KozzyCan

Watching port go forward with players free all over the place and leads to kick to compared to us where we have a crowded mess and every player running to the same spot was stark.

It just astonishes me we can't get our forward entries and structure right. As soon as we get it within 70m of goal we just play dumb football. Petracca's kick to Melksham summed up our issues in that part of the ground.

Yeah basically if Kozzy wants to go home and a WA team is willing to take on his money then they would obviously value him highly enough that we're going to get a very good ROI.

It could be true but I wouldn't be putting too much stock in Schwarz's mail.

Did you watch the chat Whateley had with Simmo? He specifically pointed out that he's far more than a small forward.

He posted the second half of the 64 GF the other day:

Fantrastic work by the club.

Fantastic work by the club if this gets done. Genuinely could become a top 5 player in the comp imo.

He hasn't been the same since his foot injury unfortunately.

Nice fanfic OP. May has always loved to have a crack at others when he thinks they've let down the team. You've got Disco comforting Max and trying to push May away. Pretty obvious he was giving Gawn some feedback and Max didn't want to hear it. May is just a hothead and really should have waited until they were in the rooms to bring it up but I reckon both of them got over it pretty quickly.

Poor entries and shots at goal kill us once again.

No one would even be talking about this if she hadn't brought it up on her show and basically no one has touched it since. It was sensationalised headline grabbing stuff to pump up the ratings on her new show.

Goodwin doesn't have to throw the players under the bus, but being honest about an area we're poor in and have been for a while is something every coach should be capable of doing. Goodwin is just so petrified of giving anything away to the media that he answers every question with rehersed nebulous waffle. I honestly don't think it's an area we have prioritised at all. We rely on brute forcing our way to victory by dominating the front half game and overwhelming the opposition through sheer weight of numbers. Lock the ball inside 50 and eventually a goal will be kicked is how we want to win but it's no longer a reliable path to victory in the modern game.

Correct and this has basically been our main issue since 2022. It's a problem that Goodwin has not yet managed to solve no matter how many times he's told us that we're 'working incredibly hard' on it.

That tells me that we're not defending very well and allow easy goals to be kicked.

Kind of ridiculous if he can't even fully admit to the issue for fear of upsetting the players.

The way Goodwin answers press conference questions is so annoying. We are the worst team at converting shots at goal into actual goals. That's not an 'everyone' problem, it's a Melbourne problem.

Field kicking is not much of a comparison because you can keep the ball low when hitting a short pass and when you go longer your target can move to follow the flight of the ball.

I'm sure goalkicking could be improved but it's simply not what happens in the modern game. Players have more time off than ever before and we've gone the extra step to let them do their own thing at training half the time. Players simply don't spend hours on end fixing up their techniques anymore, the high performance managers probably won't even let them even if they wanted to. There is simply no world where I can see guys like Gawn, Oliver or Petracca improve their goalkicking. If we want to get more accurate the simplest way is to generate higher percentage shots at goal.

I think that's fourth hardest.

Forward entries still look miles off being fixed. Still doesn't look like there is any real system to how we kick inside 50.

I'm not paritcularly fussed about the suspension either way since I don't believe AJ is in our best 22, but I'm not sure what you've described is how these things are graded. They just use a matrix and I'm not really sure how they came to the conclusions they did. for Mills it's this "The Match Review Officer graded the incident as careless conduct, medium impact and high contact, leading to the one-game ban." For AJ it's this "The Match Review Officer graded the incident as careless conduct, high impact and high contact, resulting in the two-game suspension." Both Spargo and NWM left the field and were cleared after undergoing an HIA. So the grading (medium vs high) seems completely arbitrary.

We got 38k against the Swans the week before. We got 37k against the Saints at the G last year fwiw. I just find it odd that we're the only team that sells our games and has never been able to establish any kind of advantage at the ground even when we were playing finals we've been wobbly in the NT. Even North were a tricky prospect in Hobart before they became anchored to the bottom of the ladder.

I'd hazard a guess that our primary objective is financial.

I find it strange we often look like we're lacking energy and just going through the motions when we're up there. It doesn't seem like the club has ever fully embraced the NT project. Compare our results over 15 years to what Gold Coast have turned Darwin into over the past few years. It's particularly odd since under Goodwin we have generally travelled pretty well.