I have been watching a recording of the last game against the Lions in the cool and calm a few days after the disappointment.

This year I have only seen the Bombers game live, in round 3 I think, and that too was a disappointment but I have watched most of our games on tv, so perhaps I am not ideally qualified to offer a valid critique. However without being inside the playing/coaching group can any of us really know what the instructions and expectations are from within.

There are a number here calling for more talent on the list if not a rebuild. After rewatching a few games I think there is sufficient talent to be a lot better than we are. It goes without saying that we should continue to build and prune our talent and so will every other team, with varying degrees of success.

I was taught to add value to your possessions not waste them. This is what stood out for me in this game, so many turnovers from our players not adding any value to the team effort from their possessions. Is this crash and bash style, mostly lacking in any football skill, being played under instruction or have we recruited collectively the dumbest group of athletes ever to call themselves a football team. I am hoping it is the former not the latter because the former is a relatively easy fix. I also hope we don’t have to witness a coaching upheaval to achieve the fix.

I also think the chaos brand of football is responsible to some degree for a lot of our players missing through injury and not getting time on the ground together to gell as a team. This one tempo chaos football is taking its toll in many ways. The team lacks cohesion in all parts of the ground and the various skills of our players are not being utilised, ie,

Too many players contesting the one possession instead of working together to win the ball,

Kicking at teammates instead of allowing them to run onto the ball,

Same thing, bombing the ball on SamW and Toms heads,

Short handballs and kicks not clearing the contest, simply transferring the pressure to a teammate,

Brayshaw giving more than half his possessions back to the opposition.

I could go on, what we are seeing week after week is dumb football.

Put value on your possessions mfc.

  On 02/07/2019 at 06:47, kongwacker said:

Brayshaw giving more than half his possessions back to the opposition.

By the end i could only laugh at the number of handballs when a player was in a little bit of space (congested but had time to think) that went either directly to a brisbane player or to ground where no player was. Brayshaw in particular did it a number of times. So i have to agree that we are playing dumb football or we have dumb footballers who misread ques and instead of looking classy (say a pendelburry) they give the ball up in comical scenes each week.

It’s a fair point you raise kongwacker, but I think it’s more to do with lack of structure and opposition pressure than our players possessions not being damaging enough. Clarry is the perfect example. He’s my favorite player, but sometimes he makes me tear my hair out. Some weeks he absorbs opposition pressure, takes a tackle, holds the ball high and passes off to a free team mate. Other weeks he plays hot potato and handballs immediately for no reason and just shifts opposition pressure to his teammate. It comes down to that oppo pressure, but also our structure. He doesn’t want to move it quickly because he doesn’t trust our forwards to contest etc.

Solve our structural problems and teach the players to absorb pressure and not [censored] the bed. Our possessions will then have more meaning.

I agree with your points LT, particularly in reference to Oliver. With some structure around him and some confident footballers working to a game plan we could be seeing a very different game with perhaps better outcomes. This I think can be coached and I do believe this list contains the talent to build a team around Oliver’s unique skills.

i do hope we see a refinement of the crash and bash game, one that allows our talent to be utilised to team advantage.