titan_uranus

The problem with analysing free kick counts is the erroneous but often held assumption that the free kick count should be even, or close to even, at the end of each game. An inferior side is going to be caught holding the ball more, or will infringe in marking contests more. When you're more under pressure you'll tend to grab a jumper. So on and so forth. An overly aggressive side may choose to give away free kicks to help pump up their "aggression" (Richmond may well do this, given they're so far in the negative for frees this year). So it follows that the free kick count does not need to be even to indicate "fair' umpiring. I felt on Saturday that the Dogs got the rub of the green - key 50/50 contests that could have gone either way would go the Dogs' way, but not ours. And the holding the ball call against Brayshaw late in the second was a momentum changer IMO. But that doesn't mean I think there is an umpiring conspiracy.

What's the point of posting that you think GC is as good as Hawthorn and we couldn't beat Hawthorn, then? As I said, the same argument applies the other way around (and of course, with a 12-1-4 record, it applies significantly more against you than it does in your favour). The comparison you're drawing is an incredibly bad one to draw in support of an argument that you think we will, or might, not win this weekend.

Example number 94123 of the MRP system being broken. An elbow to the head deemed serious enough to be a reportable offence is worthy of a fine, but a perfectly executed run-down tackle results in a two week ban, whilst contesting the football has the AFL sending you directly to the Tribunal. Utterly, completely, farcically, broken.

Whilst you're welcome to question whether we'll beat GC, the argument that we drew with Hawthorn therefore we won't beat GC is one of the worst arguments you can roll out, seriously. We beat Port 2.5 weeks ago, and GC is clearly worse than Port, so shouldn't that mean a comfortable win?

If the game ends up being played in Darwin, I wonder whether that will force the FD to consider some rotations for freshness in with the Perth game the following week.

The only potential good thing to come from playing this game in Darwin will be money, if we get a financial benefit to going there. We just saw on the weekend how we play when the ball is slippery. The conditions aren't going to suit us. Let alone the physical impact having to immediately fly to Perth to commence quarantine.

So that we don't have to fly to Queensland and then fly again to WA? So that we can avoid playing against an opposition's home crowd? So that we can play at Marvel, where we're we've won 8 of our last 10? Plenty of reasons to think about, at least if you haven't already given up on the season.

Agree, except that the removalists apparently lied or weren't wholly truthful with contact tracers early on, which slowed down our initial attempt to ringfence the outbreak. Broke the mask-wearing rule then didn't help contact tracers. [Censored] them. But I know that it's hard for the government to punish them because we want people to have no fear in telling contact tracers what they've done and where they've gone.

When it happens once that may be true. But across all our post-bye games we've been repeatedly missing shots. It's true that the game plays out differently if a behind is a goal and vice versa, but we are consistently winning territory, moving the ball from the back half to the forward half, applying pressure, but missing shots.

I agree that there's more to it than straighter set shot kicking but our goal kicking is IMO the single biggest problem, and that's because we're missing enough easy shots per match, repeatedly, for it to be noticeable. Brown's two easy misses on the weekend were just that: easy. He should have kicked both of them. So should Pickett in the first quarter (a snap from 25m on a slight angle). Really sad that Stats Insider hasn't updated its set shot charting since Round 6. If it was up to date we'd be able to get a sense of how many "easy" shots we're missing. On the comparative metric, I understand what you're saying but what we know is that post-bye, in every game we've played we've had inferior goal kicking accuracy to our opponent in that game. That side may then kick inaccurately the following week but that doesn't impact us: what impacts us is our own accuracy vs our opponent's accuracy when we play them, and post-bye we've been far less accurate each game than our opposition. Having said that, I agree with you that the way we deliver the ball inside 50 is a problem. We get it wrong too often - we go to the square when we shouldn't, then we go to the pocket when we should go to the square, etc. Part of it is that we have some average decision-makers doing the delivering (ANB, Harmes, Viney and Gawn all struggle with making the call on where to send the ball). Part of it is we fluff the kicks (e.g. Pickett had McDonald streaming into an open pocket but missed him). I suspect part of it also is that having not settled on our preferred forward set up, TMac and Brown haven't yet gelled together and nor have our mids gelled with them. Pleasingly Brown was involved all match as a target, so that was an improvement, but then TMac went missing and that's no good.

There's no alternative, due to the AFLPA insisting that clubs do not have any more than one five-day break in the season. The logical game to be on Friday night is Essendon v Sydney but they fall foul of that rule. You may think our game is more deserving but I'm pretty confident the AFL doesn't really want GC on the Friday night if they can avoid it, and at any rate doesn't even know where our game is going to be played yet, so the more time they get to fixture it the better.

I like the article's stats: the AFL doesn't scores from turnover (as far as I know, anyway), so it's interesting to see we're down 15.7 points per game on that metric. Funnily enough, we're going to the boundary less from defensive 50 than we were earlier in the season. Doesn't really support the recent comments on here that we've become "more boring". I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our goal accuracy has dropped from 45.9% to 37.5%. Doesn't that help explain why our goals per inside 50 have dropped from 23.6% to 17.8%? Are you arguing that the relative drop (13th to 18th, compared with 7th to 17th) means there is more to it? If so, I'm not sure if that's the right conclusion to draw because our ranking is relative to other clubs, whose form is largely independent of ours. Or have I missed something here?

On the one hand, the fact the AFL has moved Hawthorn v Brisbane to Tasmania could suggest they can't get the Queensland sides into Victoria. On the other hand, it's a natural fit for Hawthorn to play in Tasmania, but less so Gold Coast as its their home game. So it might be that they wanted to make the call on Hawthorn now, and if it turns out Queensland relaxes its position later in the week so be it. I expect they'll wait to see what Victoria says tomorrow, then try to get an exemption for us to go into Queensland without quarantining, so that we can play at Metricon. In that event, we'll then fly direct from Queensland to Perth to commence 7 days quarantine before playing West Coast next Saturday or Sunday.

Yes it does, old dee. Most of the rest of us haven't given up on the season just yet, given we're 13-1-4 and 3rd on the ladder.

I doubt they did anything strategic with the ruck: without Martin they don't have a ruck on their list capable of competing with Gawn in hit outs, so IMO it's not as if they had an alternative plan of trying to win hit outs but chose not to go with it. I think like many sides, once they know they can't compete with hit outs they focus on what to do with Gawn's hit outs but for a side whose 2021 strategy has clearly been to beef up their midfield to unprecedented levels of quality, it's hardly surprising they were able to shark the taps. The "chaos ball" forward of centre point is interesting - they may have taken the ball away from May and Lever to an extent but I felt our guys were very much still in the game and if they weren't marking it they were spoiling it out of bounds or killing contests pretty well. And I felt like Libba killed us when he was in the middle but otherwise wasn't too damaging (whereas Bontempelli and Smith were noticeably dominant on the spread). My view is that the Dogs did nothing surprising tactically to beat us, they backed in what they're good at (smart delivery off half-back from Daniel and Dale and a dominant midfield) and we failed to do what we needed to do to compete with that (forward half turnovers, laziness at defensive stoppages, and missed shots on goal that we need to be kicking). I may well be unreasonably optimistic about it all but my view remains that all of our losses/the draw, except the Collingwood loss, are more attributable to our mistakes than our opponents' strategic successes.

Whilst I agreed with them seeking to move their Richmond home game to GMHBA, I agree with you on this: clubs have been flying all over Australia over the last two months, with Sydney and GWS sharing a plane at least once. This sort of stuff cheapens their legitimate gripes: fingers crossed if we end up finishing in the top 4 slated to play away to them in the first final, this comes back to bite them!

I agree with the personnel points you've mentioned but I'm interested in the Bevo tactical point. Out of interest, what do you (or King) think Bevo did on Saturday night that was tactically sound? On the leap of faith point, one key difference between us and the Dogs is that the Dogs have had injuries which has forced them to try different players. We haven't, so Goodwin has had the ability to keep picking the same 25-odd players. Whilst I have all season considered there to be merit to backing the same guys in who have taken us to wins vs the best sides, there is now more than enough evidence of poor form from those you've mentioned to mean it's time to start dropping players.

Not always. West Coast in 2018 went 3-2 through their final five games. The Dogs in 2016 went 3-3 through their final six games. Sydney in 2012 went 1-3 in their final four games. Obviously we'd rather be winning in our last month than not, but it's not necessarily the end of the world.

Really hard to know what's going to happen with us this weekend. Seems like we're reliant on Queensland allowing us into the state without needing to quarantine. Otherwise it looks like the West Coast v Collinwood and Bulldogs v Adelaide games are going ahead, which means our only other possible opponent is Geelong, if they can't get the North v Geelong game to work. Would imagine we'll end up in Queensland one way or another though.

Agree on most of this. Harmes is not good enough right now to be in the 22 IMO. That's the opening for Melksham, I reckon, if we want to give that a go (I'm no Melksham fan and his 2019-20 form was terrible, but if we can get something like 2018 Melksham into this side it will make a huge difference). I don't think he's capable of resisting the urge to be Dustin Martin. Viney's best football yesterday was in the forward half and his worst was at defensive stoppages. I think that's the signal anyone needs as to his best role in the side.

Sounds then like your criticism is about how we score, not how we defend. Given our scores against and scoring shots against remain low, I remain of the view we're hard to score against. We're still generating plenty of inside 50s and scoring shots, so I also don't think our ball movement or transition is markedly worse, albeit it was much better vs Port and Essendon than it was vs GWS and Hawthorn. The difference in our form pre- and post-bye is, IMO, a much smaller difference than many posts suggest. We're doing a hell of a lot similar to what we were doing to get to 11-1, but a few small differences are proving crucial and costing us games.

The Dogs had 20 scoring shots last night, their equal second-lowest for the season. Two weeks prior Port had 15 scoring shots and 55 points, their lowest number of scoring shots and second-lowest score for the season. We're averaging 68 points against post-bye. We averaged 72.5 points against pre-bye. The Dogs' 20 scoring shots against us last night is the most we've conceded post-bye. Meanwhile post-bye we've had at least 20 scoring shots in every single game we've played.

What's he actually saying here? "It's really about maximising opportunity and being efficient when you need to. Clearly we had our chances tonight to kick a bigger score, there's no question about that" - we didn't maximise opportunity and weren't efficient inside 50, such that we could have kicked a bigger score. Everyone agrees with that, don't they? "Would we like to score more? Of course we would. But it wasn't a major issue. We had our chances tonight" See above "We sit here confident" - this may be true, and if it is, is that a problem? I'd rather us be confident than to have lost all our confidence. And being confident doesn't mean we don't appreciate we need to improve "They kicked six goals from their forward-50 stoppages, and normally in a game it's one-to-two, so that's a big differential and it's an anomaly" - we lost by 20 points where our opponent kicked 6 goals from forward 50 stoppages, against an average of 1-2. So in a 4-goal game we conceded 4 more goals from that source than normal. So in other words, he's squarely addressed our problems whilst maintaining confidence in the players and our system. Which, when we're 3rd on the ladder, half a game off the top, with four games to go, isn't anything other than reasonable.

Yep we were a mathematical certainty last week, as 8th was on 8 wins and we were 13.5 with 5 to play. Top 2 is locked in if we go 4-0, as we must pass Geelong in that event. 4-0 means 2nd if the Dogs win out, or 1st if they drop 1 or more games. 3-1 guarantees top 4. We could finish as high as 1st (would require the Dogs and Cats to go 2-2 and Port to go 3-1 or worse) or as low as 4th (if the Dogs and Cats go 3-1 or better, and Port goes 4-0). 2-2 puts top 4 in jeopardy. We could theoretically still finish as high as 1st but far more likely we'll be 4th, 5th or 6th - 4th if Brisbane and Sydney lose at least one game each, 6th if they both go 4-0.

Why didn't you just come out and say what you wanted to say, that they've "gone past us"? Pity they ended up losing and making your argument sound even dumber.