titan_uranus

Someone's got to do it.

How about Tom Browne's "article": https://7news.com.au/sport/afl/toms-take-another-setback-adds-to-demons-800000-steven-may-debacle-c-77542 He says Goodwin, in his presser last night, confirmed what Tom said on Monday about May's injury setback. Except, of course, Tom said on Easter Monday that May's not going to be back until July. Which is not what Goodwin said (Goodwin said 4-5 weeks from now, which puts us at late-May/early-June), nor is what the club said this week. So he takes what he can get from Goodwin and tries to pat himself on the back. A word starting with f and ending with log comes to mind. Meanwhile there are three different spellings of Weideman's surname in the one article.

Lance Franklin. Chris Judd. Gary Ablett. Dayne Beams. Patrick Dangerfield. Like the vast majority of what you post on here, this is just completely wrong. I hope people read this post 100 times. How about Marty Hore? Meanwhile who is Essendon's emerging new player? Or Collingwood's? So highly touted that all 18 clubs decided not to draft him, twice? Utter tripe. More tripe. What "supporting" are you doing if you don't go to games and just come on here bagging the players? If you don't want to spend your money or time supporting us, fine. Maybe don't spend your time posting on here then. No they don't. Collingwood won last year by 49 points in a non-contest.

I will say this - we’re a better chance of turning things around by focusing on defence first and trying to add attack, rather than the other way around. And I thought Hore was great again and is showing signs of a positive future.

We asked Goodwin to make positional changes. He did. We asked him to loosen the aggressive nature of our forward press. He did. But we still stank. To me, tonight was proof that our fitness levels are deplorable. We were out on out feet in the third. They ran us off our legs. Our fitness issues must surely run deeper like Roos has suggested. The effort was there, the attempts to spread and run two ways were there in the first half, but as we tired in the third quarter we fell apart. Combining our lack of fitness with repeat turnovers leads to no confidence and it just spirals from there. I reckon Viney turned literally every one of his kicks over. He isn’t learning from previous mistakes and he’s trying to will himself into form by breaking tackles, but failing. Hibberd’s defensive job on Dusty was impressive but I think he also turned all of his kicks over. Our forward line is a shambles. We have no one leading at the ball carrier, which contributes to the turnovers. We have no one who can take a contested mark. We tried to bring forward pressure but ANB, Garlett and Hunt failed. Weideman is hopelessly out of form. Petracca was terrible. Tim Smith is a VFL player. We won’t get anywhere until we get 22 fit players, some forwards who lead at the ball and hold their marks, and we start lowering our eyes and hitting targets.

We’re much better than last week in most areas but our skills are too bad for us to keep in this game. That’s partly due to Richmond’s elite pressure but also because we’re just butchering it. The defensive structure is better, the positional changes Goodwin made are largely working and we have a better hunger and work rate, all of which are positives. But if we keep turning it over at half forward Richmond will eventually make us pay.

I like it. As recently as Round 2 last year, Collingwood supporters were calling for Buckley's head. Each year under him before last year they had finished lower on the ladder than the year prior, and they opened with two limp losses to Hawthorn and GWS. Only from Round 3 last year onwards has Buckley begun to demonstrate that he actually knows what he's doing (and now he's generally regarded as an astute coach and a good leader). You can add John Longmire to your list (took over a strong team, got a flag early, but no flag now for 7 years and a list which looks ready to fall off a cliff). In the cases of Buckley and Hardwick, this only became true once they won a flag (Hardwick) or made the GF (Buckley). Hindsight reasoning at its finest. In saying that, I agree with you that on current evidence Goodwin's game-day coaching is not great. I don't think we've seen much of Goodwin making changes on the fly or adapting to problems within games. His big go-to move is to drop a number behind the ball, but he only ever does this after our opponent has scored 4-5+ goals in a row. I've never been a fan and I don't understand why he keeps doing it. I had thought this prior to the St Kilda game as well, that we might drop a player or two to ensure they were able to come back for the Richmond game. Whatever the reasoning is, I hope Stretch plays well, or at the very least plays well enough that we don't immediately drop him back to Casey.

Classic you, SWYL. In a thread designed for some optimistic happiness, you've managed to find a pessimistic take regardless.

Looking forward to you quoting this in the post-game thread. (i.e. I agree with you). My biggest hopes for tonight are that we see significantly better forward pressure (in that regard, I hope the additions of Garlett and possibly Lockhart to the forward line help) and two-way running (ANB and Stretch, if nothing else, should at least be able to run and chase all night). I wouldn't mind seeing a relaxing of the forward press, too, but baby steps.

More classic Demonland. People complain about the performance of the side, so we make changes and then people complain about uninspiring changes. For mine, I'm happy to see some fresh and faster legs in Garlett, Lockhart and Stretch. T Smith for Preuss is a downgrade, unfortunately, and I'm not a fan of bringing ANB back this soon, but it's not like we're loaded with other options. I think that game with Tim Smith's injury was the year prior, not last year? I'm also not sure whether the Lynch/Riewoldt thing is as bad as it has looked but fingers crossed it messes up this weekend! Frost will surely play on Lynch? Still, leaves Hibberd to play on Riewoldt. No one else in the side to do it I don't think...except TMac.

This is fair, and there is a significant degree of stubbornness attached to Goodwin and his public comments about our form. But I think it's hard to expect too much strategic discussion to be exposed publicly. Like, I'm not sure how many coaches come out and say things like "opposition sides are doing X to us and it's working". What I'm trying to say is that whilst all we seem to hear from Goodwin is a focus on our poor form, that doesn't necessarily mean we don't consider what our opponents are doing to us to cause that poor form. We just might not talk about it publicly. Of course, if we are looking at what our opponents are doing to us and we're still not improving, that's in some respects worse.

I can't believe you'd consider dropping Hore, he was one of our best against St Kilda. Good comments otherwise. As poorly as Hibberd and Fritsch are playing, I think we're better off at the moment in seeing if we can get form out of them in the AFL rather than subbing in more VFL-level players for them. That might not remain the case if they don't pick up form soon, though. Agree with this. The Sydney game is a good example. We were much better at defending the ground at the SCG and that put significantly higher amounts of pressure on Sydney. They weren't getting easy out the back marks and goals. Franklin only kicked 1 and whilst he had a few more shots, they were from 50 or on an angle (i.e. weren't all simple shots like most of St Kilda's were). Pretty much every one of your comments on Weideman for the entirety of his career to date has been that he's not good enough and/or won't ever be good enough, but suddenly now he might actually be OK and it's the club's fault?

The Roos quotes about more players than just May coming back unfit are concerning IMO. I might be wrong about this, but I would assume Roos still has connections within the club. He may well know more than is public knowledge.

That last sentence is a neat summary of everything that is wrong with Demonland. A trade is the "worst trade ever" unless it turns out to not be.

I'm extremely interested in two things: Selection. Do we persist with all of Jones, Lewis, TMac and Hibberd (being the four leaders/senior players who are struggling) or do we rest/drop one or more of them to change things up? And will we finally see Garlett? Our set up on the night. Will we see Jones/Lewis, if they play, on the wings? And will we see the aggressive forward half press, or a refined version of that?

You're doing it again, dazzle. You were completely in favour of bringing May to the club. You also posted a link to an article about May's character and what a great person he is. You can express disappointment/frustration at the way May showed up at the club, or the way the club dealt with his fitness since then, but don't make it sound like the deal was a shocker from the get go because it wasn't, and you certainly didn't think so at the time.

I love Jetta as I think/hope most of us on here do. But he's been so poor in the games he's played this year that the loss to us of him going out is negligible. So I agree with you that this is at least a chance to see who else on the list can play on mid/small forwards and aspire to play the role Jetta's been struggling to achieve in 2019. Fingers crossed Jetta comes back post-bye in good health and can make an impact in the second half of the season.

I don't think the truth matters anymore. I think the concept that Goodwin never reviewed the prelim is just going to become Demonland folklore, no matter what happens from here.

Jetta comes out which means maybe J Wagner stays in or Lewis takes Jetta's spot in the back six.

https://www.melbournefc.com.au/news/2019-04-22/jetta-set-for-surgery Article says it's a separate injury to the one he was originally out with. Cue anti-Misson posts.

Trying to get a sense of how Hawthorn and Geelong set up defensively from kick ins. Looks to me like Hawthorn are playing something closer to man-on-man? It certainly seems like their last line of defence isn't pushed up as far as ours usually is (but it's admittedly very hard to tell from TV).

Agreed. May and Lever would (hopefully) help strengthen the back six but if they're being told to press up and zone off the same way OMac, Frost and Hibberd are, then we're going to have the same problems.

Interesting stats posted on the AFL website in an article having a significant crack at us. https://www.afl.com.au/news/2019-04-22/stats-files-whos-become-the-poster-boy-for-dees-plight Most interesting to me is the CP differential statistic. We were +17.7 in 2018 for CPs (i.e. we averaged 17.7 more CPs then our opposition). This year we are -1.6. Our "one wood" is to dominate CPs, get first touch on the ball and bully our opposition's midfield. When we do that, we get confidence, our opposition's midfield has less impact, and I reckon we find ourselves converting more inside 50s (last year we scored from 46.4% of our inside 50s, that figure is down to 33.7% this year). We've built our list, and moulded our gameplan, around a starting fundamental of dominating CPs. We're not doing that this year and IMO many of the rest of our problems stem from this.

It's certainly true that our gameplan took us to those two resounding finals wins on the G, plus the Round 23 demolition of GWS too. But when we struggled last year there were "regular" kick ins and we were able to run one off the back of the square. Taking those away from us is not, I don't think, the reason why we're struggling with the plan this year. My view is that the style we play has always been high risk high reward, and requires a high level of intensity from all 18 on the field (but particularly the forwards and mids). When our intensity is even slightly off, we concede strings of goals, waste inside 50s, and get beaten soundly by whoever we're playing (whether Richmond/Hawthorn/Collingwood/Sydney, like last year, or St Kilda, like both last year and this year). What I'm not sure about is whether we need to: Change the plan altogether (i.e. stop using the aggressive high forward press); Make small tweaks to it; or Persist with it and back the players in to improve. The messaging from Goodwin post-match was that option 3 is the way we are going, and that is in line with the general way I believe he approaches coaching (which can appear overly stubborn at times). I'm not against this. I'd like to see the zone set up be less aggressive, for starters. I also want to see 2-3 forwards staying deep when there are stoppages at centre wing or half-back (too regularly we see our deepest forward at a high half-forward, too close to the stoppage to offer a lead at the ball carrier).

I think it's both, tbh. Our high forward press means that we're asking our mids/half forwards to work magic when there's 36 players in the forward half. It also requires our backs to be able to cover the entire back half of the ground when the opposition does eventually break through.