layzie

Oh boy, here we go..

At this point any return involving Steven May shouldn't be headlining the nightly sport report.

His hardness and outside game was what impressed me. I liked the move early on but Serong definitely came into the game in the 2nd half.

I've all too often experienced those days of starting like a natural, losing your swing somewhere during the round and then feeling like the rest of the round is a waste of time. Wanting to force shutdown and fast forward to the next one.

I still think Tom is a ways off being a week in week out competent second ruck. I thought he worked hard in this game and did position himself nicely at times, it was an adequate performance and for this he should get another week for sure. We need to see a bit more but I'm willing to give him that chance.

Great to see us score 5.2.32 from centre bounce and get a leg up there but my main intrigue with the us this year is what happens when this is taken away from us in a game. I look at Wheel O Ratings stats from this game and compare it against the Rd 1 game against GWS and I'm encouraged by this one in particular. Score origin from Defensive half: Rd 1 V GWS - 1.1.7 Rd 6 V Freo - 7.1.43 I am looking forward to seeing Wheel O's chain from D50 scores in the coming weeks as this will really allow us to see how the transition game is coming along.

I just don't see defence as the long term position for Howes. Even back when he was drafted I saw him developing into a wing/half forward type due to his athleticism and skill overhead. I think it's great that he's had this stint down back to learn to see the game from that perspective but I would still really like him to end up further up the ground as a Gunston type.

His game in Adelaide that year will forever be etched in my mind. His acceleration out of packs was next level and the phrase 'he had the ball on a string' gets used a lot but he literally looked like he had the ball on a string, every time he burst away from the contest and gathered, the ball would always seem to bounce back up to him and never away. It was magic, one of the best individual performances I've seen from anyone in a Melbourne jumper. We've had a lot of great individual performances in losses but if there is one that always wish got us over the line and could change it, it's this one.

Absolutely Roost It. Getting an all-in unconditional commitment from a player that has had his issues with the club when we've just gone through probably our worst patch in 5 years is a big deal and it can have a flow on effect to others. The buy-in looked like it was there on Sat, let's see if we can string a few together now.

If Kozzie goes it's undoubtedly going to be one of those painfully hard ones to take, right up there with the Wiz. Performances like Saturday won't help this but if the worst does happen I would really urge everyone to take the approach of "Don't be sad that it's ending, be happy that it happened". Much harder to to implement this than it looks but we've had some great years from him and for that I know I'll always be eternally grateful.

Didn't get to see a lot of him at Casey but do recall he finds a lot of footy. Reckon he'd make an AFL list DemonFrog?

Shout out to Harry Petty in this game, I'm sure others have praised him for his performance but I really thought he came to play. Contested well and helped us keep it in there and he gave us some much needed movement with leads straight at the ball carrier. I also wanted to make an observation on his set shooting, this was 2023 level Petty and he was kicking through the ball beautifully. I paid very close attention to his kicking routine last year after a few early misses and I'm of the firm belief that he was really hindered by his foot rehab + no full pre season at that point. I think it was screwing his routine up a lot. because each time he took a set shot he seemed to splay his foot out outwards slightly at the last second and missing the target by a lot. He now seems to have much better control of that foot back.

If you're a golfer that regularly slices but has your swing somewhat honed in then yes I agree. If you're slicing one minute, hooking the next and occasionally hitting it fat then you have real problems!

Smashed uncontested possessions this week 252 to 204. I think it set the tone from the start that we were willing to work. But why is it that when we've been beaten in this area this year that we look so poor? What is it about kick-marking against Melbourne that makes us easy to play against? I hope to see us at least break even in this stat for weeks to come.

Hell yeah!

For the quality of ball movement it was a decent trade off

Thanks so much for posting this mate. Got a bit emotional seeing the Wiz speak the way he did about the club.

Surprise sur-god-damn-prise

It's it's, it's a Bison!

Gawn Pickett Bowey Viney T-Mac Petty

If you told me that we'd kick over 100 with no Fritsch and JVR I would have told you to run around Fed Square naked for a few hours.

Just heard on the radio Max say at 3QT "We ain't losing this" If Max Gawn says we ain't losing this, you better just take it to the bank.

Are we still deathriding Freo?

Finals here we come

It's been a long time