Watson11

He’s just as likely to take his own players out as the opposition. So keep going I say. But a special request. Try and take out Maynard!

If we aren’t fit enough, then Brisbane are just lazy. We ran further than them, further at high speed, more sprint efforts, more repeat sprints etc etc. we are plenty fit enough. Maybe not experienced enough to get the most out of our fitness.

Love your post. Things are never as bad (or as good) as they seem. It wouldn’t surprise me if we got up. For all the introspection on demonland, the lions have a few issues. They are the highest scoring team from the defensive half in the last 8 weeks but it doesn’t suit their list. When pressure has been applied they have leaked turnover goals (even the lowly saints looked like they would get up until the umps intervened). So I’m hoping we get back to basics and apply a lot of pressure. They don’t deal with it well and don’t have much speed in their back 6. If we do that and get some turnover goals our confidence can come back as quickly as it fell away.

Maybe there is better footage than what I saw. But I’d like to know why Berry didn’t get fined for staging. From the grainy footage I saw it looked like Butters gave him a pretty soft tap with his non preferred left arm as he ran past. From Berry’s reaction you would swear he had Mike Tyson give him a brutal kidney punch. While we are at it, why didn’t the Brisbane medicos cop it for not immediately sending Berry for scans at hospital. He clearly could have had a ruptured kidney.

The AFL can afford it, and club doctors should have better information when deciding if players can go back onto the field. It’s unfair on club doctors to poke and prod to make a decision. Let’s look at it another way. Trac got a knee in the ribs and it was just a bruise. Do you seriously think he can get to the Epworth, get a scan, and be back on the ground in the second qtr. Let’s get real!! Trac mentioned he had his scan at 8-9pm that night.

I think you will find the senior assistant is always the midfield coach. Don’t let our incompetent media department mislead you.

Did @binman write that article? All true though. We are in bad form. We are not as bad as most on demonland think and not as good as binman thinks. Get to finals and be playing our best footy in August and September and that would be good enough for me.

The AFL should be getting some heat. In the NFL, every stadium has medical imaging, and some teams bring their own. X-Ray and ultrasound mainly. With ultrasound, a doctor can pick up internal bleeding with 90% accuracy and punctured lungs with 97-100% accuracy. And a portable x-ray would find broken ribs in 2 minutes. If any good should come of Tracc’s incident it should be that the AFL makes it into the 21st century. They have enough money to make sure of players welfare.

Are you a doctor? 3-12 week recovery according to this site. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17953-ruptured-spleen Also life threatening. He should not have been sent back on if the doctor saw the incident on TV as it was right into the spleen/kidney area. We had 2 years when Burgo was at the club where this stuff didn’t happen (injured players being sent back on). But it was a regular occurrence pre 2020 and post 2021.

Not quite finished the podcast. Well done for turning up. Just a general comment. We have picked apart a few sides in the last 2 years that play the back half rebound game through applying forward half pressure (Collingwood, Geelong). Maybe a question for next weeks pod, but do you think we are even easier to pick apart when we play this new gameplan because we have don't have line-breaking speed in our back 6, and our footskills are middle of the road. It seems that forward half pressure is our new Achilles heel. West coast destroyed us with forward half pressure, and against Freo I was worried when 4 of Freo's first 5 goals came from forward half pressure/turnovers. I think what followed the first qtr could be explained by a collective drop-off from the players due to the fact they do not think the rebound gameplan is the way to go. Just an added comment, I couldn't believe that Ross Lyon did the opposite of forward half pressure the week before against us.

Hey binman. In your previous post you mentioned that you heard JVR is the number 1 in the afl for being targeted inside 50. The actual stat is he is #1 at marking the ball when targeted (he doesn’t get targeted a huge amount). That is a hugely impressive stat for a 21 year old key forward.

Not quite finished the podcast but enjoyable again. @binman added this weeks tracker numbers.

Yep. It’s been our gameplan from 2021-2023. In 2021 we didn’t get a lot of repeat entries as it was probably a surprise to every other team how we kicked the ball inside 50 (as we flipped 100% from 2020). Result of surprise was we were ranked #1 at shots per inside 50 in 2021 at over 50%. In 2022 we dropped to #9, in 2023 to #14. Predictability is the enemy of an attacking gameplan, as there is so much data, stats, dissection of opposition etc It’s the new definition insanity. Ie Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting the same result.

To be fair to other posters, I don’t recall a groundswell saying change from a forward half game plan. The complaints centred around our attacking game plan which seemed to be a safety first, bomb it to the pocket, create stoppage plan. Most would like to see more leading, unpredictability, and trying to hit targets going inside 50. We did it against Geelong 3 weeks ago where we showed patience until options opened up, so it is possible.

Last night, after Sydney scored a goal from a defensive half turnover, it was quoted they were #1 at scores from this source with 13 points a game. @WheeloRatings is this correct? It would make no sense to base game plans off defensive half turnover if the number #1 ranked team only scored 12% of their total score from this source? It would also mean that they score 27 points a game from kickins and defensive half stoppages. Could that be correct?

Kane Farrell, Brodie Smith say hello from defence. Karl Amon moved to half back in the middle of last year. I would have thought plenty of coaches value retention of i50 kicks. It’s an annoyance of mine that we are generally so poor at this statistic. If we had retained 50% of our i50 kicks against Collingwood in the qf last year, we may still have kicked for goal dreadfully, but 7.22 would have got us over the line. Like how the pies won the gf despite kicking 12.18!

Langdon makes a difference but not 25% over the entire team. Maybe up to 5%. For high speed running, he ran 3.8km against Geelong. So assuming his replacement ran 0km at high speed we were still down by around 20%. He had 5 repeat sprints. So assuming his replacement on the wing had 0, we were still down by 40%. He was not in the top 5 for work rate in attack against Geelong but in defence was 3rd (Melbourne had the top 5 in the game ranging from an average speed of 9.6km/hr - ANB to 8.9km/hr Windsor). Against WC, we only had 1 of the top 5 (Sparrow) at 8.3km/hr. Something was clearly off.

Well done for getting up for this podcast. Hate to feed binmans monster, but after the pod I checked the tracker and we were so far off in our work rate. I am putting this performance down to complacency/heat/teamwide flu/loading or whatever reason we want to use. Below are a few stats comparing our effort v WC compared to our effort v Geelong a few weeks ago. We were 25%-30% down in work rate across every metric. The average speed with and without the ball is the most interesting as it compares the average speed of every player in the team when we have the ball and when the oppo have the ball so you can see if we run harder than the opposition to defend when they have it. We hardly ever get outworked when we don't have the ball. 7.1km/hr is easily our worst performance this year. The only other times we were outworked this season was against Brisbane (7.4km/hr v their 7.7km/hr). Most of the team had a day off on Sunday!

Are post clearance ground ball gets available for their mids v ours. Simpson has been saying all season that they are going back to basics and focussed on forward half pressure. It’s a pretty simple message. Their mids worked hard post clearance to get to contests, including in the forward half. The result was outnumbers around the ball and 64 points from midfield and forward turnovers. We scored 7 points from turnover in this same area of the ground and my eyes told me they strangled us and had numbers to post clearance contests. That’s on the mids.

Let’s face it. Until they played us they had only beaten one top 8 team (Blues), and even in that win let in 105 points. I’m not sure Scott really knows who the good teams are this year as they have hardly played any of them.

And all after Chris Scott summoned the umpire boss down to Geelong to talk about umpiring during the week. That worked well for him.

The cats have an incredibly easy draw for the remaining games. Only the blues fixture is easier. Bombers and Port have the toughest.

I know you spend quite a bit of time on the pressure gauge. Often it matches what you see but the second quarter to me was frenetic, yet both sides had low pressure ratings. I didn’t realise the no stoppages until later, but I wonder if you need to assess pressure and stoppages together as high stoppages games probably naturally have more of what is defined as pressure acts. The second quarter looked high pressure to me, but it wasn’t according to the stats. Our pressure gauge against Brisbane was almost the same as Saturday but it just seemed we were miles off against Brisbane. Interestingly, there were a lot more stoppages against Brisbane.

If you look at our high speed running on the afl tracker app, we basically never get outrun (we do but it’s extremely rare). Interestingly, against Geelong it was one of the very few times they ran 46km at high speed to our 45km.

The afl app has the Tracker page and it’s the high speed running (definition is running at >18km/hr). I got interested in it a few years ago after listening to Burgo and Brukky’s podcasts where Burgo spoke about our 2021 gold coast game as being off the charts as far as output went (he said 20% higher than anything else). I found on the afl tracker we had 48km of high speed running that day, compared to an average of around 40km and next best of 42km. I figure high speed running is the best indicator of work rate and fitness and have kind of tracked it ever since.