Just quietly, how well is James Jordan tracking in his first year of afl? Again 20 odd touches, 5 tackles, 5 score involvements from 60 percent time on the ground. Can kick a goal too. Depth in midfield is a cornerstone of dynasties.

 

2 hours ago, 4_Kent_Watts said:

I live with Essendon and Carlton supporters. What is the recommendation. They are pretty good blokes tho I must admit. They like the Dees as their second team.

Watch the replay while complaining about the umpires keeping them in the game.

I felt Viney was very ordinary at the ground and the replay is backing that up. He's still a poor decision maker and tries to do too much. His defensive positioning on multiple occasions was terrible, often trailing opponents into our D50. 

I hope that's just a blowing out of the cob webs. Needs to be much better next week.

2 minutes ago, A F said:

I felt Viney was very ordinary at the ground and the replay is backing that up. He's still a poor decision maker and tries to do too much. His defensive positioning on multiple occasions was terrible, often trailing opponents into our D50. 

I hope that's just a blowing out of the cob webs. Needs to be much better next week.

Multiple times he had options in the centre or out on a wing ..open in a lot of space…and he held the ball up. It kills the flow of our movement and is not what we are currently about. He needs time to re-learn the game plan. It’d want to be a quick re-education 

4 hours ago, Youngwilliam said:

The umpires were disgraceful, fortunately they were favouring the Dees tonight.

No. The booing might have made you think so. Try watching the game with no sound. They were equally fair to both sides. A lot of potential MFC frees were missed. Essendon fans are sore losers. But they sure are losers!!!

33 minutes ago, A F said:

I felt Viney was very ordinary at the ground and the replay is backing that up. He's still a poor decision maker and tries to do too much. His defensive positioning on multiple occasions was terrible, often trailing opponents into our D50. 

I hope that's just a blowing out of the cob webs. Needs to be much better next week.

I wouldn’t be worried about Jack not quite having his timing on. When he counts he’s one that usually stands up. 

I’d say I’ve watched a collective total of 10min of the match so it’ll be interesting to see the replay. The good news is that we’re getting wins while not playing at our best, this shows the system above everything else is working (mostly). 

But we’d want to start hitting some good form heading towards our run home, it can all fall away pretty quickly if we don’t get a number of wins against fellow contenders. This is more of a comment about our year rather than the match but we still seem to lack that clinical killer instinct that premiers always have. Yet again we were 20 points up with about 10min left in the third and fourth quarters but failed to land a killer blow. 

21 minutes ago, Pates said:

I wouldn’t be worried about Jack not quite having his timing on. When he counts he’s one that usually stands up. 

I’d say I’ve watched a collective total of 10min of the match so it’ll be interesting to see the replay. The good news is that we’re getting wins while not playing at our best, this shows the system above everything else is working (mostly). 

But we’d want to start hitting some good form heading towards our run home, it can all fall away pretty quickly if we don’t get a number of wins against fellow contenders. This is more of a comment about our year rather than the match but we still seem to lack that clinical killer instinct that premiers always have. Yet again we were 20 points up with about 10min left in the third and fourth quarters but failed to land a killer blow. 

I thought he was fantastic. We won it out of the centre many more times this week and not always because of his direct actions but his presence made them have to think twice and match up on him…

I do not mind picking up a flag as we work on all the deficiencies we seem to have.

7 hours ago, binman said:

Not being smart but which teams are picking us apart? 

Leaving the crows and pies out of tbe discussion - because in both games our defensive run, all team defence and pressure were miles off - no other team has been able to put scoreboard pressure on us. Not picking us apart at all.

The bombers are one of the form sides atm and one of the most offensive, highest scoring teams in the AFL. And in perfect conditions could only manage 57 points. 

Our Achilles heel is way too many missed shots for goal. 

Agree on blokes being down though. Kozzie was poor tonight as was Fritter. I thought Jackson was average too. 

I guess picking us apart is a bit lazy on my behalf, but there’s definitely been a shift in how teams play against us. There are avenues to goal through our defence and come the last 5-6 weeks of the year when the good teams will be hitting our straps, we will need a decent improvement.

At the moment I’d say we are going at 80-85% and we desperately need to start finding more consistent goal scoring power.

Weid wasn’t playing very well at all, but Essendons tall backs had a relatively easy day out with out that extra big body.

Kossie and Fritta are being shut down effectively now and it’s going to be interesting to see how we work our way out of that

6 hours ago, Dr.D said:

You've got to be joking. Sure we've locked in finals but we are still a 50/50 of making top 4. I'm not sure if you've seen the draw but Port, Dogs, Brisbane and Geelong all have very easy draws and would be favourites to win most, if not all of their remaining games whereas I have us down for 4 wins/4 losses with losses against WCE, Dogs, Port and Geelong. Not to mention an inability to beat your Adelaides and Collingwoods of this league means every game is going to be tight. 

You had us down for a loss to Essendon

Why do you think we will suddenly start losing to top 8 rivals when we've won all our games against them so far this season?

How satisfying to beat the bombers and listen to their fans losing their minds.

It was far from pretty but very effective. Essendon like to run and carry but we held them up easily. They broke through the middle a couple of times but we mostly had them exactly where we wanted them. They had to resort to bombing it in for May and Lever to gobble up. Love it when a plan comes off.

Winning tight games is never a bad thing and a great habit to develop. There will be lots of nail bitters through the rest of this season I reckon so I’m worried for any Dees supporters with a heart condition. I would love to see us put teams to sword as much as the next Dees fan but teams don’t win in September by blowing opponents off the park. It’s through pressure and intensity and defence. We have these in spades.

Our only weakness at the moment is our goal kicking. My nightmare is losing a big final because of inaccuracy. I’m wishing and hoping and praying that BB can get fit and back into the side.

There is something about Tom Sparrow.. a big kid, who loves pressure has some time and space, but his goal kicking and skills around goal this year make me excited. 

Good to keep finding a way to win when our performance is not very polished. Particularly being able to stop Essendon's run.

Was frustrating to see we missed a lot of tackles, and laid some pretty ineffective ones. 46 only for the game. Our better wins have been more like 75 tackles.

9 hours ago, Bombay Airconditioning said:

We got a great run with umps tonight, but we’ll take it. 
Was it just me or were a lot of players struggling to make the distance with their shots.

Time for Ben Brown to get a run.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

8 hours ago, Dr.D said:

can someone tell me what Hunt was thinking with 1 minute to go and being up by 11 he decides to play on and have a kick from 50m (by which he doesn't score). Surely, he should've gone  short to find an option. Even backwards. It was so dumb. We don't need dumb decision makers in our team. Use your brains!

Not only that, he put it down the throat of an Essendon player in the pocket.

Such a bad kick.

8 hours ago, Older demon said:

The issues that stood out tonight and left me gobsmacked

1. Set shots! We not only missed but often couldn't make the distance from inside 50. It's not little league for goodness sake.

2. Twice we got warned for not having 6-6-6 with that last one busting the momentum from Sparrow's goal. What on earth was Kossie doing sprinting of for so late. His replacement was never going to be in place in time. That could cost a final. Who made that decision

3. When you take a mark 15 metres out why do you try and dribble kick it through on your wrong foot and stuff it up.
Jason Dunstall's head will explode on Bounce tomorrow night when he shows that and goes of his nut. Jackson what were you thinking.

4. Why did Clarrie go back to hand balling so often? Usually to someone in a worse position. 

5. If you set up with a small forward line and lower your eyes you have to hit your targets. So many opportunities were created but missed the target by metres, or to nobody. 

 

Didn't mention not having a tall on our goal line. Quite a few shots for goal fell short and They marked with ease

Tracker stats always interest me. Our two main forwards T Mac and Fritsch finished in the top 5 for total distance covered last night. Doesn’t surprise me to see them shank a couple of kicks at goal when they’re asked to run up and down the field all game. 

8 hours ago, Kick_It_To_Pickett said:

I liked when they also booed Fritta because he chased a bloke who have zero awareness where they 30 foot steel post was placed. Supposedly it was his fault he ran into the post

Fritta did give him a little shove in that direction to be fair, though I don't think it was intentional, just working him away from the ball.

Up and about with a smile.      This is a very good year to be a Demon supporter,    enjoy

Some of you need to remember where we've come from 

I've no idea why some of you think the team defence was off - i thought the adherence to the gameplan was at season high levels. It was evident extremely early in the 1st when they just couldn't move the ball and continued through the night. A lot of their goals came from stringer breaking lines (not many can do what he does, so I'm comfortable with that) or individual errors from our players. 

Fact is we kept an extremely high scoring team that has been on a hot run of form, to a very low score. And we did it happily letting their mids get heaps of the ball.

Agree with the poster who suggested that whilst we looked like we lacked a target and Weid/BB may have been able to add to our score, I don't think we would have been able to defend them the way we did if another big tall was in the fwd line, given the dynamism of their back half. Defence first wins again.

I thought the horses for courses selection in that regard was terrific. 

It also felt like a frustrating win because of the inaccuracy. Most other weeks that's a 5 goal win and it would have been shut down much earlier. There are weeks where that happens and we fought through it and won anyway 

Arguably up there with our best wins for the year. Wasn't pretty and wasn't free flowing so it doesn't feel like it, but I think on reflection it was. 

Koz will be fine, needs feedback to focus on simple things but he's still learning. For a 2nd year player the impact he and LJ and Riv have our team is immense. They'll all have ups and downs - ATM LJ is definitely up! (Despite the brain fade) 

Edited June 26, 20214 yr by fr_ap

Do you prefer:

1 game clear of WB on top, and WCE 2 games clear out of the top 4

Or

2 games clear on top, and WCE 1 game out of the top 4

Think I'll be hoping for a WCE win!

Good isn't it, when you're a top team getting the top team rub of the green from the umpires. Long have we been on the wrong side of it.

7 hours ago, binman said:

They had 5 I think.

Not much connection there 

At times we lacked connection for sure but 14 to 8 marks inside 50 isn’t terrible. 8 of the 14 behinds were genuine misses it kills you.

Edited June 26, 20214 yr by layzie

I thought ANB did a decent job of keeping Hind quiet. Didn’t see as much run from him.

Our team defence was back to its miserly best, watching Essendon kick it to May and Lever continually was a thing of beauty. 

If anything it felt like we over corrected on team defence to stifle their run leaving us with no one inside 50 on counter on numerous occasions and on the worst occasions kicking it on the head of smalls surrounded by Bombers.

Our wingers really showed them how its done but our mids have some worrying signs. Too much bees to the honey pot and hollywood handballs. We are at our best when one attacks the stoppage, one holds their width outside and one defends the back. Time for this to rectified. Viney was rusty but energy important (34 pressure acts).

Forwardline and connection still a worry. If I was asked to force prioritise our team into order based on 5 week form it would be tough but I suggest most of the bottom positions would be forwards. Also felt our inside 50 pressure was poor particularly first half. 

Well played number 1, number 8 and number 10.