Deecisive

Not sure i agree that we did not have anyone capable of winning up forward, I think our delivery into the forward 50 was pathetic, long kicks to out numbered forwards, crappy little passes into a congested forwards line that went to eagles players more often or not, or high little floating chip passes that were intercepted. our ability to delivery is the issue, we seem to be able to get the ball and take it down 75% of the field ok then fall apart in delivering it to our forwards. It obviously does not help when we end up with the opposition playing a spare man back.

I would like to see frawley up at full forward, it may give him a bit of a kick along, it seemed to work well for garland not too long ago.

while trenners maybe better than some of the others on the bench he is a long way from where he should be as a footballer, dropping him is to get him to put in to be the best footballer he can. his absence gives some of the other kids a chance to see if they can step up.

Given our draw 6 weeks would mean back for the bulldog and richmond games. The bulldogs are probably one of the few chances we would have had for a win. hopefully in that 5-6 week the rest of the team can relearn how to take a chest mark, how to man up and how to kick the ball to each other going forward. if so we have a chance of beating the doggies.

Nat Jones was fabulous today as usual, Cross was excellent and dunn was pretty good too. We have a lot of players knocking up good stats based on the old keepings off strategy, so they are in many ways nothing stats. I dont think we can blame the lack of a forward line, we had the ball often enough in our forward 50 and just kept kicking it straight to west coast players, if we had actually hit our own players we would have had a much healthy score. we must have had 10 goals kicked against us from p*ss poor turnovers again. poor skills and bad habits are still very much there. Players mark on the wing and start to look inside and backwards before looking forward, I dont know how many times we took the ball from a reasonably good attacking position back into the eagles 50. hmmm does that count as a 50 entry for them? we are too slow at moving forward, I dont know how many times players had the ball and players down field were leading towards them and ignored. the constant holding the ball up until the opposition has all our players covered so we would go back as the safe option. It was just stupid, as is our inability to man up. West coast players were running around all day without players on them, their uncontested count was ridiculous. Trenners needs to sit in a forward pocket, he just does not have the run to be a midfielder or on ball player just not capable of chasing and too often does not deliver the ball well or turns it over.

We were not expecting to win this ever with our best team, it would obviously have been wonderful if we did, but it isnt going to happen. Best we can hope for is a good showing by the team doing the things Roo's has been teaching them and working on their game plan, etc using this as a practice match, which could be advantageous given we seem to play better in practice matches than real games.

If we dont have enough talls then work on a game plan using smalls and keeping the ball moving and low to the ground running the big fellows around. just need to be thinking abit more about how we play and not try to play the way we would if we have a decent tall and functioning forward line.

Roos has often said that most of his work is done before players run out onto the ground. yes he can makes some moves but a lot of it is in the hands of the players. It is sad that some of our players just could not rise up to meet the challenge. given last nights performance even with a few extra talls would not have made such a great difference if our disposal both under pressure and not under pressure does not improve. Turnovers killed us last year and they have already shown to be a major problem with our skill level. No point putting some of our valued players like Toumpas and Grimes, Trengrove back to casey the level of pressure there is far less, they need to step up there maybe a couple of players who really are not going to make it, if so dont play them give Salem and others a go instead give them AFL pressure and experience other 2013 draftees showed they can walk into an ALF side and play. Gawn or King will probably need to be bought in to play full forward and at least provide some height. players need to think seriously about their possession game, too often players up field found themselves free but our boys with the ball were too busy looking over to the side and backward to notice, not taking those forward options quickly just resulted in us kicking back, etc.. playing with the ball until we could turn it over. there were some positives but progress was not as much as I and many other had hoped for. our supporter and possibly team over confidence has bitten us on the butt and made us look like fools.

did not chase the st kilda players near the end, just sat back and watched them kick it around. poor defensive pressure in our half.. Woeful delivery into the forward line, regardless of us being down players no named forwards, etc we had the ball often enough but farted around with it. too much looking sideways instead of moving it on quickly, its great for stats but poor for winning football games. looks like they did not pay much attention to what hawthorn did to us a week or so ago when they moved it on quickly all the time going backwards only when they needed to. our first reaction is to go back or sideways. a very poor effort. not a good start to the season against possibly the 2nd or 3rd worst team in the competition...

I think Byrnes will play a lot better when he can concentrate on being a forward, in the last year he had been getting a lot of his kicks way up the ground and then trying to deliver it into a forward line where the opposition out number our one or two forwards. He would also significantly benefit from having forwards to crumb off. not something you saw too often last year,

i would prefer to see JKH sit out the first 20 minutes or so, as the saints will be hard at us. let him come on after the initial rough stuff has died down and the saints players have been using up their energy, then they can spend their time chasing him. I would prefer to see matt jones as the sub. Georgiou has to be on the field to help handle the st kinda talls.

We are putting what Roos and other believes is our best team on the field. Roos has shown that he has been able to get the best out of some ordinary players or players others had discarded at Sydney, we are looking for the same thing here with our guys stepping up to that next level and playing as a champion team instead of a team of champions. Toumpas has the class to be in the team, Byrnes has the experience and skill to be there where as i believe Bleese is still work in progress. He needs to step up, he needs to learn how to chase, for someone reputedly so fast he has trouble finding the ball and chasing down the opposition players running off him. Hopefully all the team now know they have to compete far harder if they want a spot in the side, no free rides. also that the end of the year will give Roos his first real chance to cull those not committed or able to deliver.

Coaches will not let players who are not well play it is not a matter of how tough but how long they will be out for if the do more damage. Dawes and Mitch have injuries that they will recover from in time. In the meantime we are still putting 22 players onto the field who need to play to the best of their ability. it gives some other players a chance to play now with a much better midfield than we had last year.

Hawthorn has a pretty full list, its going to be a long season and they will have their share of injuries and reports. A lot of teams have started the season well but not finished well enough. It will be interesting to see how they go as the year progresses. The Dees have had a bit of a reality check, which is good, they know when they executed Roo's game plan we won or got close to finals sides, when we did not execute it well we got killed. People learn from mistakes more so than from doing the right thing. So I can see these guys will improve as time goes on and they bed down the game plan. As for the debate on Toumpas and missing out on wines, why not go back further an bemoan the fact that we did not get Garry Ablett and then jnr.... Toumpas is a melbourne player and a damn good user of the ball, give him time and lets move on from debating past decisions.

playing 2 finalists was meant to show how far we need to go, we did ok against geelong and not so well against the hawks. They probably had their best list while we were still missing a few. They have a settled lineup with a team game plan they have been playing for years while we are just starting. Early days, lots to learn from today, we never expected to play finals this year we just want to see big improvements, there will be days like today, hopefully far fewer than last year. and a few more where we get to sing our song after the match. looking forward to the year and better things.

twitter feed must be broken no hawk goals for 7 or 8 mins

its a shame buddy isnt there to help slow them down

its a practice game. though I doubt we need much more practice at loosing by large margins.

more like baby seals

our club tweets and quarter by quarter summaries are both pretty poor. need to provide more detail even if is not all good, people want to know more than a tweet every 4 or 5 minutes

Give them all a break, they are playing better football than they did all of last year. Most of them are making mistakes from time to time, but these are far less than the sheer number of turnovers we did last year. Toumpas will still be a great player for us. give him time and a bit more experience. He will probably learn more from that mistake than all of the good kicks he did tonight.

A great start to the pre-season, a lot to like tonight and a lot of potential improvement still from quite a few of our players who played, plus those still to come back. After seeing Geelong, Collingwood and Hawthorne play, I say we still have a long way to go, but we at least appear to be on the right track to make a contest of it. I used to look at the stats of our games last year and rarely did we have more than a couple of players with 20 or more possessions, i cannot recall anyone having 30+ possessions. Fantastic job boys, a great start.

its a practice game, while winning would be nice tuning our structure, being competitive and showing improvement is what counts from whatever 22 players take the field. the loss of some of our best big men gives a few others who would not have been playing a chance to show what they can do and convert that opportunity to a more permanent place in the side.

Great job 666

we do not have poor quality playing surfaces any more so I would expect that we can run 3 bigs, clarke has proven he is pretty agile I seem to remember him crumbing quite a few of his goals. Hogan is reputedly pretty quick off the mark and lets not forget enthusiastic so I would hate to have him chasing me. We are going to stretch most clubs backlines if we can keep them all on the park, if we cannot then we still have fitzy and Watts in reserve all are capable of kicking goals, a couple of crumbing forwards able to apply good defensive pressure and we will see a lot more scores. I would expect seeing all three of those guys down forward will give players bringing in the ball a lot more options than they have had in the last year. and lets hope that we dont play that stupid extra man in defense type of football as the oppositions extra man usually kills us when we go into attack.