3 minutes ago, Seraph said:

Defensively he had a good game. Surprised to see people slating him on here. Spoiled Dangerfield, Hawkins, Rohan multiple times.

 

2 minutes ago, dazzledavey36 said:

He was much better Wise. He kept to his limitations, and did some crucial spoils on Dangerfield when they were deep. I didn't think he was as bad as everyone made out against Carlton.

People are kidding themselves of they want him drop. He is doing his job and is someone who just needs more time and experience with each game. His closing speed is ridiculous.. in a freakish way.

Cheers to both of you.  This is in line with what I thought, too.  Seemed a little more composed from what I saw and did his job defensively.

He is clearly not the problem with our side at the minute.  We have more pressing concerns.

3 hours ago, big_red_fire_engine said:

Or we have just over rated him? He is a very beige player. 

Salem needs to play forward. He is not a defender, he is an attacking skillful player. He is not a line breaking half back, he has good goal sense and can deliver the ball inside 50 if we play him across half forward where he belongs. If he ever gets a run at it and can build a tank he could be our outside mid we're crying out for.

Edited June 28, 20204 yr by Dr. Gonzo

2 minutes ago, Wiseblood said:

 

Cheers to both of you.  This is in line with what I thought, too.  Seemed a little more composed from what I saw and did his job defensively.

He is clearly not the problem with our side at the minute.  We have more pressing concerns.

Yes we do. We've spent all summer to get this right and yet our inside 50 entrie is no different to last year. West Coast and now Geelong this year we've had more inside 50s.

1 minute ago, dazzledavey36 said:

Yes we do. We've spent all summer to get this right and yet our inside 50 entrie is no different to last year. West Coast and now Geelong this year we've had more inside 50s.

We've had about 5 years to work on it and it's only gotten worse.

1 minute ago, Lord Nev said:

We've had about 5 years to work on it and it's only gotten worse.

Have we underestimated the loss of Hogan??

For anyone thnking 'Geelong is a good side and we nearly pinched it' this is what they are saying at the cattery

Geelong tries its best to lose and finds a way to stagger to a 4 point win over Demons

We officially tanking??

 coach, and players, ought to be bloody embarrassed for a second week in a row.

Paper over cracks win

Well we are officially the worst team to watch in the league

Gold coast are going to spank us next week

Were a blight on the game right now.

Massive issues that simply arent being addressed. Players being carried by the old brigade and a gameplan that is truly awful. 

As soon as we go slow we lose, still a mentality weak team with an average coaching setup and game plan.

They should be embarrassed. Jack Steven dancing around like he's won the Normie.

I have never enjoyed a win less. If Clark can't get back in next week after that plodding mess, then the coaching staff/selectors have truly lost the plot. I really hate watching us play now.

 

1 minute ago, dazzledavey36 said:

Have we underestimated the loss of Hogan??

I think so. He did a lot for us structurally as well as being a scoring option. 

 

2 minutes ago, dazzledavey36 said:

Have we underestimated the loss of Hogan??

We won 2 finals without Hogan

6 minutes ago, dazzledavey36 said:

Yes we do. We've spent all summer to get this right and yet our inside 50 entrie is no different to last year. West Coast and now Geelong this year we've had more inside 50s.

Yep.

Getting hold of the footy isn't the problem.

Getting it inside 50 isn't a problem.

You could even argue that, right now, we aren't really a problem defensively.  We've given up only 7 goals to each of the two teams we've played.

It's just everything else - how we use it, how we run to position, how we make decisions - that is hurting us the most right now.

We need to fix it, and quickly - but do we have the capacity to do it?  Time will tell.

1 hour ago, defuture15 said:

When I saw the inclusions I thought the plan would have been to provide defensive pressure to lock the ball into our forward line,?

Instead we see the ball chipped around to loose Geelong players. It is hard to judge our backline when they are exposed so easily by the lack of upfield pressure. In other games I was frustrated that our forwards were not in the forward line.I can only hope that we are "rusty" and that at the end of this season we will see what our side can do.

 

I also thought Goody's gameplan was to press and lock.  Unfortunately our forward pressure/defence has more holes in it than a swiss cheese.

If we don't start playing competitive footy from next week im afraid our season might be over well before the end of the season approaches defuture.

Just now, dazzledavey36 said:

Have we underestimated the loss of Hogan??

Risking my head a bit here, but we lost Hogan, Kent and Watts from a forward half that was already on thin ice skill-wise.

Hogan - Great at using his tank to create forward half space and separation from the 2nd key forward which obviously benefited TMac tremendously. Also his contested marking was a big plus too. Can understand why he's gone, but that doesn't change what we lost.

Kent - No superstar, and injuries a worry, but imagine having a genuine line-breaking goal-kicking speedy forward (with Burgo to look after him) in our team now. Plus, his delivery inside 50 was highly underrated. Always been my opinion it was a toss up between him and vandenBerg as far as contracts go and we blinked when Sydney came knocking for vB.

Watts - Skill and goal kicking. Simple as that. Could also pluck a contested grab. Reasons for being booted aside, we miss those things.

Just like we got sucked into over-investing in the backline, I think we also over-invested in the contest to the point where we have some of the worst users going forward in the competition and nothing we can do about changing it.

2 minutes ago, Wiseblood said:

Yep.

Getting hold of the footy isn't the problem.

Getting it inside 50 isn't a problem.

You could even argue that, right now, we aren't really a problem defensively.  We've given up only 7 goals to each of the two teams we've played.

It's just everything else - how we use it, how we run to position, how we make decisions - that is hurting us the most right now.

We need to fix it, and quickly - but do we have the capacity to do it?  Time will tell.

I watched GC last night and even some of their forward entries were so much cleaner then what we've dished up in the last 12 months.

I can't believe I am saying this but we missed ANB extra forward pressure today. Hannan and Pickett were the only ones who tried to lock it in.

I also think we just bite the bullet and get Weideman in. It's an extra tall and its obvious McDonald cannot be the main number 1 forward.

58 minutes ago, titan_uranus said:

I only saw the first half and 5 minutes of the third.

It wasn't good.

Goodwin told Channel 7 pre-match that the key to winning today was to get the ball locked in our forward half.

We did that. But we lost.

Goodwin is doubling down on the aggressive forward press method of play. He continues to believe that we can be successful by keeping the ball locked in our forward half, so our focus continues to be on getting it in there first, dealing with it second.

There is enough evidence to suggest he is wrong.

It doesn't help, though, that our players continue to make fundamental errors. Not manning the goal line properly and failing to touch Ratugolea's shot on goal, in a game we lost by 3 points, is criminal. Dropped marks, missed shots from directly in front, handpasses to stationary players or behind running players, turnovers in the back half. Mistakes get made every week, but when you are making errors with the fundamental basics of football for years, there is a systemic problem. 

I'm sure part of the problem is the stop-start nature of this season. We're getting no consistency. We're chopping/changing the team and we're not playing week to week. I'm eagerly looking forward to the next three matches as they present interesting match ups. But most of all, I want to see us play a month of solid football together. My last bastion of hope is that we need to click by getting some consistency into our 22. Unfortunately, I'm not confident.

Good summation Titan, I'm disappointed with another loss especially given the basic errors to gift 3 goals in a close game.

I'm holding my judgment till I see a run of 4 to 5 continuous games under the belt. I don't think there will be to many more changes till we start settling on a 22, another tall forward may come in, but you're right with us needing to get some continuity 

4 minutes ago, Lord Nev said:

Risking my head a bit here, but we lost Hogan, Kent and Watts from a forward half that was already on thin ice skill-wise.

Hogan - Great at using his tank to create forward half space and separation from the 2nd key forward which obviously benefited TMac tremendously. Also his contested marking was a big plus too. Can understand why he's gone, but that doesn't change what we lost.

Kent - No superstar, and injuries a worry, but imagine having a genuine line-breaking goal-kicking speedy forward (with Burgo to look after him) in our team now. Plus, his delivery inside 50 was highly underrated. Always been my opinion it was a toss up between him and vandenBerg as far as contracts go and we blinked when Sydney came knocking for vB.

Watts - Skill and goal kicking. Simple as that. Could also pluck a contested grab. Reasons for being booted aside, we miss those things.

Just like we got sucked into over-investing in the backline, I think we also over-invested in the contest to the point where we have some of the worst users going forward in the competition and nothing we can do about changing it.

I am starting to question whether the Watts decision was the right choice also. He has exactly everything we are crying out for and right now he'd be handy as that floating tall forward. Go back to some of his clutch moments where he won games off being calm under the immense pressure.

We got Bayley Frietsch with the Watts pick who for some reason Goody has this fascination of playing as a deep forward. Has averaged around the 6.5 disposal per game this year for 2 goals.....

The Kent trade i could understand to a degree, but he was just quite injury riddled where as Vanders looked like he was finally over his injuries issue and set to restart his career.

Kent was bloody good yesterday against the tiges.

No argument the game was a poor standard but i'm amazed nobody has commented on Tomlinson's hurried set shot at the death .   A senior player should have attempted to settle him down . The game WAS there to win .

1 minute ago, dee-eee said:

No argument the game was a poor standard but i'm amazed nobody has commented on Tomlinson's hurried set shot at the death .   A senior player should have attempted to settle him down . The game WAS there to win .

Yep, fair comment, you could also add in Salem's decision to kick to a 1 v 4 in the pocket in the play before that.

Possibly not all his fault given our forward 50 problems, but still a poor decision.

It was a strange old game. You walk away from that thinking we didn't really deserve to win given we trailed for most of the second half and nor could you say we played well enough to win a game of footy. But in reality we so easily could have (and should have) won that.

It was a hard game to watch but I wouldn't say it was an awful performance - certainly there were aspects that were poor but also some things that we did well.

I thought we defended our back 50 really well. This was an area that we were really poor in last year but we have defended our back 50 well the last two games. Geelong only scored 12 times from 38 entries - normally they are far more efficient that that against us. We kept them to a score that was clearly a beatable score - if you keep a team to 47 points you really should be winning that game. It was really only a few poor individual errors that gifted them goals that enabled them to kick 7 goals. Without those errors it may have been 4 or 5. So those whacking the coaching staff for "doing nothing" in the off season clearly aren't taking into account our two improved defensive performances since the break.

That being said, there is obviously some more work needed in defensive transition. Carlton in the second half found too much space and the Cats and Eagles took far too many uncontested marks. Although I must admit today I didn't think it was as costly as some are suggesting - yes the Cats retained possession with little chips but in the main I don't think it particularly hurt us and perhaps even stifled their own offensive play at times.

Effort and intensity and ability to win the ball was good as usual.

Having said all that, there were two areas that were really poor today.

Firstly, our attacking play was, quite simply, a mess. There was nothing identifiable about the way we went about our attacking play. It was random and haphazard and not helped by the usual poor delivery going forward. The forward structure looked unbalanced on paper and played out that way on the field. The lack of a contested marking key forward is just so obvious and is really affecting our ability to score. TMac was better and jumped at the ball and halved contests well, but as stated before he needs help and not selecting another KPF was baffling.

Our lack of scoring is a big concern as even when we do dominate games, it's questionable whether we will be able to score enough to maximise the dominance and put other teams to the sword. If we take out the Carlton first quarter when they didn't show up, we've kicked 16 goals in 11 quarters in 2020. Even with shorter quarters that's horrible.

The second aspect is our footy IQ. I've banged on about this for a while but we are a low footy IQ team. The dumb decisions and the mistakes individual players make game after game are just infuriating. Geelong were extremely ordinary today and were asking to be put away but they were able to just sneak through on their smarter play. Langdon not walking over the boundary line deep in defence cost us a goal. Not being able to touch the ball on the goal line cost us another. There were countless more mistakes. And we've seen it time and time again in recent matches. In a tight game some smarter and more composed footy gets you over the line.

I think what sums it up perfectly is that Salem play at the end. A team that is regularly guilty of bombing it in actually needed to do precisely that given we had two players out the back in the goal square. What do we do? No, let's not bomb it long the one time we need to, let's wait and try and spot up an impossible pass to a player who is 4 on 1 by the time the ball gets there. And this was from one of our most composed players and better decision makers.

That's three times in the last five matches against Geelong there has been a shot for goal within the last minute to win the game. We've lost all three.

32 minutes ago, Hell Bent said:

Among all the pessimism (rightly so)  I just wanted to acknowledge Hibberd's attack on the footy to start the 4th qtr that took Dangerfield out. 

Highlight of the match for me.

Hibb had a real dip today HB.  If he brings that more often from here we just might see a bit of a resurgence to somewhere near his best.  Fingers crossed.

Edited June 28, 20204 yr by Rusty Nails

5 minutes ago, Lord Nev said:

Yep, fair comment, you could also add in Salem's decision to kick to a 1 v 4 in the pocket in the play before that.

Possibly not all his fault given our forward 50 problems, but still a poor decision.

He took way too long to get that in and dumped it on their heads LN.  Salem is a worry for mine and appears to have gone backwards ever since the last few rounds of last season.

13 minutes ago, dazzledavey36 said:

 

We got Bayley Frietsch with the Watts pick who for some reason Goody has this fascination of playing as a deep forward. Has averaged around the 6.5 disposal per game this year for 2 goals.....

 

Fritsch was sensational when moved forward in the last 7 or 8 games last season.

Averaged something ridiculous like 18 possessions,  9  marks and 2 goals.    He was  playing more as a lead up half forward , marking everything and kicking goals

Why would the coach go away from that?  A player like that is worth their weight in gold

1 minute ago, TheKozzieExperience said:

Fritsch was sensational when moved forward in the last 7 or 8 games last season.

Averaged something ridiculous like 18 possessions,  9  marks and 2 goals.    He was  playing more as a lead up half forward , marking everything and kicking goals

Why would the coach go away from that?  A player like that is worth their weight in gold

I have no idea. Have said all along his best position is floating high half forward that can deliver precisely into our forward line. Goodwin saw this as a success in 2018 and then back half of 2019. Yet his stubbornness has got the better of him again...

Who exactly is our forwards coach? Plapp? Chaplin?

4 hours ago, chookrat said:

Effort was there, execution was lacking.

I had the scene in my head of Salem taking his sweet time after being awarded that 50m penalty...

1 hour ago, Farmer said:

 

Hannan was v good for his first match for ages. Better than many others

He was ok don't get me wrong and if there was a level we knew he could hit that he is working back to then it would be ok but the truth is his game today is not too dissimilar from his games when he's been fully fit and raring to go. His 4 kick game in a forward 50 that had 46 entries today being considered v good probably says a bit about where we are. 

4 hours ago, Return to Glory said:

We seem bereft of any real system. I cannot believe the entire playing group has a significantly lower footy IQ than other clubs. It comes back to the coach having no plan B.

As for Lever, what did we pay for him? Whatever it was, we've lost that one. And I know Mc Donlad was injured but he should not be in our starting 22. Simply not good enough.

Lever played fine in a good footy team.

Good footy team we ain't

Literally nobody is playing to their potential at the moment, because we're a rabble.

4 hours ago, goodwindees said:

Well played Joel Smith. Stuck it right up the no nothings on Demonland. No idea, NoSoupForMe. 

Played one game in 18 months and got absolutely crucified by the plebs on here last week.  Unbelievable.

Solid today. ?