Its Time for Another

I'll put in some extra loud ones for you mate. I really feel for you. Us interstaters don't get many of these opportunities and I really love watching the Alice game. I flew up to Darwin a few years ago for the game up there and it was an amazing experience. Am planning to get to Alice at some stage. Haven't been there for a while. It's a real shame.

It's just snowed in hell. My wife and daughter are going to join my son and I. Never happened before. Real dilemma now. I have no idea how to behave at the football. They've never seen me at a Dees game before. It's only been 28 years with the wife and this a first. To be fair it's all been O/S or Sydney but still. Any advice on behaviour management at Dees games. They're already somewhat broken in having watched me screaming at the TV but this will be different. Hopefully they play nice and I'll behave nice.

Got out to Giants stadium last year to see wins v Hawks and Suns. It's our new fortress. Bring it on. I'm furiously building a possy to go out there to give those Lions heaps. Anyone want to hear any messages. I'll just yell them out and you'll hear them on the TV. Our group will probably make up half the supporters at the ground. All 5 of us. Otherwise it's a hell hole. The equivalent of trapsing out to VFL park except finding your car is a lot easier because they don't have crowds. It only costs about $20 in tolls each way too. Big win for us Sydney siders but big $$ for the club. Would be great if AFL switched another home game to Traeger later in the year. Anything possible in this Covid era.

Surely under the circumstances the AFL will make this our home game next year so we retain the gate rather than missing it completely this year. This would be a win as it would split it up to be alternate years to the Anzac Eve game which would be much better for spreading the cashflow.

Accchhhh!!! Discussions about kick ins inevitably lead me to the horror memories of Stephen Febey's kick outs in the 2000 Grand Final. He could not kick out so that Melbourne got a possession. Every single kick out ended up in Essendon's hands and just went straight back in either for him to kick out again or a goal. Gives me the heebies just thinking about it again. Glad to say things have moved on now. Very confident we won't be seeing that this year in the big dance.

Frankly it's a seriously pointless exercise to have a thread without any creditable knowledge guessing which coach is responsible for what especially as your point seems to be mainly to try and find everything that Goodwin isn't responsible for. Why don't we just be happy that we are witnessing the biggest one season improvement since '64. There's so many reasons for it I find this exercise misdirected. It would have been better to have been a thread about what's improved. The players are saying the single most significant improvement is nothing to do with the coaches it's the playing group culture which is playing for team not individuals. To paraphrase Trac this week on SEN the culture change originated after the two loses in Cairns which made the players realise the culture was broken and needed to be fixed by them and across the club. They even spoke to Bartlett about it. He puts the success of that down to a collective maturity in the group. It's taken 3 1/2 rebuilds since 2007 to get enough players through the system to reach the current maturity which appears to be reaping these benefits. If you want to credit someone for the coaching credit Bartlett and Pert for holding faith in Goodwin's gameplan and ability. MFC history has been a coach with Goodwin's record would have been sacked by now and we'd be dealing with yet another upheavel probably with another unproven coach. For what it's worth if you go back through Goody's messaging from day one it's always been about the contest. That's what we're seeing now and that's what makes it look more sustainable than any MFC team I've seen since '64. Of course there are a lot of other changes we are seeing this year to the way they are playing and for sure various of the coaches have had a hand in that but let's praise the collective and particularly Goody for embracing the changes not hindering them.

Any body have any idea whether they are going to appeal this. I really hope they do. I can't see any reference to it anywhere. I thought there used to be an MRP section on afl.com.au but can't find anything.

At the risk of derailing the thread and turning it into a Max appreciation society. Remember this play very well particularly because the player he beat to the ball was Hickey who is 201cm compared to Max's 208cm. His agility and athleticism is off the scale for his height. I've never seen an AFL player even remotely like him. I saw his first game and thought they clearly had his height wrong because he is physically very well proportioned and too balanced as an athlete to be that height. No disrespect meant to Hickey but because of his body shape and loping running style he looks like he's the 208cm player and Max 189. Max is truly a freak of nature.

Great stuff Nasher. Even more interesting than comparing two of our games might be to compare to the Dogs who according to the stats I compiled above are by far the best centre and stoppage clearance team. The win v Blues was another typical game by them losing hitouts 23 to 42 but winning centre clearances 23 -7 but interestingly breaking even on stoppage clearances. Being a strong advocate of the importance of ruckmen I don't want to face the possible truth that the Dogs show that winning hitouts is not only not important but in fact could be a negative. It's hard to ignore that their stats appear to indicate that it is a lot more effective to setup defensively and shark the opposition's hitouts than to setup to win a clearance from your own hitouts. No doubt the rest of the comp are studying the Dogs system very closely. I have focused on Viney in the past and noticed how much structural blocking he does to create corridors for the other mids to break out from. It's not just his contribution of winning the ball himself. We seem to be missing that work as much as his own clearances.

With 7 minutes left Dogs are pulling away. Centre clearances are 21 to 5 to dogs and hitouts 23 to 38 to Blues. Of course you have to fix centre clearances

I have been worried about the centre clearances for most of the season. I posted the below stats on the Gameplan, tactics... thread but have posted again as they've now become even more relevant. Let's be clear Goody has recognised it as a real problem that needs fixing. He mentioned it after the Saints game and again last night. I know binman has a theory that they aren't that big an issue and it doesn't matter that much because we are winning. I respectfully disagree big time. Yes we are playing great footy at the moment and great defence but that is only disguising the fact that if they don't get sorted out we will not go to the next level. Both the Dogs and Port are better than us and Tigers are improving. We were lucky last night. Buddy was out of form coming back in on a wet night and they missed a series of snaps that could easily have won them the game. We shouldn't have been in that position and they wouldn't have been in that position if they didn't win the clearances so dominantly. We won't survive against top teams at the pointy end of the season if we don't fix it. I put these stats together at the end of round 6 on the differentials on Hitouts and clearances and compared the top teams to the Demons. Some have changed a bit since then and if anything they are now worse for us. It's clear we are failing to get the benefit we should from Maxy's dominance. We have the players in there. It's a strange one. We were the no. 1 centre clearance team in 2018. Melbourne Dogs Tigers Port Eagles Hitouts +147 -25 -10 +21 +54 Clearances +11 +53 4 +23 -6 C Clearances Equal +24 +12 Equal +6 Stoppages +11 +29 -8 +10 -12 I also had a look at how the top ruckmen are going. Here are the respective stats. The first Melbourne is Max, the next Jacko, Coll Grundy WCE Nic Nat then Vardy. The most interesting stat's to come out of it for me is what impact Jacko is already having as a 19yr old second ruck. The stat's show that as an example compared to Grundy Max is spending more time on the ground but attending a lot less ruck contests. I would say since round 6 Jacko is attending even more ruck contests. He is actually competing well in the contests but the effectiveness of his hitouts is below the others. The stat's are pretty self explanatory but give an interesting view of what's going on. There are other stats AOB raised after the Saints game that I'd love to see updated like metres gained from centre clearances, pressure after the clearance etc. I have no idea what's going wrong atm. I figure with the elite players we have in the centre clearances and the coaches involved they will get sorted before the end of the season. Assuming they do we are going to be a scary proposition. If we can get a proportionate benefit in clearances for our ruck domination and can clear it i50 a lot more we are going to be so hard to play against because we are now trapping it so well i50 it will make it that much harder for other teams.

Just on Maxy. Last night he won 43 hitouts to Hickey's 17. Jacko had 7 to Sinclair's 12. I understand the debate about effectiveness of hitous etc especially in this game but talk of not having him in the ruck is fanciful. I am pretty certain Max is carrying an injury. Maybe at least cracked ribs. Lynch kneed him in the kidney area in the first quarter of the Tigers game and a friend at the game said from that point on he was visibly struggling to get to contests around the ground. I'd say he's definitely playing through something.

I was originally an ologist sometime around early to mid 2000's. Went on here around the same time. My memory was different to others. I remember it being more civil over there and this place had a reputation for too much juvenile infighting. But I came over at the time of that split around 2008. Thankfully mods have done a great job cleaning things up on here and a few people who needed to be have been moved on. Quality just keeps getting better. Mind you we all have a bit more positive things to say for the first time since '64. Nowadays look here before I look at any of the press. Way better informed and intelligent researched content than any of the fourth estate rags nowadays.

binman is it fair to summarise your theory as being willing to lose more clearances in return for having better clearances when you do win.

I take your points on board and I understand where you're coming from. Your opinion appears also to be supported by Hardwick's comments about how they think the post pressure is more important than the clearance stat. However, I believe you have to take into account the relative strengths and weaknesses of each team. Nankervis is usually beaten for hitouts and often quite a lot. He's only 199 and doesn't have a leap. So Tigers by necessity have to be set up better to rely on the post hitout phase of clearances to get their control. Dogs have been on top of the ladder for a reason. I don't know that stats of their scoring from centre clearances but I bet it was the best in the Comp by a comfortable margin. You make a really interesting argument about being willing to lose more clearances in return for having better clearances when you do win. Is this your theory or have you heard this from the coaches. I can see on the face of it this has some logic. However, we have one player who is clearly the best in the league in his position for hitouts. Thats Gawn. And he should be giving us an advantage that other teams don't have. We also have 2 clearance players receiving from him who are in the top ten in the comp. While I follow your logic I still maintain we are not making the most of what arguably should be our best advantage over the rest of the comp. The advantage of centre clearances directly into our forward line with the way we are now trapping the ball i50 should elevate us to another level. I know we could argue that perhaps our defence is now our greatest strength but I think it is very reactionary to have to respond to the opposition clearances by waiting to intercept them in defence instead of getting control in the first place and being able to attack straight from the centre clearances. I guess one way to resolve this debate would be to get access to the stat of which teams score the most from centre clearances.

Have to say the weekend's game reinforced the need to sort out the centre clearances. North's dominance in the first half started from the centre clearances. The very first bounce Max did a beautiful tap right in front of Kozzie several metres from the bounce and he just got brushed aside by his opponent who spat out a handpass and they were on their way to their first goal. Interestingly Dogs are the worst team for Hitout differentials but against the Tigers they actually won them 30 to 23. Yet the centre clearances which they normally dominate were even. They won stoppage clearances 26 to 21 yet only had 43 to 57 i50's. I think there's a real argument that losing hitouts regularly enables teams to set up to defend first against opposition so they can react to where the ball falls rather than set up pre the contest and run at a spot hoping it will be there. I think it was Hardwick who again mentioned the post pressure stat again. We unfortunately don't get access to that stat but his game appears to reinforce the post clearance outcome is a more important stat than the clearances won. No idea how we can find this one out. But it was clear in the North game that they were getting repeat deep attacks by winning the early centre clearances.

Unfortunately the Edit button has disappeared. The ruck stats are very instructive on how Jacko's going. He's behind Max and Grundy in ruck contests won but right up there with Nic Nat. However, interestingly is a long way off all the other rucks in Hitouts to advantage. So you can see where some work has to be done. But these are incredibly impressive stats for a 19 year old ruckman. And these are compared to the top ruckmen in the comp. I did thebinitial post on the run last night and I've realised I left out Eagles stats. They are useful to compare Nic Nat. Here's the list with them added. Melbourne Dogs Tigers Port Eagles Hitouts +147 -25 -10 +21 +54 Clearances +11 +53 4 +23 -6 C Clearances Equal +24 +12 Equal +6 Stoppages +11 +29 -8 +10 -12 Some of these stats make you wonder about the importance of ruckmen. I'm a strong advocated but it does make you wonder. So Demons and Eagles are comfortably the best ruck winning teams. However, Dogs who are the worst at hitouts have the best clearances by a mile. Port appear to be maximising their high ruck wins. I'm guessing the Eagles large difference between centre clearances and stoppages is Nic Nat doing most of the centre bounces and probably not a lot around the ground. I suspect the Dogs set up to react to opposition hitouts rather than setup to attack from their own wins. They have massive differentials in both. Although since I set this up they have now lost to Tigers but I haven't checked those clearance stats. It is going to make a massive difference if we can start to get the benefit of our ruck dominance. Clearing the ball from centre clearances into our forward line which is now so good at trapping the ball in is going to make us a massively difficult team to play against.

The turning point in the game last night appeared to me to be when the Tigers started to get on top in the clearances. Up to that time early into the second quarter the Dogs had been dominating. I don't know how the Tigers turned this around. @binman @AxisofBob et al anyone got any idea what they did. Because whatever it is will be the key to us beating the Dogs. This raises a point I've been thinking about for a while. Clearances and particularly Centre Clearances are still a major work in progress. By all rights we should be dominating them with Gawn, Oliver, Viney, Petracca etc but we're not. In 2018 we were the top Centre Clearance team. Goody mentioned it after the Saints game as an area that needs work. I have done a bit of a summary of the stats up to the end of round 6 on the differentials on Hitouts and clearances and compared the top teams to the Demons. Melbourne Dogs Tigers Port Hitouts +147 -25 -10 +21 Clearances +11 +53 4 +23 C Clearances Equal +24 +12 Equal Stoppages +11 +29 -8 +10 We are clearly not getting the advantage we should from Max's domination. I also had a look at how individual ruckman are going. Here are the respective stats. The first Melbourne is Max, the next Jacko, Coll Grundy WCE Nic Nat then Vardy. There's some interesting stats to come out of that lot. The first is the impact Jacko is having on spreading the ruck load. You can't just look at how many hitouts Grundy has won v Gawn. You have to look at how many contests and here you can see that we are able to spread the load a lot more with Jacko compared to how much extra work Grundy has to do. The other is how little game time Nic Nat is playing. Also it shows you how much time Max must be playing out of the ruck as he has 92.5% game time compared to Grundy's 85.1% but has 311 ruck contests to Grundy's 418. The Hitout win percentage and Hitout to advantage percentage give a more accurate picture of their respective effectiveness. More to follow.

Learnt a lot about how we play from the Tigers v Dogs game last night and particularly what we did that the Dogs didn't. Reinforced a lot of what we had been talking about during the week. 1. How well we absorbed the intense Tigers pressure. Dogs lost their system under that pressure. 2. Our ability to get numbers around contests so we weren't isolated. All their numbers seem to be ahead of the ball ready to receive instead of setting up to receive defensively and release to attack. 3. The maturity to slow down and hit short targets to retain possession. Dogs kept doing play on footy all game and continually played themselves into trouble. They didn't read the state of the game and stop this like we did. 3. Our i50's have improved so much. The Dogs showed how by putting themselves under pressure up the ground their i50's were rushed. Especially final kick i50 which so often ended up handing Tigers uncontested intercepts.

I agree with you that the use of handballs wasn't a change in game plan. What I think it was, was an indication of a significant coming of age in the playing group. I think it showed that they are now able in the middle of a game to respond to a changing set of circumstances. In this case the Tigers opening with ferocious attack on the contests was leaving our players exposed and isolated and forced to dispose of the ball ineffectively under immense pressure. The first thing I believe that happened after that first 15 minutes barrage was the players, in the moment on the field, realised they had to increase the support by getting more numbers back around the contests so we were no longer isolated. Once we did that we started to turn the tide. We then used the system around the contests Jordan Lewis said he has been teaching them to have strings of players away from the contest ready to release the ball further and further into space. This is a significant development of the game plan we've been waiting for years for. It's hopefully the end of the bees to the honey pot syndrome. Secondly we realised the way to retain control of the ball was not to always kick long to release pressure which is how I've seen MFC play forever and usually means top teams like the Tigers end up with our clearing disposals. Instead we used handballs to clear into space and then look much further down the ground and if there aren't clear options kick short thus keeping possession. Salem is the master of this. I think this is the single most significant change in the way the team is playing that gives me the most confidence they are becoming a top 4 side. Running in numbers is the key to all of this. You can't run back deep in defence to help out or far in attack to create options if you don't have the fitness. You don't have the fitness until you've had enough years in the system and you have the right fitness people training you. We finally have a critical number of players who have been around long enough. We should have been here in about 2011-12 after the rebuilds started at the end of 2007. Instead of that we've waited through 3 1/2 rebuilds. I think there's only about 3 players left from when Roosy started. Gawn, T Mac, Viney. Salem's draft was the first under Roosy. There's so much else that's gone into this finally happening. But it mainly seems to be a critical mass of players reaching the number of games necessary to understand the game enough to respond to changing circumstances mid game and make the right decisions. Without that you have nothing. Those decisions are taught by the right coaches which we now appear to have. This week they are likely to face a lot less pressure at the face of the contest so will probably be able to get into space away from contests without needing to handpass as much. This won't be a change to the game plan it will be a response to the state of the game.

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Jordan Lewis on SEN this morning was asked if Buckley goes from Collingwood who does he know who he thinks could take over. Straight off he said Yze then Sam Mitchell. What a nightmare. I've gone from revelling in the ever increasing debacle over there to suddenly hoping they start winning enough games (Queens Birthday excluded of course) so that they resign Buckley and don't go near our Ooze. Heats going to be on if that happens. Do we lose him to Collingwood or do we do something drastic to Goody just when he's got the place up and about. Maybe create a succession plan. He's familiar with them after all. That would be pretty unprecedented for a team that's becoming up and about. I suppose Collingwood did exactly that to Malthouse when they brought Buckley in. I must say Goody looks like somethings not quite right at the moment. Watching footage of him around the playing group at the end of the Tigers game he looked almost down instead of what you'd expect, beaming with satisfaction.

I was interested to revisit the Lever deal after there's been quite a lot of coverage about him this week and one article talked about us overpaying for him. I'll put my hand up and say I thought two first rounders was way over for him, however, you can't just look at the headline swap and not take into account the other picks. I've had a closer look at the deal. I won't go into all the incredibly complex deals around all the swaps etc but in effect this was the end result in players. We effectively got Lever, Petty and Sparrow. Sparrow included our 2018 pick 37 on top of the Lever deal. They effectively got Bryce Gibbs and I can't really work out what else. The two first rounder picks we gave up became :- 2017 pick 10 Carlton picked Lochie O'Brien 2018 pick 19 Carlton picked Liam Stocker. In the end it looks like an extremely good deal.

@Binman I rarely disagree with you but in this case I agree with BDA. I would look at the best team for the finals. Assuming BB is fit and in form he’s got to be in that team. He’s going to be a huge bonus with the change in rules. We’re playing a KPH short. You can’t compare Jacko to him as a FF. This next 4 games is the best run we’re going to have for the rest of the season. it’s the best chance there will be to build the synergy with him in the team. We won’t lose because he’s brought in. IMO it will be a big mistake not to do it now. The Doggies have growing injuries and have a short backline. He could make a massive difference. Imagine if we beat them. That lid will be wizzing into the stratosphere. Bring BB in. Just do it.