Axis of Bob

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.

In the end it was Lever, Petty and Matthew Parker for Lochie O'Brien, Liam Stocker and Robbie Young. Obviously that was after further trades, with none of those players ending up at Adelaide. More accurately, it was Lever, pick 35 and pick 47 (future) for pick 10, pick 19 (future) and pick 67 (future).

I'm not sure I'd bother spending big on Parker for a tiny gain in our inside midfield, where we are already excellent. I'd rather spend less money making bigger gains in areas where we actually need improvement.

Brayshaw ran a sub 2.9 second 20m in his draft year, so he's not slow off the mark.

I'd rather win it from afar, and I'd rather lose a Grand Final. I still remember when we beat North in the 2000 prelim final and it was amazing.

It's hard to know how well a defensive wing plays because their role means that they are often where the ball ain't. He could play his role immaculately, deter every opposition kick and force long kicks down the line .... and you'd have no idea. Sometime the opposition will take the game on through his side and he'll get it 20+ times, and sometimes they'll barely go near him. That's why pressure acts and tackles don't tell the story for his role, because he could play his role perfectly and be nowhere near the footy for most of the match. Counting possessions for him is silly because the biggest influence on that will be the style and shape of how the game is played. If he does his job well, the reward will be when we win.

Nice avatar change.

That is the only game where a decent team has beaten us, and our structure almost won us that game despite inaccurate kicking and a 25-11 free kick count. The clearances were pretty even too, so the extra man at the stoppages wasn't really a major issue. Our structure works and it works even better under stress, like we will see in finals. Every team knows how we play. Only one team in the top 8 has taken a game off us despite this. Brisbane, Richmond, Geelong and Hawthorn all played extremely predictable game plans and each of them won multiple premierships. Our plan is not obviously broken and, it could be argued, is the most obviously UNbroken. We just need to keep playing it as well as we can and challenge other teams to do it better than we do.