KozzyCan

Was statistically one of the best ball users by foot in the comp last year when he was playing midfield. Trained there all preseason only to be kicked out so Viney and Oliver could take all the minutes. I agree that the list needs a fair bit of change, to the point that we're getting into rebuild territory. In that case I dont think Goodwin is the right guy for the job anyway. Always had favourites and we'd need a development coach.

Sparrow was never much better than those guys. Now we're trying to turn him into a tagger because we let all the guys go who could actually play that role. Its a blunder.

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A lot of the guys you're campaigning against are the ones that were keeping them out of the side. We'd be a lot better off with one of them playing Sparrow's role.

Would happily drop Viney, he's a fading star and I don't think there's much of a place for him in our new system unless he can add more to his game. Give Rivers and our young players more opportunity in the midfield. Its true our depth is poor. Shame we lost Bedford and Jordon, amongst others. Funny how those guys are flourishing at new clubs under different systems.

Are you always this patronising? Good lord. This is like watching someone have an argument with themselves in the shower.

Neeld also moved on a bunch of players. Roos was basically chucking out the trash he brought in.

Dead last on the ladder. Yeesh.

Plenty of examples of teams being able to change much more successfully than we have. Its a [censored] excuse for a team that expected to play finals this year. But, yes the Eagles also failed. Hopefully we act before we drive our list into the ground like they did.

Windsor should definitely play in the middle. Need his speed and class to burst away from stoppage. Completely wasted at half back right now.

Yeah I don't buy the 'change is hard' thing at all. Plenty of teams change the way they play over a single off-season.

The Love thing always felt pretty fake.

They might have undersold it...

Couldn't have said it better. Absolutely does my head in.

I've said this before but to me it looks like we've overcomplicated things in the process of trying to play a completely different way rather than having a simple gameplan that we can perfect and then build on top of. I think the players are getting confusing/conflicting instructions which is why all they keep making poor decisions and second-guessing themselves. I don't think we're well drilled at all in how we're supposed to be playing.

Yeah clips like that is why I scoff at the notion that we don't have the players to play an attacking game style. We've had 50 inside 50s two weeks in a row, we're currently rated 3rd in the competion for ball movment but we still haven't figured out a simple forward set up. Our players just bomb it out of contests rather than taking an easy handball or moving the ball laterally. These are not terribly difficult things to fix, most clubs can do it, but we struggle with it so much.

I've colour coded this list for how I see them. Green are guys I expect and hope will have long term careers. Yellow are guys who still have a bit to prove but have potential. Red are guys I see as little more than depth and I doubt will be on a list in three years. Out of that we appear to have a decent core of midfielders and small defenders for the future and some so-so KPP's. Need more small forwards and simply must improve our spine, especially in the forwardline. My other worry is leadership. We have very few players underneath Gawn, Viney and Lever who look like captain material. Guys like Lindsay and Tholstrup appear to have some potential as leaders but they are about 5 years away from being ready for that responsibility. If we do go for a full rebuild we need to do what we did when Roos came in and find some leaders from other clubs.

Nah, appointing our own for the sake of it is silly. Board members and presidents should be supporters because it's a passion project for them but employees should just be the best person for the job.

Now it's all about the third quarter against a battling Essendon side in a game we got comfortably beaten in. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Feels like we're going to be hearing about the third quarter for years.

I'm definitely interested in Bruce. Came to the Lions as a midfield coach after they'd bungled their third finals series in a row, said in an interview when he joined his major focus would be their running patterns. That year they make a prelim from 6th, the following year the make the Grand Final, then last year they win the flag. This year they are top of the ladder, undefeated after 5 games. I remember watching the lions during 2023 thinking about how easily they seemd to be able to move the ball, always seemed to have players in space. Hope we interview him.

Even if we win 2-3 of our next games it's only going to buy Goodwin a month or two. Our draw is brutal after we play West Coast. It could get really ugly.

Pretty sure he had a baby last year and his partner wanted to be closer to family. Just reading between the lines it's not unlikely she was experiencing some PPD.

Oliver was okay for about a month until he hurt his hand and he was awful for the rest of the year. Should have put him in for surgery but I reckon the club was afraid he would go off the rails again. Pretty poor situation for us to find ourselves in. Big picture, I think we've managed the egos of our stars horribly since the flag and it's coming back to bite us in a very big way. We tried to sweep things under the rug to keep the premiership side together rather than making some tough decisions and now it's all catching up with us.

Sure but you still need to draw a line somewhere even for the greats. The main issue is that we basically gave Oliver the 'shape up or ship out speech' and he threw it back in our face over the pre-season and we still had him back in the side for the first game of the season. Every other player on the list who is doing the right thing is seeing that and thinking 'why bother?'