FlashInThePan

There are 3 strong factors in a forwards kicking goals (leaving aside their actual set shot accuracy). Leading patterns and making space (as beelzebub has so eloquently put it above) Getting the ball in quickly before the defence has setup their zone and effectively closed off leading lanes and basic 1 on 1's The last kick into the F50 - being well weighted ad strongly to the forward's favour Only one of them has anything to do with the actual forward themselves. Year on year we have been pretty woeful at the second 2 and have relied on winning contest, taking field position and weight of numbers of forward entries. When we had the defensive structure to back that up it went pretty okay but it never made our forwards look good. They were always working in crowded forward 50s with little space to work and, in general, fairly average delivery. Our execution of point 3 was not that great either and too many of our best midfielders had extremely low % effective kick. I don't think we know whether we have some gold in our forwards or not, so my sense is that the strategy is to fix 2 and 3 and spend a season assessing whether we have what we need up there. The OP may be right, we may desperately need a quality KPF, I just don't think we can know that right now. My gut feeling is that we will play Mihocek and at least one other KPF with this new game plan. Mihocek is a known quantity, if he is getting goals and others aren't, that tells us something. If no one is getting goals that tells us something else.

I am surprised Trac has such a high goal assist rating, and when I look at what just happened in the draft I see no surprises when you look at how Kingy wants to play the game (based on not just White's commentary but also Kingy's own pressers and statements). Trac, Viney and Oliver are 3 of the worst kicks in the league. I have loved their grunt and ability to extract the ball but when you look at kicking efficiency Trac - 48.7%, Viney - 50.5% and Oliver - just out of the bottom 100 in the entire league at 55% they are actually really bad. So, given the salary cap room Trac and Oliver take up, Kingy must have been rubbing his hands together that they wanted to leave. To play a game style like Geelong, you need to be able to intercept and you need to be able to kick. You can't spot up a target in the forward 50 if you can't hit the side of a barn, you either need a man mountain to target the ball somewhere near or get it in low and generate chaos at ground level. So, we are clearly going to sacrifice some of our clearance game for better ball use. This could also mean Viney moving to a forward pocket because as much as he is heart and soul, he is a shocking kick. He can tackle like an absolute machine though and strangely, he is also quite a good set shot. So, I am expecting that both selections in the draft have good kicking efficiency and I expect that we are going to need Lever, Disco, Petty (and mybe Maysie) to be at the top of their intercept game. I don't think the addition of Matt Scarlett is an accident either, defensive positioning for both intercept support and exiting the D50 in numbers will be critical. If we don't win a ton of clearance and we can't intercept effectively there won't be a lot of opportunity for fancy kicks into the F50.

I hesitate to put this out there because I'm advocating pushing out players that perhaps don't deserve it but here goes. I think our forward problems are mostly execution based and not structural. I think we have survived for too long with very decent role players. Further I get the feeling that Goody, on occasion, overvalues these people. So here is how I'd change it up: 1. ANB comes out and Chandler moves to play that role. He is not on ANB's level as a runner but he is pretty damn good and he has x-factor. He will have to work hard to cover the holes that ANB does but I think he can do it. 2. Bowie comes forward and takes Chandler's position. I think his defensive mindset and incredible field kicking would make a significant difference to our forward entries and F50 tackles 3. This one is very speculative: I would look at Smith as potentially taking a more pressure forward role, he has great speed and can defend well. He plays instead of Spargo and we bring in another tall such as BBB if/when ready I just want to acknowledge that both ANB and Spargo have been great role players, if not always consistent. I just think we need to look at significant personel changes to get a different outcome.

Does anyone remember an injury report saying that Clarry’s hamstring was 426?

Well… maybe if they are an AFLW player we could give them a pass

I can't find a link to it. It was on either first crack or AFL 360. He was making the point that TMac's injury coincided with demons drop in form.

Dare I say ‘correlation does not equal causation’? I’m sure everyone has heard all the banging on by King about how TMac’s injury in 2022 triggered the end of our winning streak and, seemingly, all our form problems thereafter.

We need to make the ground bigger to defend. They only had to clog up the left wing last year and we just kicked the ball high into their defensive press from the kick in. We need to use a combination of short kicks and then be unpredictable, take the 45 into the corridor or switch to the right hand wing to exit. This will force them to spread their zone and defend the whole ground. We know how to enter our forward 50 against these guys, just lower our eyes and look for the short kick or go long but ensure we halve the contest. The latter approach can work fine as long as our defensive press comes in right behind the kick. Someone has already mentioned a solution to the Max problem if we are going to go down the left wing but no amount of blocking is going to give us a mark or possession if 3/4 of their team is positioned between the middle of the ground and that left boundary line. They know exactly how that play is going to look, we have to force them to defend the whole ground.

I saw him cop one in ribs in a marking contest on half back. He could barely get up to take the kick. He played on but obviously in some distress.

That is roughly where I sit in m14. I find the same thing, certain parts of the game are super clear but I can only tell how our press is working by the way the other team moves the ball. I have to watch the replay afterwards to get some of the details. i never comment during a game and rarely straight after since it can look so different when you see more of the structure. I have been meaning to try and get a level 2 seat for a while, I’m feeling motivated to pull my finger out and try at the end of this season now.

I agree, I’ve watched a couple of GWS games and his body language is still that off a sulky teenager. He also has virtually no second efforts. Such a shame, he absolutely has the build and talent, just seems like he can’t get out of that unproductive headspace.

Haha, you have no hope of understanding it from a tweet and an only slightly better one of understanding it if you read the entire article very carefully. I'm not completely sure I have got it, but I'll have a shot. The threat seems to be referring to the likelihood of the kick generating a successful scoring chain. And the threat rating is how much more likely the person or team is to generate more scores than that type of kick would normally generate. Kicking down the line generates very few scores (I think in his example it was 1 in 10) so low threat but some kickers are able to generate successful scoring chains kicking down the line at twice or three times that amount so their threat rating is significantly higher. I've probably just confused you even more, sorry.

I think the experiment with the shorter defence was in response to the perception that other teams had worked out how to get through our defence last year by going low and flat or forcing May and Lever to be accountable to their direct opponent and reduce their ability to peel off and intercept. We have never been as good at defending ground ball as we are defending in the air. I think they were trying to tidy that up but unfortunately, in doing so we seem to have damaged our intercept game without getting an equal payback on the ground ball. This experiment is asking our defence a slightly different version of the question we asked of our midfield 2 years earlier. If you are -1 one in the air, can you still intercept effectively? If the answer was yes then we can experiment freely with ground ball players to tidy up the stoppage goals and chaos balls. Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is ‘no’. What we could really use is someone around 192cm who is super clean below their knees and a great user of the ball. I don’t follow Casey as much as I should, is this maybe what they are grooming Howes for?

Thanks AF, I couldn't see it in the replay but then the shots are often so tight that you can't see the big picture. I'll keep an eye out live.

In the Carlton postgame thread someone mentioned that they thought the team had moved to a combination of man on man and zone defence (depending on distance from d50 I think). I hadn't noticed this, I went back and watched the replay and it still looks like a straight zone to me with a strong emphasis on keeping the ball out of the corridor. Are others seeing a change?

I’m not 100% certain what you are asking here but Richmond credit a significant part of the 2017 turn around to their mindfulness coach Emma Murray. She talks strongly about working with the players about changing their mindset.

Dude, you are clearly one of the mindless whiners that spend their time clogging up this forum with your complaints and criticisms. Obviously you don’t like being called on your pointless complaining so now you want to go on the offensive to insult people and try to make yourself feel okay about constantly whining and criticising. Go ahead, Jump on that keyboard and be a warrior

There are so many threads for indulging in opinion based (generally inaccurate) bagging of players. This is the one place I can come to just talk about strategy and observations on trends people have noticed and things we might try. I know I'm not a mod, I don't have any authority but, couldn't you please just take this to gameday or postgame? I promise there are tons of people who will join in a pile on with you there

I really don't think the problem is that complicated. Historically our DNA is stoppage and contest, we have played predictably up the left wing for a number of years, counting on Gawn to mark or bring the ball to ground. We let the opposition make the ground small and congest it and count on our contest and defensive structure to either win it at the source or win it back on exit. Last year and now this year teams setup well to counter that, bringing extra numbers to the contest (they know exactly where it is going to be) and chaining the ball out via handball until they can get a controlled pass. At the beginning of the year it looked like we had solved for that, mixing in less predictable exit strategies from the D50 and using lateral and 45 kicks to spread the ground and force teams to defend more of it. This opened up fast play opportunities and that is what gave us the scoring dominance. My gut feeling is that this play style is not yet fully embedded and under pressure we are reverting to what we know. I suspect that our stoppage numbers are not actually the real problem. The problem is that we are making the ground too small and that means that teams can more easily bring extra numbers to the stoppage because even if they lose, they know where the ball is going. Clearly there is a lot of supposition and opinion in the above, make of it what you will.

I actually don’t think our problem is as unfixable as some seem to think. We were on the right track early in the year and in the games we have lost we have totally reverted to type. We need to get back to making the ground bigger to stretch team’s defences. Predictably coming down the left wing with a big bomb allows teams to setup for the spill and crumb. Everyone knows we will do it, so they only need to defend half the ground. We have gone back to a down the line, handball heavy game which increases pressure on the ball carrier, which reduces disposal efficiency. Earlier in the year and preseason we were taking the 45 kick and opening up the ground. This created faster, more accurate ball movement which increases the likelihood of getting an effective entry to your forward 50. Yesterday, we had maybe 2 exits to the right hand wing, both resulted in deep forward 50 entries. Jesus, we have 2 200+cm guys on the ground and could have 3 if we added BBB, we can make our exit from D50 much less predictable and force teams to defend the whole ground. We also need to go back to taking the corridor or 45 degree kick to spread their defence more. The way we are playing right now only works if we are dominating clearance and for more than one reason, we are not.

I’m nearly there, plenty of dees fans on my train too

It is a really sad day for all people with an IQ over 60 when someone can post a thread with the title 'Robbo is right on the money'. The guy is an absolute numbskull, mumbling and bumbling through AFL360 with Gerard holding his hand and leading out of the minefields he creates for himself with his random, and mostly completely idiotic, utterances. This whole contender / pretender thing is just a media construct to garner clicks and is such a facile way to look at the game. You're a contender if you are half decent and have a big and active enough following to sell clicks/papers. Hence whenever Collingwood or Richmond are even half a chance, they are contenders. For the rest of us, you have to force your way into that conversation and if you drop anything, you become a pretender so that the big club supporters can feel better about themselves. We are a great team, even though it sometimes seems like half our own supporters would rather tear us down than build us up. We are trying a bunch of new stuff to try and get better and we have down games and injuries sometimes. The sum of us won't be known until near the end of the season, or hopefully the last game of the year. If you want to fall back to the contender/pretender paradigm then think about this. If we aren't a contender, I don't know who is. That doesn't mean we are going to have perfect season or win the flag, but if we aren't counted with those in the running then there is something seriously wrong.

I think this is probably right but I just wouldn’t couch it negatively. He was there to drive this group to success, he knew he wasn’t the guy to see through a rebuild. When it was clear that this was what was going to have to happen, he handed over the reigns. No point in him starting a rebuild that he won’t see through. I’m guessing a big part of him thought they could have one last big dance but the writing is now clearly on the wall.

I think we have probably revised down the meaning of the win against Swans (even though they had far fewer injuries back then) in the light of their recent performances. They have still historically been a bugbear team for us so I was happy to see our change in strategy being effective against them. i suspect over the coming weeks we will likely revise up the meaning of the gold coast win, that contest was red hot and I suspect they are going to take some decent scalps this year. I’m happy to discount the games against the clubs competing for Harley Reid. I did really rate our pressure game in the first quarter against the hawks though. Mostly because I suspect that is going to be the key to dealing with Collingwood when the time comes.

I’m guessing that is a polite way of saying someone stepped on his toe?