Very Jaded

Harmes needs to go to Libba. He is their best extractor. Too hard to tag Bont. I would let him go head to head with Trac. Lever to take him up forward? Oliver head to head with McRae. Caleb Daniels is IMO one of the best players in the competition. If we do not put a purely defensive player on him like Spargo or ANB he will destroy us. Fritsch and his 0 defensive efforts are a bad idea. I think this is going to be a hard task for us at Marvel. The Dogs are deadly by foot and very fast. If they dominate clearances like I suspect they would, we will be in a world of pain. It is much harder to defend a quick clearance at Marvel which is smaller, and if we turn the ball over the way we did against Adelaide they will really hurt us.

Apparently 4 more positives already today. Crowds look very unlikely. I'll be thankful if we don't go to lockdown!

It is actually mind blowing that umpires are not full time professionals, when so much money goes into betting on games. It is also mind blowing that time and again 'home ground' umpires make blatantly wrong decisions against the away interstate club. How about we make a rule that when a team is visiting from interstate, all umpires must be neutral, that is they must be from a third state. Also lets get the umpires better security, so they aren't scared to make correct decisions. Feral crowds should not ruin games. Umpires should have influence the result of a match, but its been happening for years. The AFL admits mistakes but does nothing to rectify them.

To be fair that only happened in WA and we know they are panic merchants. As much as I want to go to this game, I want to avoid lockdowns more. A wide long lasting lockdown would impact the season far more than one game with no crowds.

If capacity is heavily reduced it’ll just be a Bulldog centric crowd which will not help us at all. I prefer no crowds than less crowds. I think no crowds make sense and as much as I want to go, I think it might help us. Thankfully it’s not our home game.

We need to play ANB on him. If he plays on Fritsch we are stuffed.

Yep doesn’t sound like crowds will be allowed. Mother[censored] Covid.

We played poorly and were 16 points up with less than 10 minutes to go. We should have won it regardless. But the standard of umpiring is getting so bad it’s now ruined 3 matches and we are not even half way thru the season. Embarrassing stuff.

The competition doesn’t appreciate Oliver because he is not a poster boy. But my god he is an elite player and I don’t give a flying f who does and doesn’t rate him. He is a star and he is ours.

Yep and instead of getting wrong they’re not making calls and getting it even more wrong. They go a whole game being hot on absolute random [censored] each week. One week it’s 15m kicks and play on, one week it’s deliberate, one week it’s holding the ball. Then with 5 minutes to go and the game on the line they completely change direction and call nothing. I know umpires are humans. But this is a multi million dollar competition with millions invested into betting. Can’t we afford to employ umpires full time and get them to a level that is acceptable and consistent? Or I dunno use a video ref to overrule decisions?

I don’t think we will make too many changes. Goodwin will give the players this game to redeem themselves. Salem and Viney automatic ins but otherwise everyone at Casey seems to have had an average day.

Nothing went right for us this round. Port losing would have been very good. At least Sydney and West Coast did. It’s gonna be hard to catch the Dogs on percentage. To their credit they have that killer instinct and know how to destroy weak teams.

I don’t think Fritsch is why we lost. Far from it. Too many players were down and played lazy selfish football. Trac tried to do too much. Harmes doesn’t play to his obvious limitations. Hunt was woeful. ANB and Spargo had zero influence. May had his worst game maybe ever. I think Fritsch has had a few very poor outings this year that have been skimmed over because he is a good player who can kick a bag. But we pick on Melksham who is poor defensively, and yet we don’t raise an eyebrow when Fritsch lays 0 tackles. I don’t care if that’s not his primary role. Every player should play with a defensive mindset when they are not in possession of the footy. It’s what makes us such a great team. Fritsch averages 2 tackles a game. Tmac is at 6. That’s all I’m saying. He has to play more defensive, especially when he isn’t having a great game on the scoreboard. Because he isn’t tall and because we have brought him a host of talls recently, he is now playing on a much more attacking defender and it’s been costly.

Fritsch is probably the most selfish player in our side. He is a very very good forward who is hard to match up on and has a great goal sense. He’s also very lazy, insipid tackler and an awful set shot. He goes from sensational one week to a liability the next.

Harmes did a really good job on Sloane. But my god he has to know his limitations. He and Trac tried to do far too much with the ball. Too many dicky handballs and idiotic kicks. They were not alone but I expect more from them.

Oliver gets even more points for his post match interview. Asked about his own game he said “it doesn’t matter we lost”. Players like him make good teams into champion teams.

I actually can’t believe Tmac missed his set shot last night. He hasn’t missed those all year. So costly. And Fritsch’s set shot was an utter disgrace. Didn’t make the distance or even landed anywhere near the goals. They kicked accurately and won. Our woeful goal kicking is just another area that is starting to hurt us badly.

Would not be surprised if BB doesn’t play today. Keep him fresh for next week now that Weideman has had two poor games. I would be shocked and frankly very annoyed if he doesn’t play against the Dogs. He is a weapon at Marvel.

I know I said we will never lose again this week, but I was wrong ? 9-0 is a very good effort. Nobody else achieved that this year. The competition is very close. Even lower teams can win on their day. Freo beat Sydney last night as an example. The issue with the loss last night was the defensive effort just wasn’t there. We let Adelaide score freely, when they’ve been a low scoring team most of the year. And under a lot of pressure from them we fell apart and reverted to poor ball use and ineffective forward 50 entries. It was classic Melbourne and it was not nice to watch because we all have MFCSS and any sign of failure just triggers a very strong “it’s all over here we go again” type of reaction. I think this loss will burn in the players. It will motivate them to come hard next week. It will also start to put selection pressure on a few blokes who have cruised through the season like Fritsch. That is not a bad thing. And another week where we get closer to figuring out our best forward set up. We know now it’s not Tmac, Weideman, Fritsch and Jackson. Flags are not won in May. Richmond lost to some pretty average teams when they won their premiership. This is not the end of the world. If we lose the next 2 games and go 9-3 then I’ll start to panic.

Is Treloar a definite out? I was out for dinner (and drowning my sorrows in much wine) so didn’t see the Dogs game. I know he was subbed off but have they said what the issue was?

Brown has to play. He is a Marvel specialist and the best way to expose the dogs is to stretch their shaky defense. It’s their only downfall. I would drop Fritsch who plays tall and is a defensive liability and bring in Brown. We know it’ll be dry and I still don’t think we have our forward set up right. Weideman on his last chance coz he’s really annoying me with his soft attack of the contest. 19 year old Jackson with one arm was going harder.

May will never want to watch that game again. He was dead set woeful. He actually looked terrible on tv. I’m wondering if he carried something into the game because Jesus he was a non entity today. Normally he is a beast. And yes Walker is not a lightweight but he just lost every contest tonight. The last one that got them the winning goal was just really bad reading of the play. I am going to be positive and say this was a good loss to have. Our defensive efforts have dropped off in recent weeks. We’ve cruised to wins because we were simply a class above. Tonight Adelaide were very good and we didn’t lift. We had maybe a good 10 minute period in the third quarter and that was it. It’s not enough. Too many players did not do enough. We play IMO the best side in the competition next week on their home turf. We go into the game as under dogs and quite a few players would be on notice to perform or lose their spot. I bet the guys at Casey will all play out of their skin on Sunday. So do we take the loss as a wake up call and come out firing and win the next two critical games? or have we been exposed and worked out and is the joy ride over? The next two weeks will tell us if we are contenders or pretenders. If this group is the selfless fiercely competitive team they claim to be, we will win at least one of the next two games and continue to push hard for a top 2 finish.

We played like crap the last 10 minutes. Goodwin knows it and we know it. It’s a good thing to learn. We weren’t ever threatened in last quarters until today and we did not hold up. We learn. We move on. We get on with it.

A bottle of wine later and this was no doubt a disappointing loss. To be honest I never trusted my comfortable ease leading into this match. Should have known better ? We were getting a bit too comfortable. Teams were getting a jump on us and we cruised to a win. This was never going to be sustainable and sometimes a loss like this can really spark another level. We need to make some adjustments and I doubt our backline will ever play a worse game. We now know that we are better with Brown and Jetta is not a Salem replacement. If you told me we would go 9 rounds without a loss I would tell you “where do I sign?” I would rather lose to a non entity in Adelaide than our competition in Bulldogs or Brisbane.