Akum
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Everything posted by Akum
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Sounds like we've again learned nothing from how the Saints beat us last year.
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Re Watts & co-captains & picking Weid: Don't mind him making mistakes - in fact, if he doesn't make mistakes, he's probably not doing it right. As long as he puts his hand up when he does - like he expects the players to do - and learns from them. The last guy who was confronted with the task of transitioning from Assistant Coach to Head Coach was constitutionally incapable of acknowledging his mistakes & learning from them. It's a tough gig. Hope Goody's made of better stuff.
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Oh good. We made both Acres & Lonie look like superstars last year.
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Saints haven't picked Longer so they're going with a makeshift 2nd ruck too. Also interesting that they've gone with 2 tall forwards with one on the bench like we have. Saints know Etihad, and they pick their teams and play it to purpose, so we've probably done the right thing. Though I do agree with the bolded bit. It's all very well 'experimenting' with Spencer in preseason, but doesn't make sense to give him 3 out of 3 games, while the back-up ruck doesn't contest a single hit-out in the preseason.
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So, last year no Oliver, Lewis, Salem, Stretch, Melksham & (maybe) Joel Smith. And instead we had Grimes, VdB, M. Jones, BenKen, White & (maybe) Harmes. This year's cohort sounds much better on paper. However, the wild card is that this time there's some level of doubt around Frost, Jetta, Tyson, Jeffy, Watts & Kent.
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Agree in general. If we turn in any sort of reasonable performance, this is probably the game that winning or losing means the least for our prospects for the season. On the other hand, would be hugely frustrating to lose in exactly the same way as every time before. Let's at least show that we've learned something.
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Still get the feel that we're being prepared for picking Spencer & leaving out Watts.
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Another reason to love Elise O'Dea. Cat Phillips takes a very good contested mark in the middle of the ground & is wondering what to do. While everyone else rests & watches, O'Dea sprints from half-back, runs past Cat who handballs in front of her. By the time she meets the ball and picks it up she's sprinted a good 50 metres, late in the game. She tries to sidestep an opponent (was it Chelsea Randall?) then realises she doesn't have the strength in her legs to take off, so has to kick it quickly. But she manages to get enough distance on the kick from tired legs to get it out the back of the contest between Aliesha Newman & Angie Foley (Foley who'd brilliantly outmarked Daisy in the goal square earlier that quarter). This allowed Newman to get out the back and hit the ball at speed and she was good enough to do the rest. If O'Dea was happy to sit back & watch like everyone else, it might not have gone anywhere near goal. It was fantastic play by Newman to get the opportunist goal that Jeffy would have been proud of, but equally great lead-up play by O'Dea to get it to her. All this emphasises your point, CBDs. It's not just a matter of scrambling it forward and then scrapping a goal. Many of the passages of play, at all parts of the ground, are extremely good and would do credit to any team. The improvement in just half a dozen games is, as you say, amazing.
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I'm aware that ENYAW is just trying to stir the possum. But there's a point that has to be made about this old chestnut. But the major factor in women's football is that the extra sponsorship and advertising dollars it could generate for the AFL could be massive, equalling and surpassing the revenue generated by the men's comp. Surely a major factor for equal pay in tennis would be the huge advertising revenue that women like Serena & Sharapova attract, even though the men might bring more people through the gate; this would therefore boost the broadcasting revenue too. A thriving women's competition allows the AFL to negotiate a much higher price from the FTA & pay TV rights, because of the extra advertising opportunities it gives to use the AFL to market a huge range of products to the half of the population that men-only AFL doesn't reach. The interest in women's football among the general public is way out of proportion to the crowd sizes. And that's the point - it's not the crowd sizes that matter, it's the capacity of women's football to boost total incomes into the sport. And on this basis, when women do get increased pay until they reach equity, it will be because they've deserved it, not because they've had it handed to them.
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If Adelaide only beat the Pies by a couple of points, their percentage will go down a lot, especially if the scores are near the recent scores for each team you've given above. The more the Pies kick, the better, even if the Crows win. For example, if Crows win 44 points to 42, their percentage will come down to about 159%. Which puts it much more within range than 160%. If Pies kick 32 points again, Crows would have to kick about 52 to maintain their current percentage. Freo have conceded an average of 38 points a game. If we can go about 2 goals better than that, and hold them to under 2 goals, we're in with a chance. On the other hand, we could have a problem with the 2 or 3 goals that we seem to concede every game to appalling umpiring decisions. To give ourselves a chance to get over Adelaide even if they win, we'll still need to kick our biggest score of the season while we hold Freo to a very low score. That just means that they'll have to be firing from the first bounce and keep it up until the final siren. We're quite capable of kicking 2 or 3 goals in a quarter, we just don't seem to be able to sustain that over 4 quarters.
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Thanks, I forgot about her. It wasn't helpful at all for her to be played in the last line of defence last week.
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Whatever happens, look forward to seeing them play well for 4 quarters instead of 2 or 3. And if Brooke Patterson's come in, who's missing from last week?
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If we're gonna play Spencer, it means we've already played into their hands.
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IIRC T.Mac strained both his quads early in that game.
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Great get. This should be the standard. My point is, I hope it wasn't Watts that got spoken to this time.
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Don't know about anyone else, but I'm really going to miss watching this team after the next week, or hopefully two weeks. It seems that we're just getting used to the players, the way they play, and they're just starting to gel as a team, and it will be over. The reason I really like Elise O'Dea & Jas Grierson is that, after starting fairly slowly, at some point (probably at some time in the second half of the Collingwood game) a light seems to have flashed in their heads and they suddenly seemed to realise that they were capable of playing to a much higher standard, and now they both really take the game on. The same could be said of younger players like Lily Mithen, Deanna Berry, Alyssa Mifsud and Kat Smith, who have all shown plenty, as well as newbies to the game like Cat Phillips, Lauren Pearce & now Aleisha Newman. I don't think it's a coincidence that since O'Dea & Grierson have improved, it's freed up Daisy too - other teams can't double-team Daisy any more because they also have to tag Elise, whose ball use is just as dangerous, and Jas provides the run and ball use out of defence that we thought we'd need Daisy for, allowing Daisy to spend more time in midfield where she can do more damage. So next year we could have three Daisys - Daisy and "O'Deasie" and "Jasey"!
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No Saty, I was just going on DeeSpencer's report: For whatever reason, I wouldn't be surprised to see Spencer in & Watts out, with something like this as the excuse.
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For whatever reason, I can see them picking Spencer & Weideman and dropping Watts. Rightly or wrongly, being pushed aside by Hulett in a marking contest is exactly the sort of thing that won't go down well with Goodwin. And whatever the drawbacks, which are obvious to many of us, to picking Spencer, they simply won't let it go. And to simulate a true marking contest in the square, they'll need one tall defender in front, one body-to-body and one coming over the back. One-on-one duels in the goal square simply won't happen unless we move the ball about twice as fast as we've done so far.
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We got a really good lesson from WCE about how to win at a relatively narrow (compared to the MCG) ground like Etihad. The trick is: * To get our forwards one-on-one as much as possible, by attacking fast & direct through the corridor. * To slow the opposition down as much as possible by closing down the corridor at all costs. We won't beat an Etihad side by going tall and slow, or by attacking slowly & patiently around the boundary line. We have to won the corridor. Last season Saints did a great job of closing it down. The Dogs had a great variation of the "high bomb to the square" when their attack was slowed down. They had only one or two tall forwards (Boyd or Redpath, I think), but bombed it with enough hang time that it allowed their 4 small forwards plus a few mids to get to the fall of the ball. So when the ball came off the hands of the pack, as it will at least 9 times out of 10 for the high bomb, either a small forward would pounce, or the defenders were hopelessly crowded and couldn't move it out. In other words, their intention in bombing it wasn't to win the ball in the air, but to win the ball on the ground.
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Is JT playing on Sunday? Or is he the emergency again?
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If Watts, Garland & Jetta are out & Spencer, Weideman & Harmes are in and we lose, it'll be full Freddy K.
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Sorry, but it's just as possible that one of the assistant coaches came up to him while he was getting changed and said, "Jack, this is our plan for you today ..."
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JLT Round 4, Thursday 9th March - West Coast at Subiaco
Akum replied to McQueen's topic in Melbourne Demons
The other factor is that we couldn't have done any more to play into their hands. The WCE game plan is built to suit their long narrow Subi ground, which is another reason they're harder to beat there. Their defensive strategy is to play for turnovers across their HB line - it's not an accident, they plan for them. The "Weagle web" together with the 20m less width of the ground make the difficult task of accurate delivery into the i50 "funnel" almost impossible. Then when they move it forwards, they do it quickly and have 20m or so more ground in which to get it over the back. We played into their hands by going far too tall in the forward line, and by playing an extreme zone defence, giving the likes of Le Cras & Kennedy far too much latitude. And we seemed to be totally unprepared for their "slingshot" rebounds, they ran it through the middle unopposed so many times. So if their game plan worked so well, helped by the usual extremely generous home-town umpiring, we must have got a fair bit right to get so close. Perhaps our style of play is highly efficient, in that it doesn't have to be done brilliantly the whole time in order to bear fruit. -
Really liked the contributions from a lot of the younger players. Kat Smith was very good this week, and showed just how good she's going to be - such a cool head for one so young. Mithen, Grierson & Berry, who although not yet 20, seem to put in reliable efforts in every game. And Aleisha Newman - wow! It was good in the second half to see Rocky Cranston make a big contribution too. After her suspension in the first round, she seemed a bit tentative about using her strength and aggression, but she got a lot right in the last half. Hope she keeps it up. And I thought Lauren Pearce was good this week too, despite being sling-tackled and hitting her head, without getting a free for it, as it would have been in every other game of AFL played anywhere since the Trengove/Dangerfield fiasco. Surely a woman's head is "sacrosanct" too??
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Have the two Adelaide players been cited for the head-hits?
