rpfc

We are seeing the confluence of events that is demanding a change in how we play that I hope lasts for the rest of the decade; a change that leads to attractive football as well as winning football. 

Transition x2

With McQualter coming in there seems to be a real emphasis on something that we have never had a real emphasis on; transitioning the ball from the backline with speed and purpose.
(I wrote about this mid last season - that you can read about below - bumped post)

Where the ‘confluence’ comes in is the emergence of McVee, Howes, Bowey, and Rivers as the engine of the team.

This is where we need to ‘transition’ to this engine, which I will dub - The Transition, and away from the May and Lever driven Defence Only mindset.

Now this is already happening and that is great, but it doesn’t mean we are not a contest driven or Defence First team - we will be until further notice, but with this strong in the bow we can now win games in more ways, and avoid being out of games. 

For the neophytes - last two seasons we have been ‘forward half’ or ‘contest/stoppage driven’ to avoid as much exposure to our backline as possible. This means we kicked long to the boundary (May’s infamous kick out from FB) and progressive movement down the field through stoppage and rushed kick. This means that our forward pressure could kick in and we ‘won territory’ and we ‘won the I50 count’ and we ‘won the expected score’ but we didn’t win the games that matter…

Having a transition game and a comfortability with our defence getting footy kicked their way has opened up the ground and has allowed McVee and Rivers in particular to show their value and for our forwards to have space to exploit. Suddenly Fritsch has 1-1s and Brown is leading at the footy in dangerous spots. As an aside, this will aide in JVRs development…

So I for one thank Goodwin for his ability to adapt and I welcome… 

… The Transition.

(Demon emoji)

18 minutes ago, Pates said:

It's interesting their comments about game style, I have to imagine a lot of those who said it didn't watch the port game the week before. Has to be one of the games of the season as a neutral. The Crows game felt like they tried to bring the game down to a scrap to make it hard on us, we had to grind that win off the back of tired legs. It wasn't pretty but to use that as the game to say "they play a boring style" is a bit silly.

I'd say the style we are trying to play more of is what we did against Hawthorn (who admittedly aren't great). It's not high tempo, but it's knowing when to pull the trigger and getting men streaming forward with the ball in regular motion.

They must have nightmares about Gawn, he regularly seems to put in massive games against them. It seems silly to say but if he does it again I can't see us losing because it elevates so many other players into the game.

But overall their comments aren't over the top or disrespectful, I've never really had any bad experiences around Brisbane fans.

We have been boring the last two years. Fans of other teams don’t see things until the ‘narratives’ have got through or their team has played the teams in question. 

So we will come up against a bunch of fan groups that think we are just a dump it down the line, win territory team, that prefers repeat entries until we slingshot their team into Oblivion through the excellent law firm of McVee, Howes, and Rivers.

They are The Transition.

I believe it is Selwyn Griffith’s…

@Lucifers Hero - what a nasty, cheeky thread hitting a group of people when they are down.

….

Le Double Post.

1 hour ago, dimmy said:

Actually the articles by the "real" journalists at the Age seemed pretty complimentary & objective, but "Carro's contribution to "journalism" compares favourably with Channel 7's "current affairs" program. 

I do not think it is in her DNA to say anything positive about Melbourne FC.

Actually I feel that Collingwood should have to pay Gus' contract out of their "Player payments"  with no salary cap relief considering what they got away with.

What are you talking about? 

Caroline thinks we have handled CO13 expertly and have been unfairly brought into the drugs policy furore.

Her article today simply states facts about how we are trying to handle a situation. 

Burying our heads up our [censored] doesn’t work.

26 minutes ago, Jaded No More said:

Wow there are some absolute nobodies in that list taken by Adelaide. 
It’s no wonder they are where they are. 
Who is Fisher McAsey? 😂

Fisher? They barely even knew her?!

is that on the nose?

When we didn’t get anything after 2014 then no club ‘deserves’ to get any assistance ever again.

But NM gets assistance so WCE should as they are just as [censored]. 

On 24/07/2023 at 09:20, rpfc said:

I think it is a bit more counter offensive and aggressive with getting an extra to the defensive contest. We are happy to leave May one out against the best he is that good, but we won’t in the future. And I would lean into McVee and Rivers natural desire to run through HB, Salem and Bowey will still be there which is crucial if we want to quicken up the pace - they are elite kicks.

So without the footy; press with wings behind footy trying to cut off short kicks toward top of 50 mitigating Lever going full interceptor. You can do this from a stoppage too without the press.

Then with the footy; run from interception through HB line as quickly as possible. Have forwards deeper to stretch the field and create space left by the press (no one knows where anyone is on either side) for the initial kick off HB. It would be different from stoppage without the press in place of course.

Anyway, high level - lean into Lever and our HBs skill sets as opposed to May. I want opposition mids coming forward to think twice because of how hard they are going to have to work defensively immediately from turnover.

Bump. 

This is what I wrote about where we needed to go in 2024. 

After a closer than expected game against the crows. So partially bump because there are a few counting their chickens…

…but predominantly bump because I am prescient footy lord.

As ever

You’re welcome. 

18 minutes ago, Demonstone said:

It would be a problem if the players had this attitude.

I can't see how supporters feeling this way could have any influence on the game.

Ostensibly no, but pervasive sentiment is just that.

How pervasive? Depends. 
How impactful? Unknowable.

33 minutes ago, leave it to deever said:

I'm just wondering if I'm right in saying that Nibbler used to be a poor kick at goal. He's certainly turned it around.

Can we move him into the midfield instead of Salo or would that curtail his greatness at the moment?

Salo has been ok but Nibbler is just so much stronger and I reckon has more endurance for the job.

In any case I'm so glad to see him playing so well.

There are a couple of others who have recaptured their form of old. Not least is Langers.

The Rock wall in Lever is another as are of course Tmac and Bbb.

Flat wrong about Salem but also, ANB isn’t a midfielder. He finds space in the midfield and gets footy because of his role interchanging with Petracca and the fact that he isn’t respected by the other midfield group. He is very effective in the role he plays and allows our most damaging player to get footy forward of the ball.

No need to move away from it

40 minutes ago, Whispering_Jack said:

According to Professor Wiki, the term “hubris” describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with arrogance.

Let’s not go too early on this.

I think it’s over, the football gods will teach us a lesson to tomorrow night.

It will be tempting to replace Hore with May but ribs are not to be trifled with… Tomlinson?

2 hours ago, DeeSpencer said:

Slow start and the bad 3rd quarter were concerning, made us grind back to even with good footy and good luck a couple of times before kicking away twice in the last.

The big question is how much of our lack of speed on the spread defensively was due to covering May with a tall slower backline in the first half?

Or how much was our midfield and half forwards probably being a step slow and disorganised?

Similarly, was reverting to more bomb and chase down the line - a tactic I mostly supported to get the job done on the night - just pragmatism?

Or are we still needing to work on skill execution under pressure to play a more expansive style when facing heat?

Because there were a string of bad decisions or shoddy kicks coming out of the backline early and especially in the 3rd - hello Mr Lever - and also a lot of handballs that went back in through traffic rather than clearing to the fat side.

Fantastic win, but one that raises a few questions too.

Are you looking for perfection? You will go crazy doing that…

We are pushing a game style we just haven’t done under Goodwin. Even in 21 or 18 we were a contest, clearance and/or front half turnover team. 

Here we are 4 games in and without our prime ‘interceptor’ - the engine for any team that wants to drive score out of the backline - and we have beaten a team on their home deck that has had far more it nearer to their goals.

This is one promising for what we can achieve in 2024 and while progress isn’t linear and we will make missteps along the way - if we get 15 wins - god help the rest of the comp with us in the finals with this midfield, and with us being able to move it from back half turnover…

5 hours ago, Demonland said:

 

Great bloke, genuine person.

If it wasn’t for one Christian Petracca you could see him as a skipper in the mould of Junior Mac.

We touched on this in ‘21 - but the work he does to help CP5 in particular to be damaging is his real asset and then when he gets lost in the shuffle and hurts the opposition - that’s just gravy. To be the best, you need players like ANB that are happy to execute a role and do it excellently. You can put up with the odd fumble and clanger ;) 

12 hours ago, monoccular said:

 

This is a nothing reply

3 hours ago, binman said:

I think there is a risk of a false narrative building around this game.

In particular, that port lost a game they should have won, and that we were lucky to win.

Yes, there were similarities to some of our losses last year in the way port dominated in key stats, in particular inside 50 and time in forward half.

But those numbers are a little misleading in terms of a comparison to our losses last year.

If an opponent had beat us in those areas so comprehensively last season we would have been hammered. Not this season.

That's because our method has  changed and those stats are not as significant as indicators this season.

The other thing is port's supposed  innacracy and the much discussed expected score.

Port won the evexpected score by 34 points, on its face suggesting we were lucky to win and port threw it away.

Last year we lost a number of matches where we were ahead on  expected score. But the differential was usually a result of our woeful inaccuracy.

So, for example in our semi against the blues, using expected score as a metric, we left something like 4-5 goals on the table IIRC.

We should have won that game.

The same is true of our loss to the giants in the Alice, and to a lesser extent our finals loss to the pies.

But that's not true for port last night, as evidenced by their expected score, which was only 11 points more than their actual score.

Meaning they were actually pretty good in terms of their accuracy (expected score is calculated by the percentage of goals from all shots from that spot on the ground from the last 11 seasons).

Port didn't lose because they fluffed their lines like we did in say the giants, pies and blues losses.

It was because OUR kicking for goal, particularly our set shots, was brilliant. That's not lucky, that's skill.

Take three goals as examples.

Browns and maxy's set shot goals from 50 are probably no better than something like 30% under x score.

Fritters set shot from 45 on a 45 degree angle is probably something like 25% of shots from that spot being goals. 

Drilling those, and other goals, was the difference in the game. 

We won the game because our goal kicking was elite. Not because we we were lucky.

We didn't steal the game, we won it

Good kicking is good football.

I'd also add that we clearly ran out the game better. We looked fitter and stronger, and looked the winner from halfway through the last.

As evidence, we got out to a 13 point lead, and had a late chance to make it 19.

We dominated the last 10 minutes and their lucky after the siren goal made it feel a bit more even than it actually was.

What is a ‘steal’ then? 

A lot of internet wasted on an ephemeral question so it doesn’t really matter but the way Port lost was very similar to how we lost some crucial games last year. 

What was the general critique of those losses on here?

Thankfully, we can thank our growing capacity to move the footy from HB, our focus on keeping forwards ahead of the footy, and incredible execution near goals for the win.

7 hours ago, Binmans PA said:

See, this is the thing. We didn't steal it then. We set ourselves up that way. We were super aggressive from every centre bounce and many around the ground stoppages. The mentality clearly being win a pure clearance either out of the front or unpressured or be prepared to lose the clearance and then dig in at our defensive end.

That has been a noticeable difference in all 4 games we've played this year.

Is rpfc about to have a semantical argument? 

We have the way we want to play and we executed it really well. There were two periods totalling 33 mins where we kicked 11 goals to 1 (over the qtr time and 3qtr time breaks). We were beaten in CP, UP, Clearances, and the useless stat of I50s. Which is indicative of the pressure that the backline was under for the other 90 mins…

I think we can say we ‘stole’ this one.

26 minutes ago, Fat Tony said:

 

Doesn’t surprise me. Happy to be on the other side of the coin this year instead of trying to bash through a crowd to kick goals. 

6 minutes ago, old55 said:

We hung in and stole that one. Impressive...

Yes, and we did it in a way that is MFC in 2024. Absorb and let them flounder with no space in their F50, and then get a turnover and slingshot with kicking to forwards leading at the ball. (Ironically this is how teams beat us the last few years - when you are all about forward half turnover and can’t move the footy from the other arc - you have no space.)

Thats why we have 22+ scoring shots from 45 I50s.

This is actual footy, it’s been missing entirely the last couple of years. So glad it’s back. 

He is such an important role player, but is limited so when he plays with other ‘role players’ like Spargo his value is diminished because he needs special players around ensure his grunt work has its biggest impact.

He is a link in a chain, and not a weak one. 

An amazing player first and foremost. Then a leader, he and Gawn are yin and yang I feel.

Great story.

And those Ch7 intros are all they are good at with the footy. The night is downhill from then on.

2 minutes ago, Jaded No More said:

Why? He may prefer to play defense. Adelaide are wanting him to play down there. 

Because it’s not where we would play him. Which means it’s another half year of waiting for your (footy) life to start. I did say ‘May.’

Petty has to go back. TMac, Tomlinson, and Hore can do a job but you need an interceptor and we just lost two.

This should make us lean in to our current strategy to focus on quick movement from the backline, but we need to turn it over first.

I feel this is a decision that will save our season in the next 2 months but may doom our ability to keep Petty. Bit scripted really.

17 minutes ago, DubDee said:

who are we thinking for the sub? out of the 5 below it’s a tough call  

1. WINDSOR
2. HORE
3. Oliver
4. Petty
5. T Mac

 

11 minutes ago, Graeme Yeats' Mullet said:

Petty/Hore ?? 

DubDee is just asking a pertinent question. There is no need for names.