titan_uranus

It's not. He doesn't get sucked into the contest and helps stretch our opponents' defence both at stoppages and in general play by making sure he's wide enough to be useful without being too far away.

We almost certainly cannot afford Papley, in terms of picks or in terms of salary cap. He's been leading the Coleman medal despite being a small forward playing for a bottom 4 side. He is quality and it's highly likely another club will have more to offer him/Sydney.

We played at 7 different venues in our first 9 games, and with Cairns on the list, we will have played at 9 different venues, at least, in our 17 matches this season. St Kilda, by comparison? 5 venues so far, a 6th to come. Adelaide? 3 venues.

I think what was coming to mind was him reacting to beating us in Round 23 2017 to stop us making finals. Was it Howe, rather than Dunn, who had a crack about playing in front of empty stadiums or something like that?

It's so hard to say from watching on TV, but I'd pretty confidently bet that teams are zoning in a way to try cut out 45-degree kicks. It would align with what I'm seeing from us, with our players on the mark always wheeling around to the side to cut off the 45-degree kick and force the kicker to go down the line. I also wonder whether the predominant grounds teams are playing on this year (Optus, Adelaide, Metricon, the Gabba) are conducive to this or not (e.g. do they have wider/narrower wings?).

Don't go too overboard with Fremantle. They struggled to put Hawthorn away all night. Hawthorn are a bottom 4 side. I'm not suggesting we're a lock to beat anyone in our run home, but I'd continue to consider that Fremantle, away from Perth (and the crowd), will be a winnable game.

The criticism of drafting is nothing new on Demonland, it's just (thankfully) been less common the last few years. Criticising draft picks is usually done with hindsight: e.g. we stuffed up taking Scully because he left after two years, or we stuffed up taking Pickett because Georgiadis kicked some goals the other week. It's almost never done with foresight, or based on rational evidence available at the time of the decision. To the extent that posters subsequently criticise the pick, it's often because they had a subjective personal view of some other player they wanted us to pick, then see that player play well, and immediately say "I was right, we should have picked that other guy I wanted". Provided that the players we take are, with a body of evidence behind them, reasonably capable of being taken with the pick we use, and they fill some sort of need on our list, most of Taylor's job is too difficult to assess. He only gets them in the door. Goodwin, Mahony, Gawn, our players and our culture take over from there, and if we don't mentor, develop, train, lead and support those players as best we can, how can we then blame Taylor for bringing them in?

So that will be our 8th home game. In the final 4 rounds we'll have either one or no home games. Those final four opponents will be GWS, Essendon, Fremantle and Sydney. Essendon has already played all of them, GWS will have played all of them by the time we get there (assuming they stay in Perth and play Fremantle in Round 14) too. So we may not end up in a hub with those clubs all in one city together. We could therefore find ourselves moving around even more.

Tom Browne is genuinely a terrible journalist, just terrible.

Like you, I never really liked Dunn when he was here. Faux aggression, inconsistency, and a tendency to only play well in contract years. He's taken swipes at the club since then: might indicate his true feelings towards us, but I don't rate that sort of behaviour all the same. In response to those who suggest we made a mistake by trading him: you're wrong IMO. He was not fulfilling any sort of potential here. Plenty of players need a change of scenery to get the most out of themselves and Dunn was one of them.

I'm not sure 100% sure but I believe that Fremantle will play in Perth in Round 14, before going to Queensland to hub for the rest of the season. That should mean we don't play them in Perth, which might improve our chances of beating them.

Just because he played well in 2018 doesn't mean he's automatically going to play well again simply by starting some more bounces in the centre. Brayshaw has spent plenty of time running through the middle of the ground despite not starting in centre bounces. And he's struggled. The fact he was capable of doing it in 2018 doesn't mean he's going to get back to that level the moment he is put back in the centre, and one game vs North doesn't convince me of that. As I said, I want to see him do it against a stronger opposition before declaring that the only reason he's been so poor for 18 months is positioning. You might be right, and it might all be as simple as not playing him in the middle, but I don't accept that last night is proof of that given how bad North were.

If we're serious about playing finals and taking the next step, we need to win these next two games. But Collingwood's ceiling is above ours and they've gone deep into finals the last two years despite having long injury lists. The Dogs can play scintillating football, and their recent poor form will at least in part be because their last three matches have been vs Brisbane, Port and Richmond. Meanwhile we've taken until the fourth quarter to shake off 18th and 17th. The true test starts on Saturday. Knock of Collingwood and I'll be far more confident about our chances of picking up the 5-6 wins we need from here.

I'm really against these positional changes just for the sake of it. We're desperate for continuity and gelling as a team. Melksham, for his flaws, has been a constant part of our forward line, and clearly the FD and club rate his leadership. He's been scoring goals each week as well. Throwing him to half-back, when he hasn't been training or playing there for ages, is not something I see helping us. Ditto TMac to the wing: his mobility is shot. I agree that I'm sure there's more off-the-ball work he does that we can't see on TV, but we can already get a strong sense of it just by noticing how frequently he's in the back pocket/flank as an outlet, but also on the forward flank delivering inside. Gut running, always.

Classic OTT negative react, which says that drafting is lose/lose - either the pick is "obvious", or its a fail. FWIW, I agree with you that there's too much knee-jerk over-reacting to beating two appallingly bad sides, but this is too far the other way. I do love the old "where's @olisik gone" question after a win. Hasn't posted since prior to the Adelaide game (which feels like an eternity ago but was just 5 days back). His second-most recent post was in another Elegt/olisik circle-jerk thread, having a crack at Langdon. Lol.

We were a different side in 2018. TMac, Spargo, Harmes, Jetta, ANB, vandenBerg: we have plenty of players who have not recaptured their 2018 form. Brayshaw's another. Maybe it was the absence of Viney which was the catalyst, but it could equally be the opposition. As I said, we've got a stack of players who are not reaching their 2018 levels of output.

It's critical. When we're poor, and we see drop off in effort across the board, we see players not doing these things right, and it extends into not putting taller defenders on the mark for set shots and/or not having taller defenders on the goal line for set shots. They're all the sorts of things that the successful clubs are consistently better than us at.

@binman I don't want to turn this into another OMac vs Port analysis. I may have unfairly suggested that, had OMac done what Tomlinson did last night, you'd have defended him, whereas given it was Tomlinson you have attacked Tomlinson quite harshly. But your attack on Tomlinson felt pretty strong and I think isn't inscrutable. What we can agree on, I think, is this: whether it's Tomlinson, OMac or someone else, there is room for improvement in that third tall defender's role. This week vs Collingwood might not be the week to make a change, but we'll see soon enough.

Great thread. I feel as though I've noticed this year more teams leaving more players forward of the ball. Might be COVID/fitness related, but could equally be a tactical shift. Keep an extra player or two forward of the ball to ensure the opposition's zone has to stretch a little bit further. I wonder whether @deanox's observation from last night's game is part of that. It really does hinder our ability to appreciate the full extent of our improvement (or lack thereof) when we can only see what's shown on TV. @Axis of Bob makes a number of insightful comments about zone defence. This year, more than last, I've noticed our players when manning the mark move around to cut off the 45-degree inboard kick. We leave the boundary option open. Couple that with the increased chemistry between our defenders, and the improved confidence and form of May/Lever, and we start to see how and why defensive zones work. Risk taking is critical but when we're at our worst, we take poorly calculated risks at the wrong times: playing on when we shouldn't, going long when we shouldn't, etc.

My post wasn't designed to defend Tomlinson, it was an attempt to show how the "facts" can be spun in certain ways. IMO, your reading of that goal to Georgiadis where OMac leaves him to Lever is as favourable an interpretation of the situation, in OMac's favour, as possible. Fact? Maybe. Opinion? Certainly. To be clear, the first goal to Daw is as much Tomlinson's fault as Lever's, or anyone else's. Larkey's second was also substantially Tomlinson's problem, but again, I imagine you defending OMac in the same situation by saying we play a zone defence (see, eg, the Georgiadis goal) and arguing that there's nothing he can do from a quick kick inside 50 if no one's in front of Larkey to stop his lead. The first goal to Larkey, Tomlinson's free was pretty soft IMO, and I can't help but feel that if it was OMac, you'd have focused on the soft free and vandenBerg's subsequent stupidity to reduce the blame on OMac for that goal, but when it's someone else you focus on the free. Again: I disagreed with dropping OMac after the Port game and I'm not suggesting Tomlinson is doing any better in terms of one-on-ones or shutting down opponents.

I'm not sure we had the chance last night to see if Spargo had improved his strength (core or otherwise). He has agility, in the sense that he can (and does) move around the field well. His kicking clearly isn't at Daniel's level, nor does he have the pace of Pickett or McDonald-Tipungwuti. But I don't subscribe to the view that his height means that he has to be elite at something to make it. I saw enough last night, as well as in 2018, to believe that he has good enough kicking, good enough pace, and enough brains, to make it. I don't suggest it's a certainty though, just that it's a possibility. Our zone has been excellent, IMO, every week since the Carlton game with two exceptions: Richmond and Port. It's been a constant source of improvement, driven by May and Lever, and has held up well vs Geelong and Brisbane. Yes, part of it last night was North's poor kicking, but the poor kicking was often secondary to a poor choice they felt like they had to make because they couldn't find an option down the line or through our zone.

I agree with the general sentiment that this thread is a joke, and people who criticised the club for drafting Jackson or PIckett (or for the North pick swap) were wrong. But Demonland blows in the wind and if we lose to Collingwood, and/or to anyone else this year, and/or we don't make finals, the same arguments will be trotted back out.

You sound like old dee. Are you suggesting that if he was 7cm taller, with the otherwise precise same skill set, he'd be a better player? His strengths are in things for which his height is irrelevant: pressure and inside 50 link up play. He may not make it, but if he doesn't it won't be because of his height. I'm not entirely sure this was all on Goodwin. North tried, hard, to play keepings off in the first half. They were content to kick-mark a lot, rather than playing on and run/handballing. The lack of stoppages I think was also in part because North was failing to kill off many of our scoring chains which let us get inside 50 and generate shots on goal with ease.

Criminally underrated on here. Yes, he fumbles it. But his positioning on the wing and his exceptional gut-running mean he's routinely available to provide assistance in both defence and offence. He is so, so important. If he improves the fumbling and starts kicking goals, he becomes elite IMO.

I agree that Tomlinson looked better when he was higher up the ground. Our defence rests heavily on May and Lever working well together. I'm increasingly warming to the notion that the improvement we saw when OMac was brought back was coincidental, not causative, and that as May and Lever have gelled together and both lifted their games, we've done better. However, I think structurally we're better with a third defender playing the role OMac was playing. Right now, OMac's the best player on our list for that role. Tomlinson offers more in offence but that doesn't make sense for the role we're talking about. Smith is more athletic but again, that doesn't make sense for the role we're talking about (plus, unlike OMac and Tomlinson, Smith is untrustworthy). Maybe long-term Petty is this player. Until then, I still think structurally we never should have dropped OMac, but form-wise he wasn't offering much more than Tomlinson, and Tomlinson wasn't as bad as the goals in the first quarter suggested he might have been. If we persist with Tomlinson this week vs Collingwood, I will be very keen to see how the defence holds up in a significantly sterner test than Adelaide/North.