Watson11

Re 3 talls, I think Salem makes a huge difference to our ability to play 3 talls. He will take a while to get his touch back, but I watched him closely last week and his positioning is just elite. Whether it’s pushing up towards stoppages to stop the out the front exits from the opposition, or just being in an annoying position to mop up the scrubby kicks forward, he puts himself in positions that bring our interceptors into play. The last 2 weeks have been our statistically best defensive efforts this year, and Salem is a key reason (along with evening up the stoppage numbers since Clarry went down).

Can’t see Port winning it. Ranked 18th for one on one defending (36% loss ratio). Has any team that [censored] at defending ever won it?

It’s also much harder to win 10 of your last 11 h&a games. Has only been done 8x in 20 years. Of these, 5 went on to be premiers.

It’s hard to get to 10w after 11 rounds so full credit to Collingwood, but it’s not that uncommon. Has been done 15x over the last 20 seasons. 6 went on to be premiers. So more than likely pies won’t be premiers.

Your sport psych colleague didn’t suggest a team dinner and few wines at Entrocote did he/she?

@binman I read you entire post twice but didn’t actually find where you said what your hypothesis actually is. Or is that episode 2?

In a parallel universe the hawks, west coast, and north would get booted out of the comp and all scores against them annulled, Carlton would therefore be last, and we would be the number 2 ranked offensive team behind Brisbane.

I agree. It worked great in 2017-2021 but things have moved on. Teams have adapted. I really dislike -1 or -2 at stoppages. Collingwood in particular are sometimes pushing +2 to stoppages. Watch what they are doing as you will find they don’t dump kick out of clearances and are using the extra numbers to get spread, space and kicking to advantage rendering the +1 behind the ball redundant. Their forwards are going pretty well despite being on paper a mediocre group and often outnumbered, but Collingwoods run from stoppage and turnover is creating chaos that helps the forwards. I’d like to see us keep even numbers or +1 stoppages, even when Clarry returns. If we want to win post clearance possessions then we should back Tracc, Clarry etc to win good clearance quality and kick to advantage. We should also back our defenders to intercept when we lose clearance. Our defenders have the best 1 on 1 percentage in the league so we really don’t need a spare. Better to keep the pressure upfield as high as possible. And our f50 pressure needs to go back to 2021 levels. Remember when we would make sure there were no easy kicks in our f50 and Kossie was a menace. We have just given up on that in the last year. Its not too much to ask is it?

Lists get overrated when teams play well and underrated when they don’t. If you look at what the entirety of media analysts thought of our list and Collingwood’s 12 weeks ago, then 46 of them tipped us as premiers and 0 tipped Collingwood (26 went Brisbane, 23 went Geelong, 3 went Sydney). I’d say our list is good enough.

i missed the game and after reading this thread you would have thought we were playing witches hats and have no talent at all. I watched it today and Freo really need some credit as they played a finals brand and we almost never had any space. Yes a lot of skill errors on both sides, but mostly under huge pressure. I don’t know what the pressure ratings were for the entire game but half way through the last we were at 237 and Freo about 215. Both are off the charts (AFL average is 180). No teams deal with pressure well. Either one team drops the ball and gets run over, or the games turn into a scrap (like this game). Replay that game 10x and I think we win it 8x and if either we or Freo bring that pressure into every game from now on then both will be top 4 at seasons end.

Personally, I would rather see us bring the finals like pressure against every top 8 team and contender. I’ll accept 15-20 point wins against North/Hawks/WCE as compensation.

It’s thanks to @WheeloRatingswebsite. It’s simply calculated by how often the opposition has a shot on goal after getting it inside 50. If you are not good at this the chance of winning 3 finals in a row is pretty low. We have dropped a lot since 2021 where we had the best record since champion data started keeping stats. It’s a good question as to why we have dropped off so much. As you point out our defenders are ranked quite high for tackling and ground balls gets. I think our pressure upfield has dropped too much. Our ranking for stopping opposition marks i50 is also #8 which implies its upfield pressure as well.

Points against is not the best way to track the defensive side (if that’s what you used). If you look at recent history how well you defend i50s is one of the best measures of potential premiers. I’ve done a quick check and of the last 14 grand finalists 10 were ranked top 3 in this stat, and only one outside top 5 (Sydney last year - did not turn out well). This year so far we are ranked 8th (Collingwood are 10th), and we have had the benefit of playing the bottom 3. There is still a lot of the season left to play, but we just have to start getting better at defending i50s. I think it’s mostly our pressure and structures upfield that are the problem. Hopefully it can get sorted.

I think Max and Grundy can’t win with our stoppage setup even with Clarry. It cost us 2 direct goals that I saw. It should be a strength but is a weakness and too many clearances against us this year are just the opposition running away easily. After your post re we had this tactic in 2021, I used it as an excuse to watch the 2021 PF and GF again (any excuse right). I only found a couple of stoppages in the PF where we were -1, and none in the GF (we were +1 in a quite a few). I’m fine with tweaks but concerned that Goody gets fixated on his ideas and sticks with them for 2 years.

Is it just me or do others think Friday was an inept coaching performance. I get all the commentary in this thread about having one less at a stoppage and relying on intercept, but wouldn’t you think that in Fridays conditions it was a night for territory. But no, Goody stuck with -1 at stoppage and it was so frustrating. We lost non centre clearances 30-20. It’s why i50s were 61-48 and that was the game (imagine the commentary on here if Ports 32 shots on goal ended up as 18 goals). The problem is apparent in 2 stoppages in the last 4 minutes. In the first on our 50m arc, Port have a spare which I can live with But the ball goes down the other end, and Port have a stoppage on their 50m arc, shown. We had even numbers and put someone goal side which makes sense. But we leave Port with a spare on the other side. Max can’t safely tap goal side so all night he tapped forward or more often straight to Ports spare. It’s just insanity. They had several shots on goal or goal assists from these types of stoppages. It make no sense why Goody would not push an extra to the stoppage like Port do, as Gawns tap is never going back toward goal so we are effectively outnumbered every time. This happened all night and imo cost us the game. We need to beat Collingwood this year who will be +2 at stoppages.

For those that have the Pies pencilled in as premiers, no premier in about 20 years has been outside the top 6 at defending inside 50s.

The pies are where they are because their mids are having a great season. They are 7-1 just through inside 50 weight of numbers (they are #1 by a lot) but the numbers tell you their forward line and defence are both 6-12 rankings. I can’t see them winning 3 finals with their forward line and defensive issues. A lot can change between now and finals but the talk around them is ridiculous and is hyped because the media know they have a huge supporter base and will get lots of clicks by hyping them up. Right now, in my opinion, Brisbane should be the premiership favourites.

Our lowest contested possession count in a half for over 3 years. Hmm. Can’t believe its less than Port 2020 but there you go.

It is just a proxy. I think it equates more closely to total power output than anything else. High speed is >18km/hr. Burgo confirmed that last year against GC we were off the charts for total output (20% higher than any other game) and this data supports that. Sorry but I didn’t grab opponents numbers. It’s too time consuming, but you are probably right. Wet conditions will result in less running for both teams.

The AFL puts the gps data out on their website under the Tracker for each game.

I posted the GPS numbers on another thread. They are posted here for your convenience. The graph has high speed distance in km per game., We did not drop off at all in 2021 (in fact improved slightly). But this year was not good.

I accept and most accept we were really poor. Goody wouldn’t say why anyway so not sure his statement means anything. The facts are our running dropped by around 10% on average per game after round 10. I haven’t broken it down by qtrs but I bet it was all in second halves. If so, we were down by around 20% in second halves of games after round 11, compared to round 1-10 and 2021, which is a huge drop off. Who knows why. Maybe players with crook knees/ankles/feet just don’t run as well. Maybe they couldn’t train and lost fitness. Maybe it’s overtraining or something else. But the reality is after round 11 we were not even top 8 standard in our results and we were probably bottom 4 in running.

The contrast between Geelong and us this year is pretty stark. Scott was clearly on the same page as his head of fitness and medical staff (very experienced head doctor) when they pulled Max Holmes before the gf, but more impressive and a bigger contrast to us was sending Danger for a long rehab after round 10 (they were 6-4). On 25 May the comments were “Geelong coach Chris Scott said the decision may cost Geelong in the short term, but he’d reached the point where he wanted Dangerfield at his best, not merely struggling through games due to injury. "When I reflect over the last couple of years, we just haven't had him firing towards the end of the season," Scott said. If only Goody had applied that to the 9 players on our list that struggled through games due to injury from as early as round 1.

Key graph is reposted here showing how our running fell away this year >10% less in the second half of the year.

Enjoyed the podcast when finally getting a chance to listen this morning. @binman wondered what our record against top 6 teams away from the G was. It's 13W-13L, but you should fact check 🙂 Also, at the G over the same period Hawthorn are 10W-1D-11L and Collingwood are surprisingly not much better than us at 8W-1D-18L. I didn't bother to check Richmond as we know it would be ridiculously good.