Standard Deviation

Saints beat Adelaide week one, and we just torched them. Too early to be sure if Adelaide has gone to water, but looking real good for us nonetheless.

On a less emotional note, we seemed unable to adjust once they started kicking straight up the middle. I'd kill for coaches and onfield leadership that can make the adjustment to stop something like this, they kept it going for long enough to overtake out margin, then they tweaked it to be a bit more defensive. We needed to force them wide and slow them down, and couldn't. This is pretty much what I want most from the incoming coach - teaching the team, or building a team, that can adapt.

I am sick of losing to these [censored] pieces of [censored]. I thought I didn't care at this point with the season gone, but losing this after being in a winning position has infuriated me. I genuinely hate them.

Demonland presents Schrodinger's coach : the veteran coach who is obviously still hungry for glory while at the same time will promptly decline any coaching position he has to go through a standard process for. I don't mind the club sounding out potentials, but in recent times clubs courting coaches (Lyon, Clarkson) hasn't led to success. I don't believe Buckley is the man, but if he is then he should go through the same process as an assistant at another club who is hungry, if only to prove that he wants the job and has the new ideas needed - it's easy to point out the flaws from the outside, 2/3rd of this forum can see what's going wrong with the team, doesn't mean he can fix them. If the club runs a proper process and Bucks is the choice, then I'll be much more confident in him than I am now. I've still yet to see the logic as to why we need a veteran coach though, in recent years the path to success has been through former assistants with new ideas. Someone further up the chain here made the comment there's a few posters regretting wanting Goodwin gone with some of the alternatives being offered, even if we end up with Buckley I'm not going to be one of those. My impression of the team's direction was we'd continue to bob around between 9th and 14th for a few years before retirements had the wheels come off, bleeding supporters as we did so. I'd rather take the risk of blowing it up quickly and starting again than just watch us slowly decline.

I'm genuinely surprised by the amount of support for Buckley 2.0 here. I don't have an insight into the inner sanctum of the club, but if there have been cultural issues Buckley's record at Collingwood doesn't suggest to me he's the best choice. I'd prefer the club to steer clear of veteran coaches here, the game evolves and none of the clubs which have got a second time coach in recent times have moved the needle much on performance. We're paying out Goodwin so the price tag of a former senior coach is also going to come at the expense of other aspects of the football program.

For me a coach/CEO/player leaving or being sacked doesn't impact me as negatively as an ugly loss does. The club is bigger than any given individual, whether supporter or personnel, but a loss like the Saints one hurts the club. It feeds a media narrative about the club, it gives ammunition to other supporters and if you're as invested as we on Demonland are it stings at a personal level. I haven't agreed with every coach sacking we've made or player we've traded out (or even in sometimes) but I don't remember them with the same pain as some of the losses, and I've never felt happy with a dismissal in the way I feel happy about even the most lacklustre of wins (except maybe one dire game against the Lions almost a decade ago at the MCG which I hope noone else remembers). In the end, we aren't performing well, it doesn't feel like we're improving and the coach has ultimate responsibility for that for mine. Players seemed to love Goodwin, but that wasn't translating into success anymore so hopefully whoever the next coach is finds the missing pieces for us.

You're not going to hear me try and argue that the players aren't part of the problem, but this is Goodwin's team. He's been in the box seat for long enough that the lack of leadership is on him - we just made history in the worst of ways. Maybe Goodwin's wildly unlucky and has inherited/recruited the footballers with the worst leadership in AFL history to ever grace the field, but I reckon it's more likely the leadership failings come down to the coaching box. We're bottom four with what was once a decent list, coach must be accountable for that.

I won't cancel my membership if Goodwin is coach next year. But I will reduce it from 16 to 3 games, cause that's about all I can suffer through at this point.

To those who say this is on the players, they take some of the blame but the buck stops with the coach. And that was the worst last quarter I've since before the Roos era. Goodwin has to go for this club to turn around. Clearing out the players comes after that.

While the umpiring was definitely awful, and prob did cost us the game, blaming it is missing the point. That was a bad game of football, Carlton were awful going into their fifty and fumbly in the midfield. Their backline was the only part of their setup that played well. We should have beaten them with ease, but we managed to be even worse going inside fifty - we either missed targets on the lead or bombed it long in the hope of....I don't know what, in some situations they seemed to be hoping the Carlton backline would just drop it so we could crumb a goal. The bit I really want to highlight though was that first quarter. We were trying to play some sort of possession game and switch the ball of half back, and we made dumb decision after dumb decision. So many times we tried a kick which didn't work, and had us exposed in the other direction. Whatever the coaches are trying to train in either isn't taking, or the players just aren't up to it. We're sadly not going anywhere without significant player changes or finding a gameplan that will work with the players we have.

So, after round five I thought Goodwin was done, and was honestly surprised at how the team turned around in the games after that. We've slid back again over the last few weeks, but short of a trainwreck of a second half of the season I'd say Goodwin will have done enough to still be in place next year, especially as the club will be loathe to pay him out of his contract. That all said, I'm not sure I see the path from here. We've got a bunch of senior players on long term contracts who seem to be regressing or unable to adapt from the style we used in 2021, and a forward line that doesn't inspire confidence even on its best days, with noone at the tier below looking awfully convincing to me . Our lack of development of KPFs seems to go back a decade (can someone who has a better memory than me give an example of anyone we've drafted as a tall forward who's gone on to be good since the mid-2000s?). This naturally isn't all on Goodwin, but his watch has gone long enough now for it to be a problem he owns. Same goes for the tendency of too many players to just throw it on the boot in hope, it's not a new issue and it's frustrating we saw so much of it against Port again. I'm concerned we're going to end up stuck in no mans land where we have good enough players to paper over the cracks and win games, but not good enough to be a contender come finals time and just slowly fade down the ladder. It feels like the point where the club needs to try and do something bold at season's end to stop this, but experience says they won't.

Thought the coaching was good, Langdon on Daicos the media darling was a great move. Composure going inside fifty still a major problem. Also it's interesting how umpires in a number of sports wear the black and white, while in the AFL they just have them play for them.

We've been playing in Alice Springs for over a decade right? I could understand how we saw more Adelaide, Port and West Coast supporters at the games. I could even understand how we saw more Freo supporters. But how do the [censored] Saints get stronger support there than a team that's spent a decade hiking out of its way to play there? Aside from all the arguments around money, the effects on performance in games after and whether we'd have won the game if it was at the MCG, we should walk from this place simply because the locals don't get behind us. We're giving ourselves an extra away game at this point, even the seven broadcast seemed to treat it like it was the Saints home game.

When I saw people posting here positing how if we beat the Pies we'd be 7 and 6 I just knew the Saints would beat us.

Ah, it seems the umpires do know what holding the man is. Now perhaps they should try calling it occasionally round the contest.