Roos to learn all he could, this is very concerning

I think then ENTIRE club need to learn from the last two weeks, from President and board, to the CEO, coach, players, and us.  Every single person got well ahead of themselves.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:38, The Chazz said:

I think then ENTIRE club need to learn from the last two weeks, from President and board, to the CEO, coach, players, and us.  Every single person got well ahead of themselves.

If you think that we as supporters were not entitled to think we could beat the bottom team and a team that was missing many of its star players and had nothing to play for then you have very low expectations as a supporter.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:38, The Chazz said:

I think then ENTIRE club need to learn from the last two weeks, from President and board, to the CEO, coach, players, and us.  Every single person got well ahead of themselves.

You are probably dead right. But the Senior Coach is the first in the firing line

Sample size is far too small to rate Goodwin's performance this season because it was still wildly inconsistent as far as a season goes.

Sure it was an "improvement" on our past. But Goodwin's coaching performance should be judged on this year. We failed to make finals when the club said we would so I definitely don't consider that a 'pass' mark like others.

Winning in Adelaide and West Coast was fantastic. Losing to Freo and North twice was inexcusable. It was a mixed bag.

I'll be interested to see what moves are made over the off-season in regards to personnel, game style and match day strategy. 

We have young players and expect to improve like every other team will over the pre-season. I hate that our supporters talk as though we'll improve so much more than other clubs. We missed an enormous opportunity this year. This time next year will give a much better indication.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:46, Sir Why You Little said:

You are probably dead right. But the Senior Coach is the first in the firing line

As soon as I received that finals brochure a few days after the last game, I knew that this was way above anything that Goodwin had control over.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:40, Diamond_Jim said:

If you think that we as supporters were not entitled to think we could beat the bottom team and a team that was missing many of its star players and had nothing to play for then you have very low expectations as a supporter.

Not at all, Jim.  I generally try and have realistic expectations, but am as guilty as most for getting caught up in hype at times.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:38, The Chazz said:

I think then ENTIRE club need to learn from the last two weeks, from President and board, to the CEO, coach, players, and us.  Every single person got well ahead of themselves.

Well that was a real surprise. Fancy the MFC getting ahead of itself. Its not as though it has happened before is it?

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:50, The Chazz said:

As soon as I received that finals brochure a few days after the last game, I knew that this was way above anything that Goodwin had control over.

Yeah. Good Point

Marketing is a huge problem. Has been for years. We don’t use the name “Melbourne” at all well

It is a massive advantage that we seem to shy away from...

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:40, Diamond_Jim said:

If you think that we as supporters were not entitled to think we could beat the bottom team and a team that was missing many of its star players and had nothing to play for then you have very low expectations as a supporter.

Much truth here but can also see the reality exposed our expectations ( no matter how valid we thought they were )

Again, in regard to the injury point of discussion, it is a really ignorant thing to deem its impact a “furphy”.

We really suffered the curse of injury this season and it didn’t impact us only in the fact that it hit some of our most important players in Gawn, Hogan, Jones, Viney, etc., but it also affected our consistency. It should be no surprise Richmond was one of the top teams and is in the grand final given their almost non-existent injury list throughout the entirety of the season.

Having a consistent team and settled side is such a pivotal factor in having success and that is something we simply did not have all year. We were constantly having to make changes and adapt to new team structures due to injuries to key position players and a lot of them were long-term injuries. I mean, honestly, who would have thought we would be playing Tom McDonald forward and Pederson in the ruck for a large portion of the season? Simon Goodwin certainly wouldn’t have.

In what has been a truly testing and challenging season for Goodwin in his first year as coach, I think he has done an unbelievable job. If this were Roosy, I don’t think anyone would be half as sceptical.

Of course, there are flaws and our season was marred by unacceptable losses – but most teams have them and in a young and developing side, they happen more frequently. If you think otherwise, you had unrealistic expectations on what we should have achieved this year.  

I had twelve wins as the target mark for the season to be a pass and we achieved that. We only narrowly missed out on finals and it hurt A LOT, but that is how it is. I don’t have a loser attitude, I just have a realistic one – we were never ready to do serious damage in finals and while it would have been better to just make it an experience it, it wasn’t to be.

If we go backwards next year, that is when question marks will be raised; but for now, I think we are okay. Goody is learning, but I think he has what it takes to lead the boys to a premiership.

  On 27/09/2017 at 04:30, Sir Why You Little said:

But you are not factoring in that in Round 22 we were 6 goals in front and then stopped (almost) against the bottom side, and then Round 23 The Filth were down about 9 players and smashed us in the first Quarter, Game over. 

Goodwin better learn from it fast and get it right because so far he has failed, and considering he had 2 years under Lord Roos to learn all he could, this is very concerning

How am I not factoring it in?

  On 27/09/2017 at 07:37, Dr. Gonzo said:

How am I not factoring it in?

It is not a pass mark if you have factored in those last 2 results. 

It was a choke. Same as the year before

  On 27/09/2017 at 07:53, Sir Why You Little said:

It is not a pass mark if you have factored in those last 2 results. 

It was a choke. Same as the year before

Sir you are trying to use logic v delusion

Dont bother ok?

  On 27/09/2017 at 10:08, jackaub said:

Sir you are trying to use logic v delusion

Dont bother ok?

I have to try!!

From AFL.com

"IN MAY 2010, Richmond recorded its first win under Damien Hardwick, ending a run of nine-straight losses that had opened the rookie coach's career."

Funny to think if Richmond were too quick to react to Hardwicks performance they would not be in this position. Failure begets success. Here we are criticising a coach with 12 wins in first season. I'm more worried when he inevitably has a bad season. How the heritics and short sighted good Will call for blood. When success may just be around the corner.

  On 27/09/2017 at 10:22, billyblanks29 said:

From AFL.com

"IN MAY 2010, Richmond recorded its first win under Damien Hardwick, ending a run of nine-straight losses that had opened the rookie coach's career."

Funny to think if Richmond were too quick to react to Hardwicks performance they would not be in this position. Failure begets success. Here we are criticising a coach with 12 wins in first season. I'm more worried when he inevitably has a bad season. How the heritics and short sighted good Will call for blood. When success may just be around the corner.

I wouldn't have bothered writing all that on a lost cause.

I have hope, I have expectations and you can thank Jackson/Roos for that.

But there are questions that need to be answered with actions next year.

Simple as that.

  On 27/09/2017 at 07:53, Sir Why You Little said:

It is not a pass mark if you have factored in those last 2 results. 

It was a choke. Same as the year before

Goodwin can only be held accountable for so much. The club failed by not making finals but on a personal level I think Goodwin gets a pass as a rookie coach leading a team with multiple injuries to key players. That's not to say he excelled but I don't think you could reasonably say he failed. He won more games than he lost. He had a progressive gameplan. He had to deal with injuries to key players and restructure our ruck/midfield and forwardline very early in the season. He gave us probably 3 of our best 5 wins over the last decade. 

In the larger scheme of things while it was extremely disappointing not to win one more game across the year and qualify for finals I don't think it will have a bearing on whether he has a successful career overall.

  On 27/09/2017 at 10:22, billyblanks29 said:

From AFL.com

"IN MAY 2010, Richmond recorded its first win under Damien Hardwick, ending a run of nine-straight losses that had opened the rookie coach's career."

Funny to think if Richmond were too quick to react to Hardwicks performance they would not be in this position. Failure begets success. Here we are criticising a coach with 12 wins in first season. I'm more worried when he inevitably has a bad season. How the heritics and short sighted good Will call for blood. When success may just be around the corner.

Not sure if this is an argument in favour of retaining Hardwick (or Goodwin) but, if it is, it's spurious.  No-one can say with any certainty if Richmond would have done better, sooner with a new coach in 2010 so why say it.  The only certainty is that they are in a GF seven years after 2010.

Like RPFC, BB and many others I would give Goodwin a pass for this last season but with the same acknowledgement that the coaching panel must be held accountable for team selection, game plan, match day agility and player mental and physical preparation.  I am ever optimistic that we will see improvement next year.  Faith is built on results, not dreams.

I'd hold them accountable for the morale of the players, too - their level of confidence about the club.  Not all good signs, at this stage, in my opinion.  

Trengove had to go, but that is such a disappointment: we all wanted a fairytale.  Too much reality is not good for us, as T.S. Eliot said.  

We had all the injuries, too.  Roos would have wanted arms around the players around then, I think - but Goodwin does it differently; it was in the context of injuries (theirs, and the whole team's) that he made his statement dropping Salem and Watts. I suppose we must wait and see what he does in the trade period, but by then we'll know pretty clearly how he sees his players. 

One thing a lot of posters on here have said that I do not think is justified is that the players "got ahead of themselves", believed it was in the bag, and so on.  It is equally possible that the mental issue that undermined their performances at times was not over-confidence, but rather fragile confidence.  Undermined even, is my fear.  The area of players' mental strength can be a key part of the coach's contribution.

Neild thought taking a scythe to the players was going to help, and it didn't.  You headline the weaknesses and you tear the guts out of the place.  Build, Simon, build I wish you would, and not tear down...

 

Yes after all we are patient and can wait another 53 years for success

By many measures we failed this year so if mental fragility and or fear is the problem 

What does the coach do about it and surely having been there 3 years, now four,I would hope he was already on top of it.

So barely a pass mark for Goody.

Hope he has learnt some salient lessons!

  On 25/09/2017 at 04:54, rpfc said:

A few things have been bugging me this season, don't get me wrong - I have enjoyed the march back to relevance - but there have been some odd missteps and frustrating emanations from the club that won't be solved by Jack Watts being traded...

We all have a list of areas that go to explain why we didn't kick to extra goals over the course of the season - that is code for 'missing the finals'...

My main ones are:

• Injuries and fluctuating form of our best 6-8 players (Jones, Gawn, Hogan, Oliver, Viney, Hibberd, Petracca, and T McDonald).
• The vacuum of leadership at the club 
• The disappointing performance of the coaching staff

These latter two bring into focus our fledgling coach Simon Goodwin. 

Coaching Performance: Tricks, a motivated group, but naivete abounds

There is no doubt that he has motivated the core group of players to play a certain way; they play on with abandon, they handpass in tight spaces and trust 'the next man' to not fumble and to 'do their job.' However, this is overbalanced still and we didn't show much progress from the middle of the year to the end of the year in kicking when we were in position to. Sometimes, our forward line was not in position to make the most of a player quickly released by a chain of fantastic handballs; the player would look up and see player hurriedly running back into guarded space and/or expecting a kick so precise only 3 players on our list could hit the target. His 'trick bag' is innovative; the forwards coming off the back of the square threw teams for a loop and I look forward to more innovation and not resting on that move now that the competition has worked it out.

This leads me to the forward line - it is schizophrenic - and I appreciate Goodwins ability to make changes at will if something isn't working, I felt like we had so many changes and different structures going forward that we ended up the season with nothing working. Hogan missing isn't an excuse for changing the structure. It's an excuse for that structure to work less efficiently. We would sometimes have a deep presence with smalls beside the tall, and when that didn't work we went 'fwd line is lava no one in the fwd line' with players running back into there. And there were a few setups in between there and while that is unpredictable to the oppo, it is also unpredictable to Tysons left foot...

Then there were the two weeks we spent getting beaten by wind... I didn't see much of the NM game in Hobart but I saw the GWS massacre in all its gore. I wrote about it at the time - but the wind at Manuka always goes to the Kingston side pocket and that playing a man behind the football is a fact of life against a good team (the GWS respected us enough to have one in the 2nd term when they were 36 points up...), and yet we threw away our surprise 3 goal start by not only leaving our backs exposed for much of the quarter, but also by playing up the grandstand side of the ground for reasons that are yet to resonate with me. When you go up the grandstand side at Manuka, the wind is a propellant for the opposition to go through the middle of the ground and carve you up. Naivete or arrogance? I don't really care. It was the difference between being in the game and being out of it by quarter time. We had reports of similar play against NM the week before. If a team could drop a coach - those two weeks would seen Goodwin have a stint with Casey...

The Vacuum of Goodwin

Then there are the more complicated aspects to his persona that I wish he would address, I know he doesn't flame any bad narratives when he speaks - he hardly says anything when he speaks - but he would do well to understand that he can alter narratives for the better that might alleviate public (even if only Dees fans) pressure from certain players (Watts and Oliver come to mind, and of course Watts), prompt responses from those that should shoulder more burden than they do (outside of Watts and Tyson who is to blame for being 9th again?), and, lastly, shore up his own position and leadership (no one is that wooden, and no one that wooden leads anything for very long).

Without this - we have a vacuum - Roos filled it quite easily. He would push narratives and could seem self-serving and distracting. And sometimes, that is the point; when talked about the scars and burdens of the past ad nauseum we felt like he was giving the club a continued excuse, but as he outlines in his new book - he was trying to push a creed of patience against the screed of despair that was rife internally. That helped lift the pressure of the players as they relearned how to play proper football.

Goodwin seems in-cognisant of this ability, a we got a recent reminder of that with the below clip illustrating an awareness of a damaging narrative: that Watts "is the most talked about player" for someone who is not a core player, not in the leadership group, not in the coaching staff, and not in the administration. Those last points I added myself as Goodwin only stoked the narrative that Watts was worthy of all this attention after our failed 2017 by covering himself by saying he has a good relationship  with Jack, mentioning the coaching staff are clear with Jack, and keeping the narrative of 'Watts = Melbourne' fermenting by giving the discussion relevance with the content and tone of his response about his contract and him staying at the club.

 

 

Goodwin can come out forcefully and protect Jack Watts (or the next saviour) by shifting the focus and sharing the burden around with himself, his staff, the admin, and the leadership group that does very little leading when it comes to the burden of being the public face of the club, and the target of the ire of the club. Lewis does some and Gawn too, but years after Watts revealed himself to be nothing more than a uniquely talented role player, we are still shoving him into the coalface with little hesitation. If the rumours are true that we are shopping him around while at the same time that we are pushing him forward for cringeworthy press spots (https://au.sports.yahoo.com/afl/a/37206220/jack-watts-opens-up-on-2017-season-and-trade-talk/) - then the situation is more dire than I thought.

I have heard from a good source that the interpersonal relationships at the club are good - and that gives me some solace, but I sit here and I have no idea who the leader of the club was. Last three years I could tell you who it was - for good or bad - it was Paul Roos. Oddly enough, he shielded the enigmatic blonde kid a couple times and Watts responded.

But this year - I haven't heard much from the Admin so it isn't Jackson, it certainly isn't Mahoney or Bartlett. Nathan Jones has been seen and heard, but no more than previous years as captain. A novice coach doesn't have to be as good as Paul Roos - he is a great coach who helped redefine AFL in the professional era - but this novice coach needs to step up and start leading the club and driving the narratives that help his team, his players, and his club. 

Because, I have only seen or heard one leader since September 1 - and he might be traded next week...

Your opinions are well written for somebody who obviously lives interstate and attends very few live games or training sessions. 

  On 28/09/2017 at 08:28, DaveyDee said:

Your opinions are well written for somebody who obviously lives interstate and attends very few live games or training sessions. 

I will take that in the best way possible.