maxyblue wrote:
when the teams were announced i thought to myself that we were loading up in midfield in order to put in a place a hawthorn style structure to nullify their pace and prevent them getting clean F50 entries to an out of form lloyd / lucas combo. i thought that ratts would be using the loss of jamo to effect a serious match-day trial of the full zone that we had been working on during the pre-season. of course i may be horribly wrong about ratts intention, but that's how i read it.
hawks won a flag with croad / gilham / brown as KPPs. i saw with my own eyes how pox croad and gilham were when exposed to a 1 on 1 contest, but the hawks have perfected the ability to prevent the opposition from having clean, effective F50 entries. i don't really believe that gilham and croad are elite, A-level defenders. to me they're roughly on a par with thornton et al, perhaps a bit more composed etc but mainly as a result of circumstance.
so what happened with us last night? well, obviously first and foremost there was the debilitating effects of a marketing slogan gone horribly wrong which has sunk many a team in my 40 odd years of following the blues. those marketing slogans are like a formidable CHF, impossible to stop. i'm sure the footy dept will look to cut it's losses at year's end and trade our slogan to norf for 2 top 10 picks and a couple of tix to their next chook raffle. but we can't do anything about this pesky slogan for now, so i may look at other aspects of our game that we can change ...
as stated above, to me ratts wanted to kill their run with a hawthorn like zonal setup (again i emphasize that i may be horribly wrong here). that kind of system would've worked very well against their chip / run and carry game. BUT it needs the right personnel to pull it off. this zone can be as much canon fodder as pagans paddock if it's implementation is haphazard.
we lost the game last night in the midfield. by that i don't mean winning stoppages etc, cos i think we actually won those. we lost it cos our mids were either unprepared or incapable of imposing a structure which would restrict / nullify their pattern of play when they HAD the ball.
the use of stevens as a qtr back is the most ill-considered structural element by our MC. why? cos stevo spends all of his time WITHOUT the ball just ball watching. in today's zonal game what you do when you haven't got the ball is almost as important as what you do when you have it.
i actually, and masochistically, tuned into the fox replay into the 3rd and heard walls lament the clean run at the mark that lloyd was allowed all night. that mark lloyd took in the 3rd with 3 scum players in the pack was a total indictment on our back 6. sure, ryder may well have taken that mark. and if he's gonna jump 2 feet above everyone else then fair play to him. BUT, how lloyd was able to get an unimpeded run at that contest in UNFORGIVABLE in this day!! this is where the hawks excel. as i've seen so often, even a spud like guerra will play a role for the team and create some kind of speed hump for a gun like fev, thereby denying him that clean run / jump to the ball. then hodge would just come in from the side and effect a perfect spoil without a mclaren flower to turn it into a 17 goal play without a centre bounce.
i reckon ratts was setting up to crowd their midfield and F50 so that lloyd / lucas wouldn't have clean footy delievered to them. he was banking on an out of form lloyd becoming even more despondent and that his sooky body language deflating the rest of them. perhaps the 1st qtr was too easy for a profligate carlton, but after that they just cut through our half-assed attempts at playing zone football.
we simply had too many guys running ahead of the ball and got carved up on the rebound as a result of our lack of clean hands. i watched that goal kicked by grigg and noticed that at the moment he kicked the ball he had 3 other mids running ahead of the ball screaming for the easy take. if grigg had missed we were wide open to a coast to coast rebound from FB line. if grigg had missed our structure was hopelessly out of whack.
this zonal game requires personnel with a tremendous structural and tactical discipline. sadly, i don't think guys like stevo, scotto, carrots, houla have that in them. they are classic players who chase the footy and stats. not saying that's a bad thing, but you need guys who do not ball watch, who do not act as passengers when they don't have the ball. you need guys with mongrel who will chop and block and make life extremely hard for opposition forwards. if a stevo or a johnson put some kind of block on lloyd then we can hope that the ball goes to ground and a turnover is effected. this is effectively what Essendon* did in the 2nd half having fletcher double team fev and allowind dempsey to mop up.
ratts needs to decide that if he's to play a zonal game then he needs to put the right personnel down back / midfield and play stevo as a wing / HF etc interchanging with houla. our midfield was embarrassing last night within the context of the modern game, ie discipline (incl structural) and the other attributes contained within the subject line of this thread
Thats a good post. Ratts said in the presser that we lost our structure and the players were not setting up as they are taught.
Playing more games together and gelling is the only way we are going to get better at this. There are going to be some hick up along the way and with young bodies and minds there are gong to be games where we just dont have the tenacity and strength to gang tackle like round one and two.
The dons backline consisted of Daniher who was getting brushed aside by fev as though he wasnt there and Fletcher who is not much chop these days yet the dons still won on the night. Like Ratts said, letting them run out of our fwd line with flow iswas what killed us.
Need to work on them Midfield and forward line structures.
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