Axis of Bob

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.

I love the idea that bringing out players in their late 40s is going to be somehow motivating to a 19 year old. Just because it means something to the old guys on Demonland doesn't mean that it means anything to the players. I'm in my late 30s, and I'll nod and smile when people talk about Robbie Flower but they may as well be talking about Ron Barassi, Bluey Truscott or Allan La Fontaine. Sure, I know they were good players because old people keep telling me (whilst I smile and nod politely), but I don't have any connection to them beyond that. Luke Jackson was 2 years old when that happened. His first reaction to seeing the 2004 team is likely to be "OMG, there's a third Nathan Brown?!?!"

The kick was a miscommunication between him and Jackson. Jackson needed to double back towards the ball and Viney thought he was …. but he didn’t so the kick looked silly even though the idea was right. The movement was very poor from the forwards, with all three running back towards goal and none come forwards to separate the defenders. The only option Viney had inside 50 was a bomb to the top of the square to what would have been a pack situation. It was terrible forward play.

I just calculated this from his total possession and contested mark stats. This year he has 40 possessions and 5 contested marks = 12.5%. Last year he had 7.7 possessions a game (ironically fewer than he has this year), for a total of 100 possessions and took 17 contested marks (17%). He's actually winning more contests this year (4.6 contested ppg vs 3.6 last year), he just isn't kicking the same number of goals.

I find that very hard to believe after missing several months with stress fractures in his femur. In 2018 he played 10 games and that was only because Hogan got injured. He's not a high possession player, so the difference between his good and bad games is often just about a chance taken here or there as he gets a high proportion of his possessions from contested marks. Last year, for example, he had a decent year but only had more than 8 possessions in 3 games. In his career he has 13.6% of his possessions coming from contested marks, which is very high. This year it is 12.5% (close to average) and in 2020 it was 17.0%, so the difference between his good and bad games is just having those grabs stick or not .... and his low possession game makes that a low sample size. This year he has more contested possessions than uncontested, which implies that he's probably struggling more with running, which fits in with the stress fracture injury he had. Players that are based around contested marking take longer as they compete against directly against bigger bodies in the most difficult circumstances. That's why you see the best of them peaking and excelling as they approach (and exceed) 30 years of age. Weideman has had some poor games, but he's not miles off being OK, it just seems like that because of the way that he plays. After all, he's marked the ball inside 50 as many times as TMac since he's come into the team.

There are a lot of assumptions being made about Weideman on here. The most straightforward (and likely) issue is that he missed a large chunk of time with a stress fracture in his leg, which robbed him of a lot of fitness and strength as he's had to spend time off his feet. Given that he's young and not yet established himself as a best 22 player, (and one without a mature forward's body) that has made it a difficult barrier for him to overcome. I think time playing VFL is better for him at the moment, but there's a lot of overreaction in this thread.

I cannot overstate how much I want us to select Lukas Cooke as a developing key forward. Sometimes I just want to watch the world burn.

That's like asking if we would be better off replacing Tom Sparrow with Dustin Martin. Of course we are better off replacing a role player with one of the best players in the league, but it's not a useful comparison. Geelong paid 3 first round picks for Jeremy Cameron. West Coast, in part, gave up Chris Judd for Kennedy. There are trade offs for all the decisions. I'm sure that if we spent 3 first round picks and a chunk of our salary cap, we would have a superstar key forward to pair with TMac ..... but our team would be worse off overall.

It's funny because the winning team has kept their opponents to 50, 25, 74, 60, 67, 61, 74, 62, 81, 81, 52, 68, 89, 44, 84, 54, 73, 84, 66, 82 and 75 since the year 2000. Even when footy was higher scoring in the early 2000s, no team has kicked 90 points and lost a Grand Final. The average score of a defeated grand finalist since 1999 is 67 points, and since 2013 is 59 points. Defence wins premierships because it can survive under the highest intensity. That's why we've comfortably beaten every other team at the top end of the ladder because our game stands up when both teams are bringing the heat. We beat both Geelong and Brisbane, with their 'goal kicking firepower'. Brisbane kicked 3 goals after half time. Geelong kicked 5 straight in the 3rd quarter, but only 9 for the match. Geelong and Brisbane are both defensive teams like us because defence wins premierships. Ignoring all that .... we've still kicked the 3rd most points of any team this year. Edit: Lord Nev put up averages, which is better. Our numbers actually look less flattering because we haven't run up the scoreboard against the poorer teams like some other teams have .... but doing that doesn't mean anything in finals.