Axis of Bob

He's a good fit for the Saints. Their midfield is very ordinary.

Further to that, I think there are a couple of things that are really in Brown's favour. Look at the best big forwards this year: Hawkins, Kennedy and Dixon. They are 32, 33 and 30, respectively and you could argue that they are in the form of their careers because the game for forwards has moved away from speed and more towards strength and competing for the aerial ball. Ben Brown is 27 and arguably coming into 5 years of his best football. Another thing is that he's a really good converter. When the scoring is low in big finals this becomes more important. More so for low possession big forwards. Brown has always kind of annoyed me because I don't like how he exaggerates free kicks. I'm a bit old school like that. But there are good reasons he gets all those free kicks, which are as valuable as a contested mark when the ball comes in long: he's very tall, he uses this advantage by marking at the highest point, and he fights really hard for front position. Defenders get nervous around him because he's huge, has long arms and it's impossible to defend from behind unless you infringe (like holding an arm, pushing in the back, chopping the arms). His presence makes us immediately more dangerous up forward, allowing us to set our team up more defensively. I think this suits us, because we have some special players that can win us territory (Gawn and mids) and a strong defence that can push up to give us repeat entries. Our poor forward line hasn't allowed us to capitalise and we've had to score goals on the counter attack to be competitive. But with a genuine big forward we can play the territory game and wins games by attrition like, say, Richmond.

It's a hard one. I think it depends on a whole bunch of stuff that we just don't know. Things like our salary position, his salary demands, his injuries, what players we can move on, what other players are coming in, what it will take to trade for him, how we are intending to play next year etc. The most important things are his injury, our salary position and his salary. If all of that checks out then I think I'd do the deal because it's just so difficult to get players that fill the position that he does as an effective long ball target. Of the top 4, Lynch and Hawkins are in the GF and Dixon probably should have been, plus Brisbane is throwing a Hail Mary for Daniher. Who else is out there that can do this? Kennedy, the Kings, McKay .... Brown. Not much else. I think it would require a bit of a juggle to make our forward line work well but it's definitely solvable. Effectively we could make it the 2018 forward line (in style) with Brown/Weid instead of Hogan/TMac. I'd rather free Jackson of the responsibility of being a structural player up forward because it would detract from his uniqueness and flexibility. What it would require is a shift towards high pressure small forwards who can feed off these, lock the ball and force repeat forward entries.

This year we were ranked 5th in marks inside 50 per game (9.1 per game). We also ranked 6th in marks inside 50 per forward entry (marking on 21.4% of our inside 50s).

I can certainly see the argument. I think players also look at other things when they think about coming to a club. I think relationships are important, I think their football role is important (with how they see themselves fitting within the team), lifestyle factors (such as location) and also I think the list profile is important. Players go to work every day and want to get fulfillment from that. Different players play for different reasons and I don't think that $$$ explains all of it.

As a comparison, whilst Geelong has 8 players under 28 years old, in our final game against Essendon we had only 3 players older than 28 (Hibberd, Brown and Melksham), and none of them are critical parts of our future success. Geelong and us are a different points, where we are continuing to build and get better whilst Geelong are looking to succed in their Last Dance (or 2). We need to go out and get more mature players that can support our younger players and fill roles to help them be better because we already have most of the long term building blocks. Geelong is trying to use their current success to lure good players whilst they still can but, like Hawthorn, there will be a reckoning eventually.

@Lucifer's Hero I think I require a higher burden of proof on these things because nobody really knows and it's easy just to throw about statements like that without any evidence. We just get speculation from footy journos who have, kindly speaking, a pretty ordinary reputation for their ability to extract the truth. All of the things you said might be true but nobody has any way of knowing; it's just speculation and I think forms a pretty weak argument. My personal view is that, in the absence of credible information, people will project the narrative that they want to hear. I just don't think that the evidence justifies a view one way or another.

Geelong keeps fielding the oldest teams in AFL history. This is their time to go for broke because the edge is coming. It came for Hawthorn and it's coming for Geelong. Their average age is over 28 years old. They have Tom Stewart, who is 27, but then only 7 other players younger than 28, and the list of players isn't that impressive: Bews (26), Kolodjashnij (25), O'Connor (23), Henry (22), Parfitt (22), Simpson (22) and Miers (21). Their salary cap shouldn't be too bad now either, because the players who should be being paid the most are actually at the ends of the their careers and would be signing contracts far less than at their prime. Selwood (32), Hawkins (32), even Dangerfield (30) are their highest value players but shouldn't be on as big a salary now. The next year or two is their big shot at a flag with this group because they don't have the players to replace those stars, which is why they are going hard at free agency (Hawkins/Cameron, Selwood/Viney).

That's because there's no basis for your assertion. If you want to avoid that push back then you should provide some evidence to support your view.

Watching the games so far the main things that are common in the wins seem to be: High defensive pressure around the football. Winning contested footy. Clean hands. Being able to score against a well set defence. Effectively, the story being told about how to win a final is: Pressure the opposition so much that the game becomes a scrap, then win the scrap, move the ball forward (any way that you can) and then win those ugly contests inside 50 to score. Look at a Richmond game. Everything is at high intensity around the ball, which makes the game ugly. The get the ball forward and use their combination of big forwards and very clean small forwards against well set defences to win difficult contests to score, or pressure the opposition enough that a kick forwards goes to their excellent defence, allowing them to get the ball forward to start the whole process again. It's a very simple plan. Pressure the ball, get it forward, pressure the ball, get it forward etc. They set up their whole team to defend, but their best players are forward of the ball. The type of game that wins finals is the type of game we played in 2018. Strong, contested slogs where territory is king. Gawn, Petracca, Oliver, Viney, Brayshaw ..... our best players are around the footy, so we should be using them to pin the opposition inside 50 and then using them again to kick goals from clearances and repeat entries. We've definitely got it in us to play finals winning football, probably more so than any team outside the top bracket. We need a few tweaks to allow us to keep that intensity for longer, but we're not as far off as many believe.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive. You can win contested possessions whilst also costing your team defensively.

He was a good half back flanker for a while before moving to the middle and having a really fantastic year in 2000. His year was good enough to compete for a Brownlow in a year with no solitary standout, but winning the Brownlow did overrate his year. We paid very good money for his 2000 performance, but his professionalism outweighed his talent. When that caught up with him (almost immediately) he was a white elephant for the team. When the performances dried up everyone realised that he was a slowish toiler who used the ball nicely but only an average contested ball winner. If he signed the contract a year earlier or a year later then he probably finishes his career at Melbourne.

He's the sort of player we should be after. Not high production, but has pace, tackles and can do 2 or 3 things a game that create a score. Is older than you think .... 26.

I get this argument, and I agree that he's a natural forward. I think the role that best suits him is the role he played in the last two weeks as a defensive tall on intercept markers where he can use his smarts to find space on a non-defensive opponent. I'm just not convinced that his best role is the best role for his team.

As pointed out on the other thread, I copied the wrong graph. It should be this one: It still mostly says the same thing. Except that Geelong has fewer smalls and more Dangerfields.

Fixed.

Yikes! I'd better have another look! ?

I've always been a Tesla fan. Edison can get stuffed. ?

In 2020, when Melbourne wins the inside 50 count, we are 4 wins - 4 losses. When we lose the inside 50s, we are 5 W - 4 L. So we are more likely to win a game of football when we give up more territory and inside 50s. Bear in mind that of those 4 wins we had when also winning inside 50s, two of those were absolute shellackings over Adelaide and North. Effectively we are a better counterattacking team territory team. Or, more precisely, our forward line only really functions when it has space and fast ball movement caused by a quick transition.

I can see that my 'Fritsch in defence' thoughts are about as popular as COVID, so I'll try to give a bit more information to support it (although I may still skip doing so for COVID). Fritsch has received Brownlow votes twice: two votes in a tight win against Carlton at half back (26 touches, behind T McDonald who kicked 6 before being injured), and two votes in a close loss to the Eagles 2 weeks later (kicking 4 as the second tall forward). He stayed forward in every game after that and we lost them all, despite him kicking goals. He kicked goals as a key forward, with Weid and TMac both missing, rather than as a small forward. In games he has played as a forward from 2018-now, we were 13-14 with him in defence/not forward, and 16-18 with him forward. We won the game he missed this year against St Kilda in a dour defensive slog. There were some excellent articles in the 'Game Plan' thread and I saw this table from one of them, which showed the top 4 teams and their contribution of goals from different players. It shows a 'barbell' of goalkickers, where goals are mostly kicked by the talls or smalls, with few being kicked by the mediums (mostly midfieders). This makes sense, because it's so much harder to get space inside 50 in the modern game, so the goals are kicked from big marks (eg, Charlie Dixon, Tom Hawkins, Tom Lynch) or crumbing forward (eg, Robbie Gray, Brendan Parfitt, Daniel Rioli). Then have a look at ours: We kick twice as many goals from mediums as the others, and hardly any from the talls and smalls. 4 of our top 5 goalkickers were mediums (Fritsch, Petracca, Melksham, Hunt - nobody else kicked double figures other than Weideman). Fritsch kicked 22 from 16 games as our leading goalkicker, so it's clear that what we're doing isn't working. Our best wins were when we lost the inside 50 count because we could kick goals in transition (where mediums thrive) but couldn't kick goals when teams were set against us (where the tall/small setup is better). We can solve our tall issues because we have some talented players like Jackson, Weid and Petty (and possibly Brown). But Fritsch doesn't help our small forward problems because he isn't a small forward, but instead he'd be a fourth tall forward! He has shown promise as a smooth moving and flexible defender who can intercept and provide drive. I think that's the role he best serves the team in.

Very interesting. I found this chart instructive because I think it highlights our challenges. It shows that forward lines at the moment are either small or tall, whilst ours is mid sized. Maybe there's a method to what what we're trying to do, but it's different to what the top 4 are doing. Anyway, I thought I'd try to recreate this chart for Melbourne this year: That's a very different look, with our <184cm and >195cm cohorts being less productive that any of those 4 teams. In fact, 4 or our top 5 goalkickers (Weideman aside) were between 185cm and 189cm.

I'm not making a judgement on anything except that using tackle stats is a terrible way to judge whether or not someone should be playing in defence. Although I will say that using third team midfielder tackle numbers is also a terrible way to judge whether or not a half forward should be played in defence. ? But half forward and half back are completely different roles. I think it's difficult to use half forward statistics as a predictor of success at half back, one way or another.

All Australian team 2020 Defenders: Luke Ryan: 20 tackles in 17 games. Harris Andrews: 16 tackles in 15 games. Brad Sheppard: 34 tackles in 18 games. Darcy Byrne-Jones: 32 tackles in 18 games. Darcy Moore: 14 tackles in 18 games. Nick Haynes: 23 tackles in 17 games.

Instead they combined it with others to get Gibbs. ?

This year Weideman took 1.31 contested marks a game. Hawkins took 1.68 and Dixon took 2.53 a game. But if you break it down, before Weideman became the number 1 forward (starting against the Bulldogs in round 13) he took 1.75 per game, whilst after that it was only 0.6 per game. His ability to jump at the ball and work one on one make him a very dangerous forward target, but he's not a wrestler at the moment and we suffer for it. Sure, he can do it, but we losing a lot of his ability as a player if you sacrifice him. In the end, I think the real elephant in the room is Fritsch, whose 'tallness' as a medium forward means that crafting a forward line with the pieces we have is very difficult. Without him you could play 3 talls (if one of them is Jackson) and let them all share the workload of contesting the long ball as a flexible trio who can all do it. But playing Fritsch forward means that you have to leave one of the 3 tall forwards out (because you can't play 3 talls plus Fritsch) and that means you probably need a single player to do most of the grunt work because they will draw a lot more of the footy against the heart of the defence. A forward line with Weid and Jackson is tall but also very mobile, but you lose that if you're asking for one of them to spend most of their game wrestling with 2 defenders. Personally, I'd have three talls (as long as Weid and Jackson were two of them) and three smalls up forward, and play Fritsch at half back. I think he's probably played his best footy at half back, even if he may think of himself as a forward.