Akum

Fair enough, you did mention in the OP that it wasn't put in a negative way. Perhaps in hindsight, "Hard Done By" may not have been the best title to the thread, especially when you quote JW, of all players. Because it's given a number of posters a golden opportunity to have another free whack at him. It would be hard to think of a more negative title. The rebukes you've copped on this thread are tender by comparison.

That's the whole point - you wouldn't play someone as decoy if they were a legitimate target. Most teams would pick this up in the first 10-15 mins & either shut down the space, giving them an extra man in a crucial part of the ground (CHB). Or would just put their 6th defender (not their CHB) to follow them. Once that happens, the jig is up, and no point in persisting with the decoy. That's why I think Roos must have been surprised that it worked so well for so much of the game. I like Dimma, but he's not a great match day coach, and the Tiges' defenders aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. Maybe by him getting the early Supergoal, they thought he was better than he is, without asking themselves "why is this guy the decoy?" To sum up: Pedo did well in the decoy role on Friday, but I doubt we'd ever be so lucky again to get away with it so well.

" " (speechless)

Do you mean "Subway" or "the subway"?? And what's wrong with the pub? Biff, any sightings??

Great post all round. Was going to say I agree with it, but it's not a matter of agreeing or not - it's a statement of fact(s). I think every Demon supporter would love nothing better than for JW to really step up this year. And getting back to the thread topic - if he plays to anywhere near his potential, that would take us a long way towards where we want to go.

Must be scintillating conversation between these two Gumbys!

If I were Dimma I'd be very very worried.

By far the best post I've seen on this subject. For the past 2 seasons you could say "toxic" rather than "dysfunctional", but it doesn't matter that much. The value of the thread is now restored.

What I liked most about Trengove's game was the number of times things came to a stop because there was nobody in good position, and Trengove was the one who came gut-running from a long way away to make position for the next pass & keep the possession chain going (the other one who was very good at doing this, by the way, was Georgiou). Just intelligent, accountable footy that maintains possession. He's also, the vast majority of the time, a good decision-maker when he has the ball, and he showed this during the game too.I think this is Trengove's thing - so often the right person in the right position at the right time to do the right thing - take a great forward mark & convert, or a saving mark in defence, or punch the ball through for the winning point, and so on. Very Bartel.

Good points and agree with all of them. But I think even Roos must have been surprised that it actually worked the whole game & that Astbury (or whoever) just kept chasing him the whole game, leaving the space open.

He played the decoy role well. Pretty dumb defenders (and coach) to let themselves be decoyed all match, in 2014. To get away with that against a smart defence (or coach), he'd have to hold the 4 uncontested marks he dropped, 2 of which spilled over the boundary line. If he held those marks, it would be worth following him, rather than just letting him run away and holding the space. Great kick for goal though. But I doubt we'd get away with it again, unless he contributed more.

Absolutely agree. SD, you've painted Jack as a real whinger when I know 100% for sure that whingeing is just not in his nature. As others have expressed, they're just rarin' to go in 2014. You've left Jack wide open for the peanuts to have a free kick at him again. For God's sake, if you're going to report a conversation with a player, don't leave it so open to misinterpretation. Think, and read it back, before you post.

This is the absolute crux of the matter. Everything else -including skills - builds from here.

If it were me, I'd be so blissed out for days after that 10-goal win that I'd forget all about who I needed to take revenge on. So I hope you're made of sterner stuff. And that you've got it all written down.

Still think it relies more heavily on relentless running to make position, and it's only when this isn't done that the kicker is forced to choose between kicking long to a contest (i.e. giving up possession) or attempting a much higher risk pass to retain possession. I agree that there will be "trying times", but I think this is more because the good teams will simply overwhelm us with pressure, and because they will have much more of the ball and use it better. What we do have is a good foundation of a game style, but it's just a foundation at this stage. There's still a lot of fine tuning to be done. Even against Richmond, there were times when we were not able to move the ball forwards & were forced to keep kicking it sideways for too long, or when a promising forward move came to a dead stop, probably because nobody was running into space forward of the ball. The forwards were slow to react to fast switches, which are supposed to catch the defence off-guard, but not the forwards as well. In soccer (which, let's face it, is the source of this game style), the whole point about sharing it around at the back is to be able to create openings and launch attacks. But, as the i50 stats show, we couldn't do this. And as the game went on, their mids were too often able to break through the stoppage and stream forward down the corridor under no pressure, which is why it ended up such a close game despite our overwhelming possession advantage. So our stoppage set-ups need a lot more work.

I thought the defence looked better organised when he was on the field than when he wasn't. The thing about him is his positioning. He rarely got caught out of position defensively, he made great position when we had the ball, he backed up really well, and he uses his body positioning really well in one-on-ones, even against much bigger opponents. It's that unmeasurable "footy nous" factor again; he plays like a veteran.

Really like this post. Roos' game style is based by players without the ball running hard, long & often to make good position. It doesn't rely on everybody to be an elite kick, but it does require everybody to run & make position. It's only when this fails to happen that there is lots more pressure on the kicker and things start to get a little shaky. A number of turnovers happened because nobody made good position so the kicker had to take a much more risky option. A number of times, Bail was able to lose his opponent simply by running long and hard and smart. Bail's value is that he possesses the unusual combination of endurance with speed; the others are Jones & Nicho. We also have a few with excellent endurance: Trengove, Cross and McDonald. Cross usually won the Bulldogs' 3km trials, at a club who I would have thought had a reputation for hard running; he only finished 3rd or 4th in ours. So it plays to our strengths. It will take a lot of fine tuning for us to be a really dangerous team - I too am worried about how many extra possessions we had to get to manage a close win. But it's frankly amazing how quickly they've got the basic building blocks into place.

I thought the midfield's performance on Friday was even better than it looked, because: * They were playing to a losing ruck - the Tiges' mids got a lot of help from their rucks, but ours didn't. * We didn't seem to bother to tag their playmakers (especially Cotchin & Martin) who were often able to get into the open, while Jones always seemed to have a hard tag.

I thought there were quite a few monumental howl-ups that led to goals, and by some of the best kicks - Strauss, Dunn, Trengove, Frawley - and they were just about all because of misjudging the pace of kicks. It's just that with the team performing so much better overall, they're not the disaster they've been in the past. The thing I liked was that when Richmond did apply more pressure, our game held together pretty well & we kept going, even after a bad turnover. The game style relies on constant running by 2 or 3 players downfield to make position for a pass, and at times when we stopped doing this, it did start to look a bit shaky. As was pointed out, Frawley's bad turnover was the result of the player downfield not running hard enough towards the boundary line, so that he was forced to turn inboard and turned it over. There was another time when Dunn did a great switch and found (I think) Trengove in lots of space on the other side, but there was clearly nobody running for him further upfield, so he had to turn and chip it sideways. It happened more than once that when the defenders switched the ball, the forwards were all caught flatfooted on the other side of the ground, rather than read what was happening and run hard to make position. But these are just fine-tuning problems. The point is that once the right basic game style (seems to be Roos' preferred expression for it) is in place, it's not difficult to fine-tune it (but no amount of fine-tuning will help the wrong game style).

Is it just me or are the trolls particularly lively today? Must be a Valentine's Day thing.

... mainly because if they go into meltdown when they lose a practice match, what will they be like when we thump them in a real game?

... And they'll whinge about it afterwards. And before. And probably during. It's North we're talking about.

This is the right idea. It's not a matter of having "Game Plan A" and "Game Plan B" and so forth. It's a matter of having a "Plan B" (or contingency plan if you like) for when an opposing team has sussed and totally neutralised your game plan in the first few minutes of the game. What do you do then? Because if you just keep playing to your one-and-only Game Plan, you're going to get slaughtered. Which is exactly what happened last year. For example, it became blindingly obvious under Neeld that we were instructed to kick it long down the line to a contest, and in most games we played, the other team not only countered it from very early in the game, but fed off it, moving the ball quickly through the vacant corridor, knowing they could take risks because we could never hurt them on the attack with such a stupidly rigid game plan. If the instructions were "you just keep doing what you're told", and anybody who dared to take the initiative and did the unexpected was harshly dealt with - well, you get a season like 2013! Doesn't happen by accident. It's not "OK boys, we switch to Game Plan Q!" It's "If the other team is able to exploit our game plan, here's how we tweak it so we stay in the game." Cos if we can't tweak it when we need to, we're gonna get slaughtered.

I thought Bailey had been given a year's extension to his contract during 2010, partly to head off any media speculation about his future in the final year of his contract. I also recall there being some discomfort among some Demonlanders about that, on the grounds that if the Board really had faith in him as our coach into the future, they would have simply offered him a new 3-year contract. On the other hand, the extension seemed to indicate that there were misgivings about him, that they really weren't sure whether he was our future coach or not. In other words, the extension meant that his position really wasn't as secure as it seemed.

Perhaps, but when it did finally come down to a Bailey vs Schwab situation, the Board backed Schwab & sacked Bailey. If he'd confronted them earlier, the odds are that the same would have happened, and the only thing that would have "turned out differently" is that it would have happened earlier than it did. I've always wondered whether 186 was a horribly misguided ploy by the players to bring "Bailey vs Schwab" to a head, hoping the BOard would back the coach, not realising that in such a situation, any Board is just about obliged to always back their CEO (who is often their only source of information) against anybody, unless they have watertight information to the contrary from elsewhere. So Bailey was always "coaching to instructions", & could never really do what he wanted. And as soon as he did "take on Schwab & Connolly", he was sacked.