Deecisive

the team won even goodies brainless idea of using petty in the ruck. for someone on the ball so much and supposedly a leading target for kickins etc he did stuff all, that is because it is not his position. the rest of the team stood up and need to be commended for a great team effort. if we had someone taller who could wrestle and event punch the ball away for the taller essendon rucks who were marking everything when it was dry then we may have done even better. goodie has done well because of the quality of the players and team he has. petty has been played in the ruck multiple times and to me has failed everytime. may as well throw woey in the middle at least he could immediately tackle the opposition ruckman when they take the ball straight out of the ruck instead of going for the hitout.

put petty in the forward line and see if he can at least have some sort of presence there, he is not a ruckman, he has proven that time and time again and yet we continue to do it. wake up goodwin. team doing well a lot of good defensive work being undone by some loose checking. if they did not get those easy goals they would five or six goals behind. tighten up, no loose men in their forward line please and we should win this.

the question now is can we maintain or even increase that lead over the next 2 quarters. the boys have done well. Petty has to lift 5 disposals and given away 3 free kicks in the half when he on the ball a fair bit of the time is not great. certainly need sparrow to lift as well

these umpires are really pissing me off with there inconsistency. kozie is getting pinged for everything under the sun. And essendon players doing the same thing nothing. just before kozies last goal the man on the mark was told to stand and he continued to move and nothing. it worked out ok but where is the constency. I dont know how many essendon and even some melbourne players have been stripped of the ball but kozie gets pinged. The essendon backs are pushing our forwards fair square in the back time and time again and marking the ball and thats ok by the umpires. i think roo was deliberately blocked in going for a mark and nothing. we have played some decent football but we have let these guys have too many players on their own especially in their forward line. need to tighten up and man up.

It will be interesting to see how we go with the ruck department. while i think max is a great ruckman the number of times his hitouts go to our players is not brilliant. his work around the ground is what is really important to us. So as long as who ever is in the ruck does not give away too many free (i.e. petty) and can play that marking player around the ground we could be ok. its just that we also lose that marking presence in the forward line. also, given petty's issues with his foot i wonder if this will put too much pressure on his feet. oh well in a few hours we will know how successful or not goodie's decision to not play a ruck and leave our forward line intact.

i agree 100% Goodwin does not know how to use a fresh spare man deemed to be amongst our best 24 players at the time that we need them most. We were obviously getting run over by a faster finishing lion team and he kept brown fresh, fast and eager who saved our bacon last week sitting on the bench while others could not run. i really cannot comprehend why he would do that, he can blame the players for playing defensively but he needs to also take the blame for not giving them a running player who could have certainly helped both defensively in attack and for not moving players around to combat the lions or address our shortfalls. Last year in the finals we could have brought on a sub but chose not to. again i can not understand why you would not use that player unless you believe they are only something you go to as a very last resort, if that is the case then our choices in subs is definitely a problem. all in all i am starting to think that our flag winning team could have won under any coach, as i dont see a lot of decisions or changes from this guy when changes need to be made. i mean to say how long did it take to get petty into the forward line when he seemed an obvious option at the time. now the backline is probably the best option for him as he can work well with lever and may and the backline team to turn defense into attack again. and maybe he can get some of his mojo back and go back to the forward line when he is in better form.

perhaps nibblers was deliberate. god know i have see players walk over the line countless times in other games and never once have i seen it called. so disappointing that it happened to us, at such a time. we had our chances but did not take them. i dont know why Goodwin does not change the team up when things are not going well, Petty would certainly have helped in defense and tom may have been a good addition down forward. bringing brown on in the last 5 minutes is an absolute waste of a young fresh player when we were obviously failing to keep up early in the last quarter. and again i must say petty should not be in the ruck, he just does not have it in him. it is a shame that ANB did not try to handball the ball into the lions players leg to go out of bounds. but it is what it is ... a crappy result. as for umpiring i still dont understand some of these rules. if a player is out of bounds and plays on or is called to play on while out of bounds isnt it out of bounds? when players kick play on from the kickin and run 30 meters or more without bouncing the ball, why is that not a free against them. when a player is tackled and they try to fend off a player and are still caught is that not holding the ball. when a player is swung 360 degress in a tackle then lets go of the ball is that not dropping the ball. Pushing players in the back to allow you to take a mark is that not a push in the back not a mark. and protecting the head is sacrosanct so they say, so is it ok to just give the player who was kicked in the head a free, or is it a bit like a maynard we dont have a rule about kicking someone in the head deliberate or not. can someone forward a cartoon version of the rule book to umpire 22 so that he can learn the damn rules so that we can have a fair game of football.

what a wasted opportunity. yes they kicked a lot of points, that was usually due to our pressure, we missed a few too. our manning up in the last was woeful. that left us chasing them for the whole quarter instead of having them chase and try to catch up. our kicking to out numbered or to opposition players was again killing us especially from kickins. One example that hurt I think it was AMW had the ball on the half back line in the last with probably 10mins to go and had a player free about 20 meters away but went long down the line to a contest that we were out numbered on. why do we constantly keep doing that why do we not take the simple open option.

every game you see people ducking and getting taken high is that not staging also, they are deliberately trying to draw a free out of what could have been a fair tackle if they had not ducked or lifted their arm. i dont know how may times i see melbourne players come flying out of a pack as if they have been pushed in the back as they did not get a free because the umpire did not see a push could that be seen as staging? just because his head did not crash into the ground does not mean he could not have hit his head, strained a neck muscle etc. i dont have any issue if they AFL wants to persue this sort of thing, i would just like them to be consistent in doing so. which we have seen they arent

with all of the petty week holding the balls they have paid all night was that not holding the ball by the brisbane player who was trying to fend off the melbourne player instead of getting rid of it. that is a pathetic umpiring decision by an umpire only meters away.

clayton is a star but at the moment his is a wandering star not focused on his game. i see way too much vision of him pushing and holding opposition players as well as giving away lots of frees. he looks angry, he needs time off from footy to get into a better headspace. He also seems to be targeted by umpires. in a few games i have seen he has been one of the very few players pinged for holding the ball when he is tackled and handballs away pretty quickly. i believe he gets a lot more negative attention from umpires who dont really see the things done to him. looking at the AFL seasonal stats he looks to be giving away the most frees in our club. our forward line is poor, i dont know why they dont try petty down back and tom forward, it cannot hurt to try something simon!! as for fritter love the guy but he like some of our forwards just seem lazy in chasing and putting pressure on the opposition. we allow the opposition to keep players open all over our forward line when they are kicking in. why? if we have taken all of the trouble to get the damn ball into our forward line why do we not put pressure on every single opposition players to keep it in and give us a chance to get a score. our defensive nature in our forward line of letting them have the easy kick around the boundary can often turn up in their forward line before we have put pressure on them. I would rather see all of our forwards and players hold every opposition player accountable at kick ins so that we have a chance of a contest and a turnover closer to our goal. Some of our players seem to put in token chases i.e. if i look like i am chasing the opposition player hoping they will get rid of the ball, instead of chasing hard to really put pressure on them. its hard to understand our tackling in quite a few cases our players just tried to fence an opposition player in rather than tackling and other times our tackles were just shrugged off so easily. And Simon, really not a lot of moves in his game plan. Oliver probably should have been subbed off at half time.

stupid play knocking a player after kicking the ball cost us a goal, gets their hopes up. dumb , dumb football

our ball disposal is still pretty poor, we are getting away with it because we are playing north. hopefully we will continue to get away with it and get the 4 points.

oliver is playing angry and giving away needless free kicks. always wrestling and holding and he is the one that gets caught.

same old bomb it into the forward line, what is there problem with players leading, if one of our forwards has two players on him where is our spare player.

yes he beat our one of our water boys for honor cause the rest of the team played s*** that day

pretty poor effort after a half decent first quarter they have done absolutely nothing. if north kicked straight we would be in trouble, having said that i am not feeling overly confident the way we are playing. maybe sub off oliver he is playing a stupid brand of football giving away frees and 50 meter penalties. he needs more time to get his head straight, as well as get his game back on track.

still feel gutted, and so let down by their performance. our potential window of opportunity of winning multiple premierships has well and truly gone. i do blame goody for for some of this, us exiting the finals so early in the last two years especially. he has shown a great reluctance to change things up even when things are going badly. i really dont see him as taking us to another flag, but he will be someone who will keep his job based on one year when we were truly good and other teams did not know how to play us. other teams have recruited young players that have slotted straight into their line ups. all of our recruits are spending their time at Casey, and all most people say is that they need to spend more time at Casey to get up to speed. which tells me we probably did not do so well at recruiting.

time to put petty back in the backline until he can get some confidence up, and please, please dont have him playing in the ruck he is just not up to it.

It was obvious that our kicking for goal cost us the game, but constantly turning over the ball to collingwood with poor handpasses, kicks, etc enabled them to kick that winning score. Players were handballing over the head at times only to give it to collingwood players. our chasing and tacking is poor, always has been we try to play the zone game which means hedge the guy in instead of trying to tackle, the list of things we did wrong today is pretty long. sadly i dont see any real remedy. Max tried, ANB did pretty well all things considered, rivers and Roo were good and while Kozzie and Fritter tried they did not really do what was needed in the end and that was score lots of goal. if we go into our game with North playing like this we are a good chance to lose that game to. Oliver probably needs a rest to get out from all of the attention and pressure. Everyone talks up our midfield as being so good, that is long past. while i love max his ruckwork seems to go to the opposition far more than our own players. i think this is a worse lose than the freo, collingwood is playing half a vlf side and they kicked out butts, regardless of the fact that we had more scoring shots etc. the end result is what counts.

what a f&&*& disgraceful effort against a team that is decimated by injury and playing half their VLF side. we dont run and chase, fritter as much as i love him barely chases, though the one time he actually did he was rewarded. this is a side you must man up on and run with your player as they are always looking for the give and run and get it back again, or the overlap. if everyone is on their player you deny them this.

our current team is playing poorly and there is no immediate replacements, just replacing out of form players with others that are only making it in the team because they need to make changes. how quickly we have gone backwards, how many handpasses were to the ground instead of to players, turnover after turnover. stupid zone defense that was no defense, just a bunch of witches hats that they ran around and did as they wanted. such a soul destroying effort, petty was hopeless up forward and possible worse in the ruck. throw him back into defence of the VFL. he has certainly devalued his worth in next years trade period when he wants to go to SA.

sadly this looks like its going to be our future going forward, we have been absolutely demolished by a running team. We are not a running team we are a zoning team and we just dont know how to man up. Everyone can see how to do this to us now. Goody needs to go, he is totally bereft of ideas and getting the team up especially for games that we should be winning. We had a window of opportunity over the last couple of years but dumb decisions on who to play and other things have seen us kicked out of the finals far too early. the way this is looking we may not even see finals this year.

absolutely terrible effort, while max is getting the tap out it is going to the opposition and they are clearing the ball, he need to get the ball to our players. when it goes the freo players out of the ruck, our midfield is not putting pressure on them. why they hell do we not man up they are running rings around us with this stupid zone game we play. collingwood and north must be loving this.

what a terrible quarter of football, we gave them most of those goals with absolutely braindead football, turnovers and total lack of skill. is this another game where we came in thinking we got this, we dont need to do anything. kick the first couple of goals and go into this is easy mode and just blow it all over the ground. something needs to be done about the attitude melbourne players show out there, no respect for their opponents, not manning up, not chasing, not tackling, no idea.