Watson11

Graded as low impact to the body. That hit was so much harder than what May did, and the “optics” were so much worse because it was so far off the ball. But it was exactly what I think Stewart did to Max Gawn at Geelong last year, and the talk about the hit to Max was how he faked it and Stewart didn’t even get cited from memory. Go figure.

No not from points in the JLT. We kicked 16.5 and 15.7. It was just coming out easily from ground balls and intercepts.

Who will Harmes tag? Gray if he plays midfield. Otherwise Rockliff? Ports midfield depth looks pretty weak.

For me 30 goals and providing a genuine contest and tackle pressure is a pass. 2 or more goals a game would be a distinction.

Sorry, but unless they had an MRI at Casey the doctors have no idea of the damage. Preuss looked worse than Smith at the time. He’s ready for round 1. Have the utmost respect for the professionalism of MFC these days but not on this occasion.

The front 6 is what worked at the end of last season, and would be a safe bet. Our issue in JLT was the ball came out of our forward 50 way too easily. Hope these 6 are back to locking it in and causing turnovers, and if they do the back 6 will be fine and we’ll win easily.

Maybe the mids can start kicking it to where he is running and not over his head so much

I don’t know any more than any other uninformed poster. But I do know that professional well run clubs don’t put players with mental health issues up for trades. AFL is a very stressful profession for young players, and mental health issues are not uncommon. Clubs have professionals supporting players. Jesse requested a trade and his struggles would have been a factor for sure, and the club would have considered all the factors. But it is not a Jack Watts scenario.

I wish Jesse all the best and hope he makes a super speedy recovery. He deserves to have a good run at it. But the idea Goody or the club would ship out a player who is struggling with mental health issues is archaic and insulting. Can you imagine Sydney shipping Buddy off after the 2015 season? It wouldn’t happen at Sydney or Melbourne. Jesse asked to be traded and Josh Mahoney said “we will do the best thing we can, if we can get you back to Perth we will, but it needs to be a good deal for us.” No different to Lachie Neale requesting to be traded to Brisbane. Mental health had zero to do with it.

Agree they have a quality list and will bounce back. Also hampered last year were Betts, Tahlia, Douglas and Sloane. Adelaide won 12 last year and would have won 14 if they played GC and St Kilda twice like this year. With an easy draw I can see them top 2.

I was travelling back from Perth today, and the Sunday Times has the same article as above, but 2 pages later had all the writers predictions and Mick still had us missing the 8. Only other pundit that had us missing the 8 was our now good friend Karl Langdon.

Agree re kick out rule. But from what I have seen the 6-6-6 rule will help the best centre clearance teams a lot. Of all the teams, Richmond should be concerned the most and need a new game plan. Just look at our JLT v Richmond for a snapshot. Richmond still rely on defence intercepts to attack, but no longer have the benefit of +1 or +2 so they will get exposed at times. In the JLT we were a shambles in our forward 50 trying players who didn’t know how to structure up defensively when we lost the ball, Richmond played their best back 6, and the result was Bacher et al clocked up countless easy possessions and Richmond scored easily when the ball slingshot down the other end. Same against Brisbane. Take that away and you take away Richmond’s scoring and score more yourself. Right now J Smith and Hunt in the forward structure are a liability. They could be great long term because they add speed and should improve our forward 50 defence, but right now neither knows exactly what to do when we lose the ball. It just takes one forward to not do the defensive job and it makes all of them look average because we lose our biggest scoring source which is forward half turnovers. I don’t expect us to lose versus Port but if we do it will be because of poor forward 50 defensive structure, and won’t be because of the new 6-6-6 but will be in spite of it. Spargo and ANB have both copped a lot of flak in the JLT, but if they play they will do their job and if all of our forward 6 do the defensive job, they’ll suddenly look a million dollars again. What I expect to happen early in the season is we’ll persevere with Hunt or Smith as forward options as the upside could be huge by seasons end, we’ll still dominate inside 50s, we’ll still struggle with our front 6 unable to lock the ball in, and MFCSS will blame Lewis, Omac, and Frost for our losses.

Can you show me a VFL ruckman we should have taken on who averaged more than Preusses 46 hit outs with 16 to advantage last year?

WC, Richmond, Adelaide, and Collingwood have peaked too early.

Should challenge, but they are pretty tough when you have an alternative. May could have easily just pushed him over with his little finger.

There are some ripper clashes at training too. Goody treated this like a practice game. If he didn’t he would have picked his strongest lineup but he had more important things to try. The lions looked quick because our forward 50 is a bit of a shambles with no offensive or defensive structure and the ball comes out too easily. We’ve had 3 practice matches and the forward 50 has been different every time. You would expect to see far more intensity from us in week 1, and as long as our forward structure is perfect by finals I don’t care too much about JLT, and will even forget about a few frustrating days during the season proper.

And WC lost to Freo 39-101 in JLT2 last year. It looked like we treated the JLT like training sessions. As soon as we get our forward and mid pressure to the level needed we will be fine. I’ll back that intensity to be back in round 1.

I thought our performance was the worst JLT performance since West Coast got clobbered by Freo by 62 points in JLT2 last year.

At least we are having the same issues we had for most of last season - too easy to run it out of our forward 50 resulting in easy scores the other way. So we know it can be fixed. Stats - we score from 35% of I50, they score from almost 50%

AFL will be happy with Port v Norf scoring fest. At one stage North kicked 5 goals in 5 minutes from 5 consecutive centre clearances.

Adelaide look ok. Top 4 quality with easy draw. Only real weakness is the ruck.

Macca, If you're really Ron Barassi in disguise then even you couldn't prevent the deplorable years.

From 6 disposals

One poor game in 39C heat for a 6ft 9"" goliath and plenty writing him off for the season. Quote from articles on heat stroke " The largest athletes are the most heat-sensitive." Another " Large people have lower surface area to volume ratios than smaller people. Evaporative surface area is relatively small in large folks so they have higher risk of developing heat stroke than smaller people." Not surprised that Preuss was cooked after the first qtr, or TMac had a shocker. Don't jump to conclusions too quickly.

A lot of times you need to look at the differentials as game style skews overall rankings. ie For 1, we were ranked number 1 in contested mark differential, so it is the complete opposite of what you had assumed. We just don't chip the ball around like other teams in the back half which is mostly a positive, as we were first for scoring from defensive 50. For 3, we are 13th on tackle differential. Magpies were 1st. Our tackling can tend to go missing at times. We know Goody would hate this stat, hence why not much patience with those who don't tackle. More interesting stats that we have to be better at this year are: 1. Ranked 14th for disposal efficiency and 12th for disposal efficiency differential. For a side that was 4th for most handballs and 11th for kicks that is pretty poor. 2. Ranked 9th from scores conceded from D50 entries. 9th flatters us, as we are 1% from being 16th but 6% from being top 4. 3. We rank 1st for centre clearance differential but 12th for stoppage clearance differential. My view is we are at our worst in the forward half of the ground, especially when Max dropped a kick behind and we pinch hit. Probably why Goody wants Max and Pruess to spend time in the forward half. We ranked 5th for inside 50 scoring efficiency which surprised me. Against top 8 teams this dropped to 39% which would have ranked us 17th. We definitely need to improve our scoring efficiency against good teams. I suspect some of this is we bomb, and are pretty good at creating stoppages, but we are lousy at defending stoppages in the F50. I think our terrible F50 stoppage work is directly related to our leaking goals at the other end. Most but not all of the issues above were fixed up in the last 5 weeks (save for the prelim). But they are far more significant than the stats that we are 17th and 18th in.