Little Goffy

Looks like we've got a tall defender factory to rival Adelaide's, except ours isn't a factory strictly for export! ?

I'm not going to get carried away but what I liked the most was that he, for want of a better expression, looked like Ben Brown. As in, he wasn't out of sorts, wasn't hesitant and second-guessing or only half-competing, didn't rush. Throw in some examples of very composed and immediate ball movement with competent kicks, and I feel very confident about his coming contribution. And there can be zero concern about his effect on McDonald's game, that's for sure!

6. Petracca. No butchering this week! Magnificent. 5. McDonald 4. Salem 3. May 2. Oliver 1. Pickett (9 tackles and 3 goals, what more can you ask from a small forward?) Many unlucky, but I don't think they'll feel like complaining.

Well, that day took forever. I'm mildly freaking out. Good times. Final thought before the game; in the three games Ben Brown played earlier this season, both Fritsch and McDonald kicked more than a goal-a-game better than in games without Ben Brown.

I'm currently working on a personal side-project (which might one day become a book) where I'm going through all the classics of military theory and collecting the notes and quotes which may be of interest from a football perspective. It has been a very interesting ride with a slightly surprisingly huge amount of content on cultivating behaviours, understanding the hearts of men, the nature of courage and panic, all that. There's also, of course, an awful lot on using tactics to take the initiative in a battle or at campaign level. In all of that, one thing I've never, ever come across is an endorsement of a tactic which allows your opponent to not have to worry about dealing with a counter-attack. Multiple authors have gone into quite angry rants about the psychological death that comes from having troops deployed in a strictly defensive posture. It is often described as the product of cowardice and (in various terms) groupthink on the part of officers and senior commanders who can only think in terms of simple risk and who are intimidated by the danger to their reputation if they attempt something bold and it fails. Doing the same as everyone else incurs little reputational risk even when it does fail. I think Australian football has very much fallen into that trap when it comes to pressing all the numbers back to defence and leaving a vacated forward line. For this example the situation is precisely the same in football as in the military theory; having a force deployed in a way that can threaten multiple crucial enemy positions compels the enemy to protect ALL of the various positions that force might attack, thus forcing them to distribute both garrison forces to provide delaying strength as well as an 'observation' force at least as strong as your offensive force, ready to respond. The analogy to football is pretty clear; if you have one or two forwards stay 'home' even when the ball is up the other end of the ground, the opposition then has to consider the full range of places those forwards might become a threat. Got a CHF in position? Are they going to lead out to provide a connection? In the corridor, on the wings? Are they going to lurk around the 50m line ready to provide a short lead marking target or to suddenly break towards goal to run onto the long bomb to space over their head? Even on that simple level of consideration, that one forward has just forced the opposition defence to actively consider about a hectare of the field as under threat. A second forward doesn't expand the range as much but it also makes planning that defence even more complicated. Key is - your opponents MUST respond, or they would just be giving away goals every time you broke out of defence. #letforwardsbeforwards !!!

Hf line is all Aussie... Jack Thompson, Naomi Watts, and, um, ah, hmm, Philip Adams? I only ever get two in a set and I'm usually wrong on them, too

Mid-season staggers by premiership winners. Some are definitely there, some are pretty minor and not really worth considering, and some teams had start-of-season problems. Melbourne's 3w 3l run mixes in without so much as an eyebrow raised. Richmond 2020 - not sure if going 1w, 1d, 2l to start the season counts as a mid-season slump! Richmond 2019 - round 11 to 13 - three consecutive losses (by an average margin of 45) West Coast 2018 - round 13 to 15 - three consecutive losses Richmond 2017 - round 6 to 9 - 4 consecutive losses (without passing 75 points) Footscray 2016 - round 13 to 19 - 3w 3l Hawthorn 2015 - another from the start: round 1 to 8 - 4w 4l Hawthorn 2014 - round 5 to 10 - 2w 3l Hawthorn 2013 - no slump Sydney 2012 - round 6 to 9 - 1w 3l, and again in rounds 20 to 23 - 1w 3l Geelong 2011 - round 15 and 16, consecutive losses. Collingwood 2010 - round 9 to 12 - 2l, 1d, 1w (and that draw was to 2011 Demons!) Moral of the story: Calm yourselves.

Devil's advocate in Viney's defence for that particular incident - if he had already said a number of times, "I'm fine, leave it. Leave it. Get your hand out of my face while I'm trying to gather myself after taking a hit. No, get off me," and then she's once against wiped a tissue across his face like he's a snotty four year old, then, yeah, that's reached a point where he would have to push her off. Maybe I'm just a bit sensitive to carer-patient consent after all the NDIS and Aged Care training videos I've been exposed to recently. Of course, it is also possible that Viney was just being a bit of a sulky snotty-nosed four year old. ?

The need for a bit more variety at our stoppages, especially some added class and speed, has long been a concern. Pickett is not afraid of contact and sure knows how to dance in a crowd, so I also like seeing him mixed in occasionally to confuse the opposition. I would assume the main concern is that he is still only a kid with (while crediting his personal initiative bordering on heroic this pre-season) finite endurance so there's a limit to how much we can expect him to be running all over the ground attending stoppages, hence the use just a centre bounces. He's clearly fatigued. He works his horse off every week without a lot of exciting reward and that's hard to maintain. I wouldn't put it beyond being emotional fatigue as well. His individual season has a distinct resemblance to the Demon's collective 2005 after mourning Troy Broadbridge and for a kid to lose his mother and be away from home is a much greater grief. There's only so long you can courageously push through before you go through a period where all you are feeling is the hole in your life. That's all speculation only of course. My main thought from it all is that I'm not really worried about Kozzie longer term and I hope when we bring a tall target back in for him to work with then he'll get to really enjoy football again and the rewards will flow for himself and the team.

Okay. Trying to sweep through the negatives as fast as I can... a few players had absolute stinkers and a few more were well down on what they should be expected to offer. Our forward 50 entries were mostly junk, we frequently didn't have a clear target to kick to, we had numerous brainfart kicks, and even when we had a runner bursting through the wing they had no confidence to kick it to even a one on one and instead kept hesitating and looking for the ' Positives. Hmm. Correcting the forward line problem may yet be relatively simple. Tom McDonald has definitely proven he can play as a roaming CHF and up the ground. Jackson has also once again shown he doesn't need to be plonked up in the forward line to be making a contribution. There is simply zero doubt left that Brown can come in and not disrupt out structure. Even moreso when you consider how often Fritsch was left trying to compete with the opposition's top tall defender. Brown really must come in as the 'when in doubt, at least he'll get his arms to it' target for our hesitating mids, as well as his capacity to offer good leads. Other positives... um, * even when our forward line isn't working and out mids are wasting the ball, our defence is still rock solid. * if our forward line starts working and our mids stop wasting the ball, we'll routinely double our opponent's scores.

6. Salem 5. May 4. Mcdonald. 3. Fritsch. 2. Langdon 1. Gawn Lever unlucky. Petracca's missed shots and turnovers were just too costly to include him.

I see Toby Green is still a cheat.

And then you can use it to keep birds out of your peach tree. Or your vineyard! OMG wine bags are a 360-degree natural cycle! #sustainable #drinkgreendrinkgoon

Is the football world being restored to order? Is this the return of Ninthmond?

It Mumford plays I say we send in Spargo as the ruck at the first centre bounce. Why? Because #### Mumford, that's why.

I always assumed it was because with the hair and his playing style it looks like an enthusiastic floppy-eared Beagle puppy has been allowed on the field. He's a very tough one to judge for Rising Star chances because of his versatility. His only outstanding areas stats-wise are hitouts where he has no rivals at all, contested marks where he is in the very top group, and slightly surprisingly contested possessions where he is right up there with inside mids like Tom Green. Thing is, he is also 'good' in every other category: possessions, tackles, disposal efficiency, clearances, one percenters, score involvements and even tackles inside 50. For all these things the lists go 'specialists in the role' and then there is Luke Jackson being 'best of the non-specialists'. He is the ONLY Rising Star ruckman worth mentioning, and he is also the most complete and well-rounded footballer in the entire Rising Star cohort. It's remarkable. Heh, I've actually talked myself into believing in his chances.

Solid article from the evil scum People's Liberation ABC, there. :D Just for fun I'll draw out whatever Melbourne stuff I can from the charts they've used: Just one goal a game from forward contested marks is a concern. If we can lift that just enough to make it something opponents have to think about more seriously, it makes us much harder to defend against. Most directly it would make it harder for defenders to spread to cover the various leads of Fritsch. Interesting, and good, to see that our scoring doesn't falter against the top teams in the way that Footscray or Brisbane... or Port... or Richmond... or West Coast do. Would seem that the real 'finals football' styles belong to us, Geelong and Sydney. Also interesting to see us on another extreme line with the scores from hitouts to advantage. We do just fine for our own scoring but when it comes to letting the opposition score from their good hitouts, we give away half what the next best team does and about a quarter of the average. Clearly we're a lot better at defending against a lost clearance than we were last year. Kudos to the inside mids learning to control the spaces better. Little side story if you take the time to drag your mouse over the 'scores generated from clearances' chart: Jack Viney is on 2 from centre clearances and 6 from general stoppages, despite only playing six games. Per game that puts him in the vicinity of clear outlier Jacob Hopper. Mr Viney is having some offensive impact to go with his mighty tackle counts.

The ol' disingenuous bait-and-switch, eh?

Your tactics are odious. This information is all readily available in the public domain from numerous sources.

On March 10 Australia first reached 100 total cases and just 23 new cases for the day. Two weeks later, despite rapidly increasing restrictions, the daily new case rate was wobbling between 300-500 per day while stalled in the first stage of lockdowns. When you consider further expansion at that rate of reproduction (>2000% growth in two weeks, which is in the normal range), then after another two weeks without tight restrictions we would have been looking at several thousand new cases per day and a thousand deaths a week by late April. That has been the experience of most the world, both as a description of events and as a statistical pattern. These aren't controversial or unsupported figures or claims.

Pushing the AstraZeneca recommendation back to the over-60s was based on accumulated evidence that identified the drop-off in side effect incidence was much better from age 60+ on, rather than the original estimate of 50+. There is a drop in the number of people experiencing medically significant side effects in the 50+ age group, but 60+ is half the rate of even that. If you vaccinated, say, 3 million people aged 60+, the incidence rate would mean about 300-500 people having side effects requiring medical attention and within that 300-500 there would be a proportion that would be very serious and even fatal. On the other hand, just a few weeks worth of a Covid-19 cluster spread without either large-scale vaccine coverage or lockdowns would kill hundreds - and then it would really get going. If you do know an over-60 who feels like they are being given the off-cut vaccine, just make sure they know that it is being limited to over-60s because the side effects are much, much rarer in that group. Maybe also mention that if Australia was in the septic tank situation like 90% of the world is right now, we would be slapping AZ into people's arms as fast as we could go. Being so cautious about using it is a matter of great circumstantial luxury but if we slack off too much we are inviting disaster upon ourselves.

Looking back on my earlier post I probably came across inappropriately cranky at @A_F. To begin with, I should probably have started my posted by saying 'the sentiment stripped of some hyperbole is correct both ways'! For me the key is to separate the items 'are we scoring' and 'is our forward line functioning well'. I'll start by being very clear that I think it CAN and sometimes HAS - McDonald, Fritsch and Pickett combined for 8 goals against Brisbane while McDonald, Pickett, Weideman and Fritsch shared 9 against the Dogs. But my concern is the increasing frequency of games where our mids and resting rucks are the source of our scoring while our forwards have been quiet. Fritsch and Pickett have both slowed significantly since their early season form and Weideman has been dropped after showing very little in five games. The Essendon, Collingwood and Adelaide games - clearly our three worst for the season - all shared the feature of almost no goal-scoring coming from full-time forwards.

Yep. Just by a whisker - 24 yrs 9 month V 24 years 10 months. If my estimate is right, we had eight players out there from the last four drafts despite not yet giving a debut to any of the 2020 draftees. Then we've got a fat wad of 25-years-olds who don't push the average up much - Petracca, Brayshaw, Nibbler, Langdon, Lever, Harmes and Salem, and of course Oliver at just 23 years. Our only 'old' players out there against Essendon were Hunt (26), Viney (27), McDonald (28), May (29), Gawn (29) and Hibberd (31). Just 6 players taking the field aged 26 or over.

I did say that both sentiments can be correct simultaneously. As to the bolded line; after his first six games Fritsch had 18 goals, in the 7 since then he has kicked just 10 including just one goal int he last two rounds. 'Realistic possibility' of not breaking 40 is what I said and is clearly a valid point given he would need 12 more goals in the remaining 8 rounds. That our defence is elite has no bearing on whether or not people should consider our forward line to be effective. If anything the forward deficiency is highlighted by the failure to dominate when we have such a priceless source of genuine intercept marks and quality rebounds rather than just killed contests in defence. It is clearly our weakness, it is clearly the reason why we haven't been able to put teams away and it is clearly the primary reason for both our losses this season. And, as I said, it is also an area with a very realistic prospect of getting sorted out and thereby making us unstoppable.

Both sentiments can be correct simultaneously. Our only goal-kicking forwards this year have been Mcdonald, Fritsch and Pickett. As noted previously, they've had two goals between them in the last couple of weeks and it isn't the first time they've had a collective drop-off. You'd have to check some history to find a team that finished a season on top of the ladder which also didn't have even a 40-goal forward on hand, but that's a very real possibility for us. If our forward line was functioning even to the point of three goals a game shared between the three main goal-kicking options, we'd be unstoppable. It is the weak point of our team but it is also an area we can realistically expect to see improvement.