KozzyCan

The four teams who have made the Grand Finals over the past three years all play more entertaining football than us imo so I think there's room to do both. I also think the football we played in 2021 was more entertaining than it was in the following years because teams started defending against us in a different way and we couldn't adapt.

I don't have the stats but our forward entries have an observable defensive intent to not allow the ball to get back into the oppositions hands for an easy rebound. As you say the pockets are deep and close to the boundary line, easy to crowd and keep the ball in contest, the trade off is you give yourselves a low chance to actually score. It's also very dull to watch. Was interesting listening to Hird the other night on FC. He worked with Goodwin for years and talked about how much Goodwin hates getting scored against and was never as interested in scoring as much as he was interested in contest and defence.

He's always come off as extremely awkward in front of the camera.

You're right about percentage in 2021, I stand corrected. I'm a little confused as to your overall point. You've posted numerous times that you don't think our forwardline is much of a cause for concern, so where do you think we need to improve to give ourselves the best shot at contending again? I would say our inability to capitalise on the scoreboard has been our greatest weakness for several years now and is the area that has room for the most improvement. I think that we could apply some relatively simple fixes to improve that area, such as cheating forward off the clearance and pulling our press back a bit to open up the forwardline rather than slowly kicking to contests and predictable safe zones like the forward pockets. I think what we'd gain offensively from those sorts of moves would outweigh what we lose defensively.

Has JUH started making friends with the wrong sort or something?

Indeed sample sizes from finals series will be small by definition. You don't think it matters that in 2021 we were far more dominant in finals than we were in the following years? That it may have been a factor in our success? You also haven't examined the form of the following premiers who were better at scoring and won more games than us throughout those seasons, where in 2021 we were the strongest team in the competition in both percentage and wins. That tells me we stagnated while other sides passed us by and we were unable to replicate the same kind of form that saw us win it all in 2021. You're saying our forward line doesn't need to improve because we won the flag on 2021 with fewer PF in the h&a season ignoring the fact that we were incredibly high scoring across the finals that year and it was the thing that held us back in the following years. We couldn't have done a great deal more defensively in those years so we have to look somewhere to improve.

Must be fake. People on Demonland told me Clarry was never considered for a trade and it was just a media beat up.

You don't think our scores in finals are worth looking at? The 2021 Finals series was one of the most dominant ever, where we averaged 119 points for and 56 points against. Compare that to the following years: 2022: 74 points for and 91.5 points against 2023: 62 PF and 66.5 Points against.

They don't even need to lace it out (although it would be nice) just get the ball in fast and hit it up to the advantage of our forwards in space. We make things hard for ourselves by bombing everything to the pockets or the top of the goal square onto the heads of our forwards.

I love Melksham, my point was more about our preponderance over recent years to recruit older injury prone players to plug holes in our forwardline, and that Membrey would have just fallen into that bucket. I'm happy we didn't attempt the same thing last year.

Yeah Membrey would just be another Melksham or McAdam.

Last year was weird. We attempted to change the gameplan into this weird half pregnant chip kick thing in an attempt to fix our ball movement but we still moved the ball too slow so we were still easy to defend against. It looked good when it worked but was disasterous when it went awry. Then the coaches blinked after the Freo game and we tried to go back to the old faithful but we had a lot of injuries and out of form players and the players who were left just looked like they were over the whole season by that point.

I'll need to see more evidence but it did seem like our forward press was pulled back a bit in the third quarter to give us a little more room from the turnover to work with. It also seems like we are trying to share the ball around more, especially by hand. This will need to be ironed out because we are overdoing it at the moment. Couple of examples from the weekend: Petracca handballing to Viney when he had an open goal in front of him and Viney had to stop, turn and snap from 40 out. And Fritsch 20 metres out on a slight angle kicking backwards to Billings was another baffling decision.

He's a big boy, he can cop some criticism. JVR's a good player and is progressing well, he also has flaws in his game. I don't think what Lloyd said anything that egregious.

I'm indifferent to it but I think starting at round 0 is incredibly stupid.

I kind of agree with Lloyd about JVR's limitation, he very rarely kicks goals in play, mostly just set shots. But I also think it doesn't really matter. Our forwardline is no worse than Collingwood or Sydney's, and only slightly worse than Brisbanes. We don't need to have an elite forwardline and we're not going to build much more than we've got in the next couple of years. The issue has always been ball movement and delivery inside 50. Fritsch would win the coleman if he had the time and space that he'd get at those teams.

I was totally on board the forward experiment after his late showings in 2023. By mid last year I just wanted him to be moved back again. So much more reliable as a defender and I think playing forward was horrible for his confidence.

Petty was good that day but there was no way known he was the best player on the ground.

Every team is untouchable with that sort of accuracy.

Much better/deeper entries, got it in quicker so we could hit players one on one or ping it around by hand to get decent shots on goal. Basically just more time and space.

Maybe we'll see Wade Derksen line up on the MCG in round 1 after all.

He's just the type of person who wants to be everyone's mate.

We got worked out a bit after 2021, teams started tagging Langdon and Gus returned to the middle. We basically had to always take the opposite wing which was given to Jordon who, while a fine role player, never really had any weapons. This is when the trend of just bombing it long to Max started to come in and our ball movement slowed to a trickle. Our wings looked a lot better last year with Windsor taking the opposite side but everything else fell apart so it didn't really matter. Now we've moved both Langdon and Windsor to completely different roles. I don't really get the thinking.

"May have gone rogue." Hmm, makes you wonder how the footy department are feeling about Green's big statement?

This has been fairly consistent under Goodwin. We play a high forward press to generate repeat inside 50s which means when the opposition break our lines we have very little going for us defensively. That style of play has gone out of vogue in recent years. The game now favours transition play which we don't seem to have much interest in doing. We very rarely score from the defensive half of the ground these days because most teams defend deep and kill our ball movement. It's also why a lot of our games become such slogs to watch. We lock the ball in our forward half for little reward only to see the opposition break through once and kick a fast goal.