Adam The God

We'll be putting together a bigger contract for Petty. And then we have the emergence of our young stars like McVee, Windsor and JVR. It'll be interesting to see if we can get a few guys to accept unders so we can target a FA or two.

I'd prefer we start by allowing McVee to step into Salem's role at the back of stoppages. Rivers did a lot of that last year. Particularly, if we play a more aggressive press, because it'll enable him to have more disposals higher up the field and across the high half forward/50 metre arc. We were pretty aggressive against West Coast and he got some possessions in the front half and was devastating. The problem in our back half is that he has become an elite 1v1 player, which means we have to find someone (Woey? AMW?) that can play that lockdown defender role on the likes of Cameron, Greene, Bolton etc. to replace him. @Lucifers Hero comment on the Salem comparison is interesting, because he seems like a Salem clone in many ways now that you've said that.

I'm hoping it's season over for the GCS by the time we play them in Round 23.

I think Turner is a bigger presence, certainly in the air, but Joel had x factor in the air and at ground level. It's a pretty good call this.

Interestingly, we've had some debate on this thread about whether we simply went 1v1 at stoppages or +1 at stoppages (as opposed to -1). In almost all these examples, we have a +1 at contest. But you can also see, most of our numbers are defensive side of the contest. Whitey's Twitter is great. I'm really liking the analysis.

You don't think we have the cap space? I reckon we do, it's just whether we think it's better spent on another area of the ground or ultimately a better player.

I like the Bolton idea because he's two years younger and fills that void we have of players in that age bracket, but he's also more damaging and consistent. But I can see what you mean by Ryan, and fair enough.

Nah, I mean, when a tackler comes at him, he panics. No one else in our back 7 panics.

Goody mentioned in the post presser that we've looked to address our wet weather footy, so I'd say it was just this pre season.

And we nailed pick 3 too. Incredible draft by JT.

I'd get Bolton.

I disagree. I think he's always panicked. He's also often the one turning it over by hand and foot. But he's still a great reader of the play and excellent 1v1.

I reckon Turner forward is the future and the FD will now be hoping that Adams can fill in defence when TMac and May retire. I'd prefer we go JVR, Turner and a 2nd ruck/forward (Verrall?), with Petty Lever and May (eventually Adams?).

May really struggles with frontal pressure. Completely panics. And if the ball is on the ground, forget it. That said, he's always struggled with this.

Perhaps brutal was the wrong word for his game, let's substitute that for disciplined. He clearly plays his role otherwise you'd be calling for his head and he wouldn't be playing.

That was very derpsy of me haha. Apologies.

It means we're more likely to win in inclement conditions, because we don't rely on May and Lever taking intercept marks in quite the same way that we used to. Of course, they are still important parts of our defence, but we're less vulnerable in wet conditions because we've learnt to score in different ways - ie ideally, we're turning the ball over in our forward half or between the arcs.

Who for? Before you say Sparrow, Tom plays a brutal defensive mid role. Can Laurie play that? I don't think so. So who else?

Good old, Kingy. Let's hope he doesn't tip us this week. He has NFI.

We were super aggressive pushing up last night too and in the first quarter our defence looked really exposed a few times. It looked very 2018ish last night at times. Not in a bad way, because our personnel is vastly better than 2018.

Yeah, I heard that on the replay too, but at the game, it looked even to me.

I think our stoppage set up last night was purely for Essendon. They like to chain out of the stoppage with hand balls. By setting up on the defensive side of the stoppage, we constantly nullified their quick exits and chaining. I must admit, I'm not convinced we brought up an extra to the stoppage, I'm pretty sure we played even numbers. (happy to be corrected on that front)

My watch for the rest of the year is on our ground ball game. Another +15 result this week in ground ball gets. Our turnaround in form has coincided with starting to smash teams in this stat. Interestingly, we won most of our games earlier in the year losing this stat consistently, but as a rule, across 2021-2023, ground ball gets were a really good indicator of victory.

If Jefferson's out, I wonder if that means he'll play against Freo? Otherwise why?

We heat Freo in the rain this time last year in Perth, so I think it'd help our bigger mids versus their smaller mids.