aido wrote:
Then can you describe to me Rattens vison. His structure, setups, presses/zones etc and don't go off the 'one' mighty performance gainst the Saints. Can you please descibe to me what the team stands for?
Essentially Ratten is a big believer in counter-attack football, and looks to disrupt the opposition's ball movement at every line, then move the ball up-field quickly to take advantage of 1-on-1 opportunities that present. That much you've already touched on.
He initially did this with man-on-man football and it worked a treat until Essendon* showed that raw pace and drawing our forward line up field exposed a lack of top-level pace and defensive nous through midfield. This spurred him into developing a zone set-up for the players to implement such that pace would become less of an issue and players like Murphy and Gibbs would excel with their read of the play. Sound idea and after Hawthorn's GF win; everyone was doing it.
The problem? Pagan was notorious for 1-on-1 football and put only a select few in charge of dropping in the hole in defence. Think back and remember the year of Teague, the year of Waite, etc. Very few of the players had essentially dropped the idea of zones from their football itinerary pretty much when they set foot in the club. It's a slow process that's going to take some time yet, but thankfully we can accelerate this by recruiting individuals like McLean, Lucas & Davies who show an understanding of what's required.
In terms of secondary avenues to the forward line, Ratten has again become focussed on delivering to an out-numbered forward unit, i.e. piercing a zone defence. Regardless of Hawthorn & St Kilda, the last 10 years of football has always featured some form of genuine zone in the D50 beyond a man in the hole: flooding, rolling midfield, etc. The thinking is obvious: if you can manipulate an outnumbered situation to your advantage, you can defeat anything thrown at you. We started to combat this with switching the play ala the Pagan era, then developed to wrong-footing the opposition with misdirection handballs.
The problem with these methods of defending and moving the ball around is that we don't yet have enough good decision makers with and without the ball to pull this off as yet. For every Bower or Armfield defensively, there's a Joseph or Carrazzo, and for every Murphy & Judd offensively, there's an Armfield or Joseph. You're never going to get everyone on the same level, but there's a gulf in understanding that needs to be closed down a bit more.
So while these ideas are great in theory, when you've got two switches and a misdirection handball in one ball movement and your team is slow on the uptake or the ball carrier has missed a clear option, you're going to be on your own on an empty wing as the opposition have just about closed down any gaps in their zone.
You lose confidence, players start over-committing in terms of numbers to 50/50 contests, becoming single-minded in their tasks and unwilling to commit what seems like a fruitless cause. They all run forward, they all run back and don't really care about the space they're minding because no one else seems to be either. Fingers get pointed, names are named, etc etc etc.
Game plans are simple enough. Individual strategies are more complex, and coaching them into every single player is always going to be on a different timetable. It's those latter tasks that are the challenge of every coach in every sport, ever. That's the challenge for Ratten and his team, and I also suspect that as others have identified, Teague & Lappin are really behind the 8-ball in this respect.
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