Watson11

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.

Great podcast. I haven’t got all the way through, but was great to hear @binman acknowledge the lack of stoppages. The second quarter was crazy with no stoppage for the first 15 mins or so, but even over the entire game there were only 33 stoppages compared to a normal games 50-60 and some games being up to 70 (65 in our final v Collingwood). There was a lot of high speed running (both teams over 45km which is huge). As binman said Goody tactically outcoached Scott. Beside the style out of our defensive 50 to make them run, but we also did not bomb it inside 50 and tried really hard to make sure we retained that inside 50 kick. I’ve been waiting for us to do this forever so it was great to see and I hope we keep it up. Makes for far less stoppages, and in my view helps us exploit a strength which is our running and fitness. Keep up the great podcasts.

I’m tipping us to dominate stoppages and apply huge forward half pressure and win easily.

Comparing Geelong and our stats is interesting. Despite our new style, we are a way behind Geelong this year in scores from turnover and defending turnovers. In fact, based on averages in these areas we are looking at a 20+ point loss. Also they are +6 ahead at scoring from defensive half. However, Geelong may be #1 at defending turnover but are #18 for stoppage clearance differential and #14 at opposition scores from stoppage. I wondered if they had played good stoppage teams to be leaking so much, but they have only played 1 of the top 8 teams in scoring from stoppage. So in other words they don’t defend stoppages well. I think we can improve our stoppages a lot as well. Despite not being at our best this year, we are still ranked #6 at scoring from them and #1 at defending them. So if we want to focus on where we can really hurt them, we would be working on stoppages at training and aiming to break our 2021 prelim final score from stoppage record.

The Giants almost came to a standstill last week with a few injuries and only 1 on the bench. So I checked the AFL tracker stats to see if they struggled and the workrate for the Saints was insane. They had the 5th highest amount of high intensity running ever (49km). And the Saints have a 5 day turnaround this week so it will be very interesting how they come up against the dogs on Thursday night.

Then us, Port, Gold Coast (away), and GWS. Would love to see them go 0-6 or 1-5 over this stretch.

Interested to get thoughts on the new attacking gameplan. Binman has mentioned in earlier pods that he thinks goody will have an early season game plan and then another for later. Last year we also started the season taking a lot of risks from the defensive half. In fact, at the end of round 9 in 2023 we were #1 for scoring and #1 for scoring from defensive half (40 points a game compared to 30 points a game this year). Last year, following consecutive losses to Port and Freo, we changed it up in round 10 resulting in slow safe ball movement and inside 50 bombing to pockets to setup repeat entries. It had immediate effect when we restricted Carlton to 44 points. Can binman elaborate on what he things the other game plan will be and when it will happen? I personally would like to see us persevere with the attacking brand all season and wear the setbacks.

Thought I would bump this thread to talk about stoppages which are hurting us this year. It always amazes me that teams (ie us) can have a dominant ruckman and still get smashed in stoppages. Last night there were 85 stoppages. Lions won 44 clearances (more than half) despite only winning 27 hit outs. We win 35 clearances. My question/frustration is that there must be a better way than what currently seems to be a random outcome from our ruck dominance. We adopt a lot of innovations from other sports in AFL. Should teams with dominant ruckman like us at the moment, adopt a quarterback approach with Max using numbers and colours before a bounce/throwin so everyone in our team knows exactly where the ball is going if Max wins the tap. Or are gridiron players just smarter than afl players and so they can retain a complex set of number/colour sequences to denote all the different plays?

Love the idea of you contributing to the forum, but you have to improve your grammar. Too many apostrophe errors, missed full stops, and wrong capitalisation. Sorry I had to move onto the next post half way through. I’ll try again with your next post and see if you’ve fixed it. Cheers

Agree Fogarty should have got 3 or 4. Full speed hit. Eyes off ball etc etc But for Kozzie we have zero chance of getting him off. The rules changed this year and any front on contact (or contact forward of side on), which is high, is graded as a minimum of medium impact this year. The only way he gets off is grading it low, which it was but because of the change it’s medium impact as a minimum. Of course the afl can direct the tribunal to do whatever they want though and make an exception, but that only applies for Collingwood and Carlton.

I couldn’t tell if your question was a joke. But it was 2014 when they had their feud. Not related, but I just watched Jack Billing’s first afl goal which happened to be against the bombers in 2014. He ran from about half back. The bombers looked big and slow, almost like they were taking something to bulk up.

I think this is a good point. If you look at the afl tracker, we consistently outwork (outrun) every team we play because we have to with our defensive system. Interestingly, the crows actually shaded us for work rate last week (both sides did a lot of high speed running - 39km v 40km which is way above average). For all the dismissive comments about the game, I thought it was our best performance this season because of how hard the crows worked. They got a lot of numbers to contests, won more ground balls, but we shut them down anyway with great system and pressure, and absolutely burnt them when we had it. Shots at goal from 58% of our forward 50 entries has to be our best effort for a long time.

Love this comment in the guardian in the crows game review. “Harley Reid’s had more column inches devoted to him than Bruce Lehrmann but Windsor may end up being the steal of that draft at pick seven”