Watson11

I’d be testing Goodys food. He enjoys dodgy fish around finals time and needs to learn to fully cook his chicken. Did he have Hibbo over for a meal!

@binman you need to have a serious word to your mate. Anyone that supports Collingwood/Carlton/Essendon/Richmond etc over any team is NQR. I spent 8 years in Sydney back in the 90’s and became a member to get my live footy fix. The majority of members seemed to be from Vic, SA, and WA and adopted Sydney as a second team. Probably the most reasonable group of afl fans in history as we just went for fun and none of us were fully vested (unless our teams were playing). Maybe things have changed. For all AFL clubs it’s the 1% of bad supporters that give the other 99% a bad name. The exceptions of course are Collingwood/Carlton/Essendon/Richmond/West Coast where 99% give the other 1% a bad name.

I agree 100% with you. We could probably have a far more accurate correlation of metres gained to the weather than we could to fitness.

SEN must have invented the top 30 over 30 just for Geelong? Top 30 Over 30 Only 6 from Geelong made it. Stanley, Zach Tuohy, Ceglar, Rohan, Menegola, Cam Guthrie, and Dahlhaus would be gutted to miss out.

It was reported on afl.com.au he has returned to play with the metal plates and screws still in. Is this normal and how common would it be?

Looking at @WheeloRatings stats on another thread Sydney and Melb are pretty well matched. If Sydney have weaknesses they are relatively poor (not terrible) in defending marks on lead, causing opposition clangers (interested in the panels thoughts on why as they are ranked #2 on tackles and #3 on tackle difference - do they lack structure at stoppages?), stopping opposition shots on goal, and bottom 6 for centre clearances. Considering where they rank poorly, what tactics do you think we will use this week? I’m guessing we will try and play a typical forward 50 game and it will all be decided on our forward 50 pressure and scores we generate from forward half turnover but interested in your thoughts. If we generate reasonable score from turnover Sydney can’t win. Who will go to Isaac Heeney?

That is such a joke. He does not even deserve to be in the team. His stats were boosted by cheap goals against north, west coast, and Essendon (4.0 per game). Against decent sides he was average at best. 16 goals from 8 games against finalists (2.0 per game). Just as well they didn’t have our draw and play 11 games against top 8 teams. Yet rewarded with captaincy. Joke.

Thanks @WheeloRatings Such great data. One small issue that probably skews the data every year is the draw and double-up games. Because of how uncompetitive North and the Eagles have been this year, it is even worse. As an example, for inside 50 differential Geelong were approximately +50 and +40 against North and the Eagles the second time they played them. If you removed those 2 games from their averages, their i50 differential drops from 5.7 (ranked #1) to ~1.7 (ranked ~#5). Same for raw i50s and probably a host of other stats. But great data so thanks.

Harmes did a really good and underrated job. Bailey is probably their most dangerous mid and he kicked 0.0 and only had 2 score involvements.

We are pretty much unbeatable when our forward and midfield pressure is elite, and that’s mainly down to Viney and our role players. In 150 games, ANB has probably been top 4 or 5 for pressure and defensive acts in 90% of his games. Friday was no exception.

By started do you mean at the first bounce below? Zach Bailey was tagged by Harmes and spent most of the night on the wing.

As per my post above. I forgot to mention that despite their only way to stay in games is the risky transition from d50, which relies on great foot skills, they are ranked #18 for kicking efficiency. Feel free to bump these posts if they win a final.

It’s not weird. They won 10 in a row which was a great run, and 11/12. But 6 were by less than a goal against bottom 8 teams, 2 against us during our 4w-6L run, 2 against Carlton during their 4w-8l run, and Freo during their 4w-5l run. They have had a charmed draw. Their midfield is useless and they need to pretty much play kamikaze from defensive 50 because it’s the only chance they have to stay in games. Sydney are the only decent team to make their defenders accountable and destroyed them on turnover. If Geelong don’t do the same I’ll be surprised. But it is Geelong. I would love us to play the pies.

Playing Collingwood is the easiest matchup in all the finals. That would be a gift. But it would be so Geelong like to lose to them. But logic tells me Geelong thump them by 60 points, and then Freo or dogs see them out in straight sets.

Concussion apparently

If you rate the draw on how many games against top 8 sides then it is identical. Last year 10. This year 9 (10th tonight). Same for top 4 matchups (4 each season). The difference this year we only played 1 game against a current top 8 team in our first 10, and will have played 9/12 in the run home. So not an ideal way to plan loading :-) The other difference is against top 8 sides only one team kicked more than 80 points against us last year (Dogs in their win). This years it’s been 4 (3 over 90 points). We have been more up and down defensively.

Not really getting by as we are 5-6 since round 11. The defensive drop is stark. In 38 games prior to rd 11, we conceded shots at goal from >50% of opponents i50s just twice. Since rd 11, it’s been 6 times and we lost every time except Carlton. I would not say we are getting by on coaching. If we fix it the coaches will be geniuses, but on the last 11 weeks it is looking like a fail. I think they can fix it.

If you are interested in planning for olympics it’s a great listen. Matthew Innes is high performance manager at the Dogs but he also was part of the Malaysian cycling program who won Malaysia’s first silver medal at the Tokyo games. Fascinating listen. Burgo chimes in with his Gold Coast fact just after the 49min mark. There is no context or planning. Just a factual statement.

I’ll have to dig through his podcasts again but I’ll find it. From memory they were talking about power output which is a combination of factors that are combined to produce what is intended to equate to physical effort.

Good podcast. @binman I have unashamedly posted on loading as a thing before. But considering your strong conviction that it is still a factor, I have a few questions. Burgo is on the record as saying our best physical output last year was r20 against Gold Coast, and collectively it was almost 20% better than our next best. How can Burgo have got the timing of peak performance so wrong last year? How much would we have beaten the dogs by if Burgo got it right? Burgo is more experienced than Selwyn. Is there any chance Selwyn has the timing even worse and we peak in November?

Burgos resilience idea was not about knees and ankles. One podcast where he spoke about it was about his time at Arsenal and how they had masses of data (10 years or so), and he hired a data analyst who went back through it all to see if there was any correlation between player management (resting or not), and soft tissue injury. It turned out there was no benefit to resting, hence Burgo’s next job was with us and he adopted a strategy of not letting players have sessions off if they were tired or sore or needed to be managed. There is also plenty of other stuff in his podcasts talking about soft tissue injuries, and there are only a couple of factors proven to be linked to them. One is variation in training loads. So he adopted the theory that resting players make them more likely to suffer soft tissue injuries when they came back to full training. But I have never heard Burgo or others apply the same to joint injuries. That is an entirely separate debate to what Burgo actually proposed.

That article is missing the real cause of our poor defence. It’s our forward line (and mids) forward pressure and defensive structure. Using last week as an example, the pies scored 6 goals from chains that started in defensive 50. If we apply forward 50 pressure like last year, then they score maybe 1 goal from those chains and we score 3 goals on forward half turnover. We end up with 16 goals and they end up with 10. That’s what our games looked like last year. Most of our losses have been the same (we have given up too many easy goals from lack of pressure upfield) that has been exposed since teams have started taking on risky kicks out of defensive 50.

Wave or not I don’t think they are that good. Macrae spent a long time at Richmond and has implemented their gameplan at Collingwood but they have half the talent Richmond had (or we have). They have a pretty good defence and bring forward 50 pressure, but their midfield is pedestrian and if they don’t get quick movement into their f50 (or f50 free kicks) they find it hard to score. They are bottom 4 in contested possessions, bottom 2 in clearance differential, and bottom 8 in inside 50 differential, so they rely on intercepting (ranked #1) and counterattacking. But their kicking efficiency is ranked #18 so they don’t even have the skills to implement their game plan well. I rate Longmire as one of the more astute coaches and so expect Sydney to be the team that brings forward 50 pressure against them this week. I’m not sure how they cope when that happens. If they deal with Sydney I’ll pay them some respect.

I’ll reserve my judgement on the Pies as I think they are just making up numbers. An 11 game winning streak is impressive, but it started with a super impressive win over Freo, but since has included us twice, blues, and 7 of the bottom 8 (by an average margin of 6 points). Considering we and the Blues are 4w-6l in that period, I would argue they have scraped over 9 of the bottom 10 teams based on current form. I think the Swans will thump them this week but if that doesn’t happen, they are a very remote chance to beat 3 top sides in a row considering they concede so much field position.

If you do the same thing again and again, teams work it out and come up with plans to address it. On Friday, Collingwood expected the kick to the pocket and always counterattacked from the subsequent stoppage (or intercept) to the other side and always had the outnumber and overlap on the far wing (Langdons wing). We did nothing to address it and gave up 5 easy goals due to that switch (we also gave up 1 goal from a switch to Jordan’s wing). That’s incredibly poor coaching by Goodwin and the support coaches. The dogs game was just as bad. I think we should stick with the kick to the pocket as it is the percentage play, but we need to setup to stop the counterattack to the other wing. It seems an easy thing to fix.