Sidefx wrote:
IMO The problem today was player selection foremost:
-Philips is a good tap ruck and even though we won the hit-outs today, Kreuzer is not a good tap ruck and frequently hit the ball to the opposition when he gets his hand on it. However he is another mid and is good at it.
-The Gov, although he played ok should not have come in. Why do we need 4 talls in the team in the rain.
-Dropping Kennedy was a huge mistake when he should've stayed in and at the least had Lang dropped.
-Garlett was an emergency and should've been played considering the speed of their team.
-We should've also played Dow and/or Stocker for more leg speed and played a rushing game like they do.
The game plan with linking talls into the forward half in wet conditions had Harry go missing and our players bombing it again into the F50 to 1 on 4s. There was many a time, players pushing forward kicked it high to a tall on the wing rather than linking with handballs and pushing forward as a team. And we got killed on turnover. We've been doing it for a couple of years now so when are we going to call a spade a spade here and put the blame on Teague, it's his area after all.
What was also apparent was the centre clearances and how we got smoked by them without Martin and Cotchin. Lucky they didn't play.
This has been our issue all year, even before we put Ed and Murph back in. Both are too slow compared to the new age mids coming through. And it's pretty simple for other teams, shut down Cripps, kill us on the spread and we're cooked. If we don't get mids this year, expect another tough season next year.
We are lucky we have been developing such a good defence over the last couple of years otherwise we would've been annihilated. Jones, Weitering, Plowman, Newman, Simpson, Thomas and even SPS to an extent held back a very attacking outfit.
Garlett has to have a chance. He is kicking goals in tyhe twos, he is quick, he has x factor.
All of those things are missing from Lang and DeLuca.
OK, they have better defensive sides but we need some X factor.
If he doesn't work out or even look like it, that's fine but for mine, he could replace any of DeLuca, Lang, Fisher and we would be no worse off.
Our F50 entries gave been crap for years. The 'kick it ong to Sticks/Fev/McKay mentality only works if the structure is in place to back it up.
Meanwhile, we get out-marked in our own F50 and then murdered on the rebound through the middle to an open F50 at their end. Thank goodness Jones and Weitering are god in the air or we would regularly lose by 50 points.
Unless three is some sort of changed mentality next week, we will lose to StK and that is not on the way we have been going about it. I have this terrible sensation that last night was a fork in the road. Next week is going to show us what they are made of.