Thanks to all who provide training reports over the summer, it's greatly appreciated to myself and others unable to attend. I have noticed almost every report touches on drills involving our ball movement, particularly forward of 50 and entering the forward 50. It seems as though the coaching team have identified this as our biggest area of weakness over the past two seasons. Having watched our rise and fall between 2018 and 2019 like a hawk, picking apart our strategy with and without possession to understand where we could improve, I landed on the fact that we are just so easy to score against in transition. When the ball was turned over, we simply had no capacity to set up and form of defensive mechanism to prevent a scoring opportunity for the opposition.
Now, this was an area of concern for me in 2018 when we were supposedly flying also. We got torched by the sharper teams such as Richmond and Collingwood, hence the "they can't beat a top 8 team" tag that followed us the entire way through the 2018 campaign, right up until we beat an out of sorts Geelong and Hawthorn with no O'Meara and Mitchell with one shoulder. I'm curious to know if any of the track watchers can report on this aspect of our game. How is our team defence looking? Do we think it's simply a matter of fitness? Is there a significant portion of time being allocated to fixing this deficiency?