Axis of Bob

Great to hear from you. And still 35 years young ! 😁

If you look at the best defenders you will generally see a list of the best intercept defenders, so there is a bias there too. Look at the AA team: May, Lever, Aliir, Stewart, Rich and Dale. Of those, only May could play directly on the opponent's best or second best defender (tall or small). The remaining 5 would play on the opposition's weakest or second weakest forward. All the awards have flaws, even the AA which specifically selects 6 defenders. The last true defender selected in the AA team was Talia in 2016.

Both teams are right to feel confident because they're a chance. It's a Grand Final, so you should feel confident .... it's just one game. They'll be playing against a completely different type of team to any they've played in the finals so far. They've smashed Essendon and Port in contested possession and were +10 against Brisbane, but we are by far the number 1 contested team team in the league (+17.9 pg .... 2nd best was Geelong's +9.9). Our wins were against the 2nd and 3rd best contested teams and we beat them +30 and +22 in our finals. The Dogs will need to find a way to use their biggest strength (winning contested possession) against the best contested team in the league, and then find a way to negate our biggest strength (defence and intercepts). If they somehow nullify our intercept game then they just have to overcome all of the other reasons that we should win. They are a good team, but they will likely need something pretty special to happen to beat us. That's why we're the favourites.

King is looking at the Schache/Aliir thing as being what won them the game. It wasn't .... it was simply a sideshow. The Bulldogs won the first quarter with +22 contested possessions and that was the whole game done. They won based on contested possession, not by negating Port's intercept game. There were one or two times that worked for them, but Aliir still had 11 intercept possessions because Schache isn't a very good player. The difference is that, whilst Port have an excellent interceptor (as do we), we have many excellent interceptors and a midfield whose key strength is defensive pressure. If they want to push forwards to defend against Lever, then we'll just have the AA Full Back do the intercepting (who is arguably an even better player), Petty or even the AA ruck to do the job instead. Plus the ball is unlikely to come in so easily because Port were so woeful in the midfield that Jakovich and McIntosh couldn't have saved them. That simply hasn't happened against us, and I'd bet against it magically starting next week. David King knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He can be given as many stats as possible but he simply doesn't have the wherewithal to use them properly. The Port game was one team that was ready to play a high paced, contested game of football versus another team that looked genuinely afraid. The rest of it was just window dressing. We had to win against Geelong. We were much better than them, so we won comfortably, but they were still fighting. Port were terrible. Most of the competition would have beaten them that night because they had no fight in them. The Dogs threw one punch early and Port dropped straight to the canvas, hoping that the count came quickly.

The culture of this team is based on his work ethic and integrity. In the early part of the decade, he was given the leadership of the club despite not being a natural or outspoken leader. But when this new group of players came into the club it was his example that demonstrated to everyone that this is how you train, this is how you prepare and this is how you make yourself into a good AFL footballer. The others were moved on from the club and Nathan Jones, with his example of who they should all try to be, was forced into the middle of club. The integrity of him as a person, and the integrity of his work ethic, is an example that all of this generation of players will have with them through their careers. A super player in his own right but his character still lives through the club through his actions over his career. I can't say how much I thank him for staying with us and help us become the club we are now. He'll always have a special place the the MFC and any future success we have will be built on the foundations that he laid down with sweat and integrity. Thank you Chunk. Not just for the last 15 years but also for everything that hasn't happened yet. Champion.

Playing with power and a willingness to defend is extremely valuable in finals, especially in our team. Look at how well Sparrow has taken to it. If you're playing in a big game, he's a player you want on your side.

The Parfitt injury was absolutely massive for them. It wouldn't have changed the result by any means, but he's about their only decent stoppage defender and we absolutely waltzed the ball out of the stoppage all night. What a great game to watch. Not often you get to celebrate a preliminary final halfway through the second quarter. It shows the difference between playing beautiful football during the season and practicing playing finals football all season. When the pressure went up we were unflustered. We knew what to do.

Solid game.

I think it's more that they were able to selectively add talent when they had a chance but didn't have to add in bulk like they did in those drafts. We are also a little different in the core of our team was taken in the Petracca, Brayshaw, Oliver drafts, which preceded this. We did it a little more slowly and methodically, rather than just smashing one draft out of the park as the article suggests. 2019 was just a bit of a free hit after an unexpected down year. Wrong B Smith. Bailey was the year before. (Snap @grazman!) Also the 5th player on the list definitely appears to be Deven Robertson rather than Noah Anderson. The height is after the name, and Anderson is taller than 185cm.

Obviously Jackson, Pickett and Rivers are guns. That's the obvious one. However you could look at 2017 as being the more important one to our performance at the moment, especially considering that we traded out our first rounder for Lever and then nailed 3 picks in the 30s on Spargo, Fritsch and Petty, each of whom are deeply entrenched in the team. That's an extraordinary set of hits with picks that low. Often people look back at a draft and say "Yep, that's the one that made that team", like you look back to Geelong's 2001 draft as the reason why they were so good (Bartel, Kelly, Johnson, Ablett), or Hawthorn's 2004 draft (Buddy, Roughy, Lewis). The reality is that these teams had mulitple great drafts and the club's 'superdraft' was built on an equally impressive draft a few years earlier. In 1999, Geelong drafted Joel Corey, Paul Chapman, Cameron Ling and Corey Enright, whilst in 2001 Hawthorn drafted Luke Hodge, Sam Mitchell, Campbell Brown and Rick Ladson.

That's a name that's usually pretty popular around here around trade time. 😁

One might be that if we drafted Macrae instead of Toumpas, then Weideman would be playing in the AFL because we wouldn't have been able to select Luke Jackson.

That's the thing that bothers me the most about this.

They found that his actions were 'disrespectful, demonstrative and aggressive'. The only part that he was not found guilty of was 'forceful' contact. If he was found to make contact with an umpire that was aggressive then it's very unlikely that he's going to come out of this well.

Talking back to a rugby union referee will get you marched straight down the ground. That's one of the most contentious sports to referee and they get treated with respect. Baseball too, where arguing balls and strikes (ie, disrespecting or 'showing up' the umpire) will get you ejected from the game. The AFL is getting better with its umpire culture, and abuse now results in a pretty automatic 50m penalty (which nobody complains about anymore). I was a junior footballer when Williams got 9 weeks. We got the message: Do not touch the umpire!

I think a better test would be: What if the umpire was a woman?

Deliberately knocked into an umpire. He looked at him, he thought about it, he walked through him. Every footballer, umpire and kid will see that this week and the AFL needs to send a message that you absolutely cannot do this. Ever. I'd give him 6 weeks.

You've lost your edge, olisik. It used to be much easier, but you're just trying too hard to get a reaction these days. It's a bit sad.

I don't rate King at all. He does stats because that's what the American sports shows do but AFL football is much harder to define with stats because the game is so chaotic. Sports like baseball, basketall etc are far easier because there are fewer moving parts. King tries to shoehorn stats into his analysis but he usually misses the point of them. It's really frustrating to watch because most of the time he just doesn't understand what's actually happening, despite the resources and statistics that are thrown at him. Montagna is far more interesting and insightful. He looks at things that are actually interesting about the game and you can learn a lot from him. It must be hard for him to sit there sometimes as King talks about Geelong chipping the ball around, as they have for many years, like it's the most groundbreaking analysis of all time. Get Daisy on. Get her on all the shows.

One of the examples King used was how the chip kicking resulted in the soccer goal to Hawkins (12 minutes in) because Lever was playing on Close. However the kick came in from a turnover in the Geelong attacking half, with a switch kick and then a bomb from 80m out .... to an 8 vs 5 with Max Gawn standing under it. Geelong somehow scrubbed it through because Max got body pressure from the small Parfitt and let the ball over the back, whilst Hawkins and Cameron were worked out of the contest. This is how we want to defend, but a series of weird mishaps resulted in a goal. King, instead, thought this was a coaching masterclass. I don't have a problem with being bullish on Scott's plan to nurse a slow, old team to a final crack at a premiership. It's smart coaching. But he's started with a conclusion in mind and then went really looking for evidence to support it even when it wasn't there, which made the whole thing look really weird.

I think the idea was probably especially for Kardinia because the ground is so narrow you probably get more value around the ball than you do behind it because there is much less space (since KP is so narrow). By bringing up the extra number you can get extra pressure around the ball and still be able to cover any long kicks into defence. Geelong tend to camp number out behind the ball, which works well at Kardinia but can result in some pretty turgid football. I think we just wanted the game to be as contested as possible and then win the battle of attrition, as we tend to do. As it turned out our extra ended up being caught too close to the stoppage and they were able to get out of the stoppage too easily. We just brought back a reasonably shallow sweeper half a kick from the contest, which forced them to work through an extra line of defence and slowed the ball down. They had very few chances to look dangerous in the second half. It was good to see our game plan still hold up against Geelong's fairly unique style of play.

It was a bit weird. Montagna was saying that we had the better of general play, aside from about 5 minutes of chaos where everything Geelong touched turned to gold. This was exactly what most people would say. King then was trying to say that Chris Scott is a tactical mastermind because they play keepings off and that their golden run was a result of that because Dangerfield and Selwood exist. It was hard to follow his point but he seemed to argue that Geelong was better tactically because they chipped the ball around. The fact that they kicked 4 goals in 3 quarters of footy wasn't important. Montagna pushed back on that and King was flustered. Montagna eventually just moved on for the sake of the segment. It was weird and pretty hard to follow, but King certainly wasn't particularly full of praise.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of that.

Matt Priddis, Sam Mitchell and Tom Mitchell have won Brownlows in the last decade. There's a place for a slow centreman still, but you have to be really, really, really good. To your point, Brayshaw is a completely different type of player though. Brayshaw is far more powerful and much quicker off the mark, however he is nowhere near as agile, which is the most important part of being that type of centre square midfielder.

Two points: 1- The tests were done at different times (Brayshaw missed end of year testing with injury, IIRC). Brayshaw's was done preseason. 2- The 20m test only tests the speed from a standing start in a straight line over 20m. That's it. Gary Rohan and Lewis Jetta, two long striding speedsters, are quick but that doesn't make them necessarily markedly quicker from a standing start (which nearly never happens in AFL). They are quick over 20+ metres, where they are near top speed already and can maintain that to burn opponents off. This is where you see Jetta striding down the wing, putting the ball under his arm and taking running bounces. That isn't tested in a 20m sprint. Brayshaw's test could theoretically be slightly out given that it wasn't at the official combine, but he's not slow in a straight line from a standing start. He's very powerful and his ability to burst from stoppage in 2018 was one of the key reasons we were so good at scoring from them. His lateral quickness is not as good as his straight line (so he doesn't defend stoppages as well), but he isn't the slug that he's being made out to be. The 20m test doesn't test overall speed, it tests the ability to accelerate from a standing start.