Two seasons ago the hawthorn gameplan was known as chippy chippy and was useless in the eyes of some when Ratts had us doing it before the hawks dreamt it up.

I agree with bits of what you are saying but i think its a bit rich of you to say "all games are important" and "habits are habits" when you were so into tanking games a few years back.
A lot of players from those years were out there on the weekend. Even some who we recruited straight into tanking sides so if i was to do a Synbad and lay on the spin thick i could paint a pretty damning picture about the habits our players got from not trying to win for 1-3 seasons.

I am not against what we did back in the mid 2000's but I would not knowingly contradict myself to the extreme by saying "every game counts" in a pre season a few years later.

funny how club thinks this team of players should be chipping the ball around.

very funny!

look you devise a gameplan around what you have not what have

maybe the saints should develop a fast runnning game?

Was an interesting discussion on 'on the couch' last night regarding Geelong. Basically talking about how a bunch of no names who have played ressies for a couple of years were developed and able play to the Geelong game plan in the NAB Cup. They were able to give a more experienced (by average matches played and age) Gold Coast side a touch up.

Funny how Collingwood are aiming for a flag....how's their pre-season going?? Hawks lost to Richmond didn't they? Or Geelong playing all their kids?? Funny how the bottom sides excel in the NAB and the top sides work for round 1....but hey bad habits, makes for a nice pessimistic story!!!!

Gilly, youre really confused.
There are teams that have shown to have effective gameplans and won recent flags and teams that have done nothing in years and need pre season games to prepare.

Were not collingwood / Geelong or Hawthorn....

Were a team in the wilderness for 17 years !!!

........who won 2 pre-seasons flags that then amounted to nothing.

Can we continue the discussion on Sticks, Ratten, our recruiters and board being no good in any of the other threads that have been hijacked and get back to talking about coughing up goals in time on?

Its been an issue for a long time, would like to see stats on how we compare to other teams. I think our focus has been on preventing the other side scoring and needs to shift to scoring ourselves during time on.

THIS

All good to say but there will be times when we have a stoppage in our defensive 50 in the last 5 mins of a quarter. Need to be on top of that situation and i doubt any team would see a defensive 50 stoppage as a scoring opportunity.

We just have to get the strength and the mindset where we just tighten the screws and dont let the ball out of any contest unless its on our terms for whole quarter after whole quarter.