titan_uranus

You're entitled to be pessimistic but this is unfair revisionism. If anyone on here tried to justify a loss to a side in Round 4 for not having "twigged" to the stand rule, they'd get pilloried. But if you want to give Geelong that cop out, then it's only fair to note in response that we'd spent all pre-season preparing for a Brown-Weideman forward line and so were still "twigging" to having to play without them. Smith played for them and Higgins has been dropped this year as being borderline best 22. Plus we were missing May after the first quarter. The Dogs wasn't an "early" win, it was in Round 11. Reducing that win to "we tagged Libba and they missed Dunkley and Treloar" doesn't do our hard work anywhere near the justice it deserved. Your revisionism reaches new heights on the Richmond win though. "Missing too many players to list here"? They were missing a grand total of two best 22 players, Vlastuin and Prestia. Martin went down midway through the third after having been tagged out of the game by Hibberd. They were at peak Richmond in the first 15 minutes, where most sides fall apart, but we weathered the storm and turned it around. Feel free to argue we'll lose to the Bulldogs, West Coast or Geelong in the run home, but don't do it by undermining our strong wins against every single top 8 side we've played this year. So to answer your question - who knows what would have happened if we'd played two consecutive games against top 8 sides. But a "closer look" at our wins doesn't reveal anything you're arguing for here. Indeed, I'd argue that the "closer" you look at our wins, the more you realise we lift and play premiership winning football.

Pretty sure a teammate got angry at him, too, because I recall after his miss they cut to him and he was mouthing back and gesturing as if to say "what was I supposed to do?" The answer, IIRC, was to slow down and hit one of the players laterally. Unfortunately he took off and wanted to keep moving, and ended up making a bad decision to neither full bore go for goal nor to pass it to Brown.

If our home game vs the Dogs is brought forward, it will be our fourth home game affected by COVID. We lost our two most profitable games to the first Victorian lockdown, and we're about to lose the Hawthorn and Dogs games too. It's just awful luck for us. Compare the situation to the Dogs who, through what will now be six COVID-affected rounds, have had one home game (at the start, vs us). Or Geelong, who've also only had one home game in those six rounds but that home game still was able to have a crowd, albeit a reduced one. They're at home this week but at the G - a game that, with a crowd, they'd probably have had a larger crowd for Richmond.

It was more like 50 metres out. It was an annoying miss but probably not an egregious one. The worst misses were Brown's in the first quarter and Spargo's in the second. Hunt streaming into the forward 50 in the second quarter when we were 26 points up also didn't end as well as it could have.

They don't need to win by anything much - right now, 3 points up, they're in the 8 on percentage (although both West Coast and GWS can pass them if they win today).

You'd sure as [censored] hope not! But I'm sure Gill will tell us we have to be "agile and flexible". And we got shafted in being the side sent to Darwin in the first place. Plus the GC and WC games are critical to our fixture as they're the only two sides we're yet to play.

I had given you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you were complaining about Rivers being dropped for shanking it and therefore missing out on being in the firsts. I now see you're complaining about Bowey (and Laurie) not being in the firsts. Which is even more ridiculous. The fact we have last year's draftees getting stronger and better at Casey is a tick for our list management, not a cross.

It is even more interesting when you look at other star mids: Martin - 52% Neale - 48% Pendlebury - 48% Tim Kelly - 46% Bontempelli - 44% Dangerfield - 43% Selwood - 40% Josh Kelly - 40% Yeo - 40% Cripps - 39% Wines - 39% Fyfe - 38% Boak - 37% Kennedy - 36% Cotchin - 24% So Viney at 46%, Petracca at 44% and Brayshaw at 43% actually stack up really well.

Seems like that's the option being considered: by luck, six sides play each other next week and again the week after, which allows next week's games to be swapped with the following week's games. Would mean we play Dogs next week and GC the week after. Problem with that is we'll be travelling twice in a row, if we play GC and then WC...

Jon Ralph now saying we'll be playing the Dogs next week: This makes sense because six sides play each other in Round 19 who then play each other in Round 20. In Round 19 there's Hawthorn v Brisbane, GC v Melbourne and WB v Adelaide. In Round 20 there's Brisbane v GC, Melbourne v WB and Adelaide v Hawthorn. So they can swap all three games and at least for another week no one's slate of opponents has to change. Of course, thinking further, if they want to keep our GC game in Darwin, they're shaping up to be sending us to Darwin in Round 20 and then Perth the following week in Round 21...

Lol. Rivers and Jackson have played every game when fit this year in the side sitting top of the ladder with a 13-1-3 record, and you've decided there's a problem that we might have made drafting errors?

We're almost certainly not playing this game in Darwin so any proposed changes based on the venue of the match are misguided IMO. There's also no guarantee we play GC at all next week. Meanwhile the pressure acts stat is revealing again. The top three on the ground were Hawthorn midfielders: Mitchell, Shiels and O'Meara. Our best: Viney 31, Petracca 30, ANB 27, Oliver 25 and Jordon 21. Forwards: ANB 27, Pickett 16, Brown 13, Fritsch 11, TMac 9, Jackson 8, Spargo 6. I'm confident the FD will keep giving ANB games when he rates highly in this stat. It's what he's in the team for. I'm also confident that Spargo's number is lower than the FD want. If we're going to play a forward who is a nice kick inside 50 but doesn't tackle (two tackles, none inside 50) and only gets 11 touches, I wonder whether Melksham can do a better job of that role?

It's quite easy to make a negative case for us when you assume every single competitor is going to win every single game on their respective runs home, except the one game you have to give someone a loss (Bulldogs v Port).

The draw is like a win when you compare us with the Dogs and Geelong: they both have better percentages than us so the draw does the same job as a win. But the draw is like a loss when you compare us with Brisbane, Port and Sydney, who all have lower percentages (particularly Port and Sydney, who are 8%+ behind us). The draw does nothing for us because we likely would be finishing above them on equal wins. We haven't played two top 8 sides in a row since Rounds 11-12. I'm not suggesting it's that simple, but our biggest flaw is our inability to switch on vs bottom 10 sides (and particularly bottom 4 sides). We won't have that issue in the finals.

The only result that could really impact us is if GWS beats Sydney.

Lol. Luke Shuey from Round 1 2018 - Round 6 2021 (which is as far as the data goes) - 43% goalkicking accuracy. Petracca over the same period - 44%. Viney over the same period - 46%. Brayshaw over the same period - 43%.

Compare that with our competitors: Bulldogs: 455 shots, 233-222, 51.20% Brisbane: 421 shots, 225-196, 53.44% Melbourne: 413 shots, 205-208, 49.64% Geelong: 396 shots, 213-183, 53.79% Port: 376 shots, 210-166, 55.85% Sydney: 375 shots, 203-172, 54.13% (game in hand) The Dogs are the only side in the top six who are close to us on accuracy, with everyone else over the 53% mark.

I can't access the paywall but Jon Ralph reporting that the Brisbane v Gold Coast game scheduled for Round 20 could be brought forward to Round 19. I don't know why, but if that is correct it obviously impacts us. Brisbane's Round 19 opponent is Hawthorn (at the G) so we can't just swap opponents with them, which means at least one other game will be impacted. North apparently is returning to Victoria but Essendon isn't, so you'd expect that means Essendon v GWS will proceed next week in Queensland. St Kilda is apparently already in Perth so that should mean West Coast v Perth proceeds. Right now our opponent for next week seems very unclear.

I think the prospect of us missing finals at 13-9 before tonight was very close to 0, given how flat the middle of the fixture is. The draw is better than a loss, clearly, and particularly given we're behind our two closest rivals on percentage. But it does little for us otherwise, bringing Port and (likely) Sydney a game closer to us in the run home.

What? You want us to be like Port? Downhill skiiers/flat-track bullies etc.? Like we were in 2018? Seriously, feel free to be disappointed with tonight, but FFS this is an unbelievable position to take.

Incorrect. Our results speak for themselves. You don't win every game you play to this point of the season against the top 8 by accident or a fluke. Everything else you've said describes our wins against the good sides perfectly. Good offence (e.g. sides like Bulldogs and Brisbane) can't beat good defence (us). Every time a top 8 side has thrown their best at us, we've countered it and won. The issue isn't whether we can win finals. We've shown we can. The issue is whether we are going to give ourselves the best shot at it, which starts with ladder position.

vandenBerg had three goal assists (or at least it looked that way) and that'll likely be enough to hold his spot, but he is a very vanilla footballer so I'm not sure that's a long-term fit for our best 22. Don't be fooled by Viney's 32 disposals, he's struggling to get involved in a positive way when we're going forward. There is merit to the calls to drop Jackson. He's very important structurally but the last few games he's struggled to get involved in the ways he was earlier in the season. ANB's playing mediocre football too but I suspect the defensive stats will keep him in the side.

The umpiring really killed us. Petty gets called for HTB in the fourth when he slips over with barely any prior. Hartigan then gets caught after taking a player on and drops it in our forward line, but doesn't get called. Brown gets called for the "hold" on McEvoy in the second. So many 50/50% calls went their way but then didn't go ours.

He had Jordon on short but did the team thing - he ate up more time, and then kicked long to the boundary. Problem was Hawthorn outworked our talls and brought the ball back through the centre. Wasn't Lever's fault. "Accurate"? You've got literally every single match prediction over the last month wrong.

This isn't about changes to personnel, it's about changes to attitude. We need to work out why we don't apply ourselves against bottom 10 sides the same way we do in prime time games against top 8 sides. In saying that, we need to think about Viney's role.