titan_uranus

If he doesn’t go on big coin there’s every chance we don’t get anything.

He has a premiership medal for being the sub in the GF. He may not have got on the ground but it could have been far worse (see, eg, McStay, Adams and Noble this year, or Rich and Gardiner/Payne for Brisbane).

I get the sentiment but as @Axis of Bob says, some of the needs on our list are very unlikely going to be filled by elite kicks. That's largely because, as much as we need better kicking, the competition isn't flush with elite kicks and certainly not in the ruck or key forward positions. If Naughton were available he'd make us significantly better instantly, and that's assuming his kicking for goal remains as it is now.

Well on this front we are 2nd best in the league (took this from the Useless AFL States page):

Bengals, Steelers, Chiefs

Sorry if this is too late - Bills, Eagles, Cowboys (like many others!)

Or perhaps Gawn’s palm on the line… Or the ARC overturning the ANB goal… Or Melksham’s ACL… Or our own inability to kick easy shots on goal…

Agreed. They are under enormous pressure and don’t currently look like they can cope with it. We were always going to be in with a shot if we’d made it. A genuine shot at the flag was thrown away in the 90 second disaster last week.

Yeah, it sucks, but don’t give me umpiring. There were a handful of blatant Collingwood frees that weren’t paid late (the Moore high and the HTB on Idun were horrendous misses). If GWS got shafted it was by having to have a 6 day break into this game. There’s no need to ensure the top side gets 8 days into the GF. 7 is enough. But the drop from 7 to 6 is more severe and GWS shouldn’t have had to deal with that. But in the end, Collingwood have been the best side for the majority of the year, so it’s no real surprise or shame that they’re in the GF.

It’s hitting hard today. It’s prelim weekend, there are Collingwood scarves on the train I’m on, but when I opened Demonland I started with the drafting and trading board.

Want to find this and share it? I was at the ground and what they showed on the screen at the time suggested his fingers touched it.

I'm sure it's been discussed somewhere already but as expected, the behind the goals vision of the last play from the Lever mark to the Acres goal shows how terrible we were as an entire team (i.e. not just Viney's poor kick). Rivers is briefly open wide but once he's shut down (Lever rightly taking a bit of time to assess his options), there is no movement short, not a single player tries to get open. We are just waiting for him to dump it long. Despite that, once he does dump it long (and you can see he looks frustrated with his kick for going too far inboard), the defenders don't reset. They ball watch. We also have way too many players up the ground and nowhere near enough in the D50. The switch occurs, and we're light on numbers who are then completely outworked to free up the Acres space. It's tough to break down one play in the final 90 seconds of a very intense game but we should have been better than this. https://www.afl.com.au/video/1034289/trsf-dees-collapse-opens-acres-door-giant-killers-do-it-again?videoId=1034289&modal=true&type=video&publishFrom=1694873897001&tagNames=AppNewsFeed:Yes

You may notice I didn't say that. I said the absence of Petty, Melksham and JVR made our chances worse, on the back of Fritsch, TMac and Brown missing months of football (and in Brown's case, never getting back). I've posted elsewhere that there are multiple issues which contributed to our loss last night and our season ending the way it did. Injuries were one of them. I don't really think there's much of an argument to the contrary.

I'm proud to say I picked the GWS renaissance before we played them in Round 15 or whenever it was. However at quarter time of Carlton v GC at the MCG in June, I thought Carlton were more likely to finish bottom 4 and sack Voss than get anywhere near this far.

They can't kick them directly in front but Riccardi nails one from the boundary 40 out. Love to see it. Keeps the GWS v Brisbane GF dream alive!

Mate, I get it, it's disappointing, but we have an elite player who is in the conversation for the competition's best player and is a genuine chance to win the Brownlow, we had a third straight H&A season with 16+ wins and a top 4 ladder finish, we got to watch us play two finals in front of 90,000+ fans, we hopefully found a new forward in Petty, we saw Joel Smith get his body right and finally get a prolonged crack at AFL level, we saw Melksham rejuvenate his career, we saw Viney put together probably his best season of his career, and we saw Rivers take major steps towards becoming an A-grader. One of the reasons you're so upset with the finals loss is because of all these other positives. If we didn't have the other positives, we wouldn't have been playing last night and/or it wouldn't hurt.

GWS should be 50+ points up, not 19. Bedford's miss from 10m out directly in front means he'd slot straight back into our side pretty seamlessly.

If "really controlled the game and should've been up by far more at halftime" was a thing, we'd be premiers. We were good vs Port. Not great, but good. We certainly weren't comprehensively beaten. I don't think that game goes in the same bucket as Brisbane, Essendon or Geelong.

Watching GWS play strongly here against Port (although they are doing a Melbourne having kicked 2.10 from their last 12 shots to take what should be a 60 point lead and turn it into a 20 point lead) reminds me of a thought I had at some point when I wasn't sleeping last night. The AFL competition has never been more even. We know this because 14-odd sides were in finals contention until the last month of the season, with plenty of upsets, no utterly dominant H&A side, and plenty of changes to the top 8 make-up all year. This is, of course, what we want, with equalisation measures designed to ensure as many of the 18 clubs in any given season can compete. That means the gap between the top 4 and 5-8 should be as close now as it's ever been. Doesn't mean it's OK to go 0-2 in finals, but as every year goes by, these semi finals of 4v5 or 3v6 are going to become increasingly more even, because the gap between those sides is going to be increasingly smaller. Just something to say back to all the flak we're going to cop from people with the whole "double straight sets" stuff.

IMO we were only properly beaten three times - Brisbane Round 2, Essendon and Geelong. Port we were a kick from winning late. Fremantle was 7 points and felt far more even than the other three, but just a game were we didn't do enough for long enough. This is somewhat like 2022, where we led in every single game by at least 10 points and IIRC we led all bar one or two games by 20+ points. You can honestly count on one hand the number of games we're been comprehensively beaten since Round 1, 2021. A 3-4 record in finals for all that doesn't sit well.

No issue with your views on goal-kicking. But just because West Coast in 2018 won the flag without Naitanui, Gaff and Sheppard doesn't mean every club with injuries should be able to win the flag forever more. A key difference between their three injuries and ours was that ours all impacted the same end of the ground, which happened to be our weakest part of the ground in the first place. I know in times of disappointment/anger, many don't like hearing about injuries (or luck, or umpiring, or these sorts of things) but they all played a role. There can't be any doubt that losing Petty, Melksham and JVR (the latter through his own clumsy fault) in a season where TMac, Brown and Fritsch had all spent months out with injury made our chances worse.

The kick was poor but so unfair to blame the loss on Viney. Lever has the ball on half-back and can’t find a target. That’s on him and the rest for not making an option. The next contest had a bunch of 50/50 moments that could have gone either way but we still ended up with Viney who, yes, panicked and turned it over. But despite Weitering playing on quickly, somehow we were outnumbered in our D50. In the 20 seconds it takes them to switch and go deep, the only player within cooee of Acres is Fritsch. The back half structure from the time of the Lever kick was appalling.

Based on their careers, sure. But based on the first three quarters last night, Schache.

Some won’t like it but one thing we need more of is luck - the Petty and Melksham injuries were devastating for our season. As for things in our control: 1. Rivers to the midfield 2. Another wing to put selection pressure on Langdon and Hunter 3. A tall forward who can lead at the ball carrier and kick straight 4. A re-think of the way we move the ball in order to generate easier shots on goal given our personnel 5. More Woewodin, Laurie, and other new faces 6. And we need to work on how we start quarters. We give up the first 1-3 goals of quarters too much (tonight they scored first in each of the second, third and fourth. Last week Coll scored first in the first, second and third - same as Sydney the week before).

The string of deliberates was insane. Saad’s was blatantly deliberate. We copped the raw end of the umpiring stick all night. Add it to the list of what went wrong.