I didn't hate the idea of sitting on a lead once it was established and tightening up like a boa constrictor. The philosophy is clearly to pressure, lock in the 50 and deny the opposition scoring opportunities. If we go the other way we might score more but we do open ourselves up to being hit on the rebound and then more points conceded. It’s the age old ‘chaos vs control’ argument and it can be easy to say things like “They just should have kept attacking”. It is also a very fine balancing act and you quite often see teams go too much the other way and over correct. 

I for one will be extremely disappointed if we come out next year and decide to go all out attack and we start leaking goals left, right and centre. I’m proud of our ability to keep teams to low scores and I think we shouldn’t venture too far away from it, we don’t have the personnel to win shootouts every week and we aren’t going to acquire said personnel in one off-season. We do need to tweak things though and this is all part of fine tuning the balancing act. We do need to decide internally what is considered a good enough lead to sit on because 4 goals is not as big of a lead as it used to be with 6-6-6, rules for defenders constant 50s which can really swing the momentum in an instant. There is a point when the opponent drops the heads a bit but that is easily over the 5 goal lead mark for me. Obviously the FD would have had this in mind and they would prefer we don’t miss so many opportunities early but the facts are that teams miss opportunities and our plan can’t rely on coming out and starting with 6.0 every week. So we definitely need to tweak structure, ball movement but overall psychology but let’s not pretend that this method was complete crap in 2022 either and we need to follow the leader word for word.

Look to improve our cutting edge in front of goal, keep working on the locking it down stuff especially once the lead is established which means constant running and pressure. If guys aren’t running hard long enough or doing much else, drop them and reward VFL efforts with players chomping at the bit. Add some more footskills to the side to assist with our ball movement and get creative with angles of movement and stuff. 

I could keep going but I really need to start working.
 

I've missed this thread.

It'll be interesting to see what the 2023 iteration will look like for the team as a whole as the season unfolds.

#goodtopicforconjecture 😇  Calling @binman 📞

Go Dees and good luck to Laurie and McVee.

Edited March 17, 20232 yr by Engorged Onion

If there is one thing I hope we took away from last season, is that we have got to better manage the load of our best players, and stop trying to push them so hard until they fall apart at the most critical time of the year. 

A lot of people were calling for changes throughout the year to gamestyle, personnel or coaching.

Looks like rotating more players through the middle of the ground will be our biggest weapon for the year, for unpredictability and also for longevity.

We have never had the depth to do this properly and it looks like 2023 is the year! 

 

Edited March 17, 20232 yr by BW511

4 minutes ago, BW511 said:

A lot of people were calling for changes throughout the year to gamestyle, personnel or coaching.

Looks like rotating more players through the middle of the ground will be our biggest weapon for the year, for unpredictability and also for longevity.

We have never had the depth to do this properly and it looks like 2023 is the year! 

 

Early days but our game against Richmond was a big transition away from where we were at in 22. Lots more cutting back to the corridor, changing the angle of attack etc.

The club probably rightly thinks our defence and post clearance game is solid given we held good leads in every game last year.

Will be watching the first few weeks with interest, particularly Sydney rd 3

2 hours ago, Engorged Onion said:

I've missed this thread.

It'll be interesting to see what the 2023 iteration will look like for the team as a whole as the season unfolds.

#goodtopicforconjecture 😇  Calling @binman 📞

Go Dees and good luck to Laurie and McVee.

Leaving aside the topic of the timing and impact of loading, i am increasingly of the view that fitness levels will be one of the top 3 determinants of ultimate success this year (the other two being talent and luck with injury).

The game plans of the leading teams this season will all be pretty similar:

• variations on the tiger's territory template (ie go forward at all costs and win post clearance possession - as opposed to the say the way dog's liked to flick it around out the back or how freo really try to make the ground wide with lots of across ground switching)
• super quick ball movement to separate the tall defenders and create more one on ones and stop zone defences getting set 
• Ball in motion
• Win quality contested ball and clearances ala the dees (even the tigers have come round on this)
• Outnumber the oppo at each contest - whether that be forward or back

A challenge for teams employing this game plan will be how bloody taxing it is as it requires a huge amount of all team running (for example to create outnumbers) and there is very little opportunity to get a breather other than going to the bench. 

Case in point - last night's game. I expected a high scoring match, particularly after two goals in the opening 2 minutes. That first quarter involved lots of aggressive ball movement and whilst the blues did try and slow it down, plenty of forward and back ball movement, with the ball in motion most of the quarter. 

The third quarter was even more ball in motion, up and down the ground running, with the goals flowing this time. 

But both teams looked completely gassed by halfway through the last. The standard of footy dropped off a cliff, with any number of fatigue related basic errors. 

It's one thing to want to play like the tigers tried to. It's another thing to keep that model up to the final siren. Teams that can't do so will not win this year's flag.

We look incredibly fit and fast. Fitter and faster than any other team i've seen vison of this preseason (though i haven't seen much of the cats to be honest).

I think we may well run over most teams in the first 10 games or so. Particularly any team that has had more than small handful of players miss multiple training sessions in the critical Jan Feb loading phase. 

Assuming we can hit the finals with the same level of relative fitness advantage we will be very hard to beat. 

 

Edited March 17, 20232 yr by binman

We've gotta be able to run out games this year. Injuries will happen but management will be key.