Are we even that good?

[MarkPlow]

We can't play 4 quarters of football. For the second time this year we have kicked away and then been run over. Should of beaten Adelaide and should of beaten Geelong. Were lucky to beat West Coast. Skill level was terrible. Too many handballs in pressure situations and got ourselves into trouble. Then when we actually kicked the ball we butchered it. Missed way too many short targets by either dropping too short or sitting it up too high. Just bombed it into the forward line instead of kicking it in front of a leading target. When Geelong was on the roubound it was far too easy just like the adelaide game, where there would be loose players over the top. When we were good we were good but can't play in only parts of matches. Keep playing like this and we would be lucky to make the 8 and certainly not a serious threat. Was expecting a lot more after the premiership of 2008 we need to turn this crap around

[hawk_88]

I think the main issue is with structure. Mainly how we set up around stoppages and contested situations. More often than not, we don't have the crumbers in the right places. Other teams take the ball away too easily.

Also, for such a tall forward line we still seem to have very poor structure. We should be thinning defences but we still seem to be outnumbered at contests. There doesn't seem to be enough blocking and drawing defenders away by leading to different parts of the forward line. 150m^2 is a lot of space.

Also, our key forwards don't seem to be crashing packs and using their bodies as well as they usually do. Buddy in particular seems to be relying on the ball falling through and crumbing up the ball behind the pack. He has a big strong body and has shown in the past he can do it. There were lots of long bombs we should be marking or at least making a contest and we aren't.

[MarkPlow]

was so frustrating to watch. Especially once we got to 1 point down and every time the ball was in the centre geelong would get an easy clearance. And they ended up kicking the sealer from very poor decision making in the backline. We had a mark or free kick and instead of kicking long out of defence we just chipped it around the back line and ended up turning it over out on the full.

[hawk_88]

Not sure kicking it long is necessarily the way. I think the Hawks may be on to something there with combating the press. It will look bad when it doesn't come off, but turnovers will always occur, I'm not sure that the turn overs by the Hawks are any more numerous than any other club nor are that in an any worst position that any other club.

There is definite structure in place to support it, and it is flexible and difficult to modify a press to account for it. Kicking long has two ways of working: you have a lot of talls who can take a contested mark along the centre of the ground (we are OK at this, but by no means great and teams with rucks who are good around the ground will win in this situation) or you have a team with pace and you quickly kick over the press and bank on your players being first to the ball (we are a very slow side). However, both of these things are easily defended.

The constant cry of "just kick it" is the biggest misunderstanding by most fans, especially when viewing on TV. You properly understand when at games that most of the time they don't "just kick it" because there just isn't anyone to kick it to.


To be honest as much as it sucks losing to the Cats again and as frustrating as it was watching the deficiencies in the Hawks game, we weren't that far behind them and Buddy was having a pretty poor game and had minimal impact on the game apart from the first 3 minutes. We have the personal and the problems when have are all very fixable in a short amount of time. The bye will probably allow the footy department to properly analyse the first 5 games and devise and implement the fixes in time for our game in round 6 and beyond.