Funny reading the match day thread.
Bender will now find religion apparently.

Chalie and Harry 0.5 to half time. GWS are slick and I thought we were in trouble but we just monstered them and crushed them with contested ball and weren’t going to let this slip. I think we were so cocksure against Adelaide 16 points up 7 mins to go we always win the close ones job is done that we let the game slip. Not today. Great win. Very happy

That's it Braithy. The TDK/Pitto combo looks a million bucks when it looks like that. But they both literally had the best nights of their career in playing those roles. We need to see more of that and less of Pitto 6 touches, TDK 8 touches with 3 marks and 0 goals between them.

For now, I have gone from thinking anyone in favour of 2 rucks was crazy to being keen to see the combo again next week. Very happy to be proven wrong based on tonights showing.

9 minutes left in the 3rd , down 20

7 minutes later and we are up 17

crazy

i think the balance of the team still isn't quite right ... when the ball hits the deck in our F50, we still don't have the ability or personnel to lock it in.

But voss acknowledged that in the presser ... he also made a valid point about what we have in tdk and pitto, H and charlie is unique to the league that no one else has and tinkering with it all to perfect it into his vision is where he's at.

and yeah, if they can all keep playing like last night - i was well wrong about it all. Swap owies for a fit motlop. maybe elijah for a fit martin ... and bring fogerty back for the ground pressure; maybe they can play like as their baseline.

I'll tell you one thing.

I never, ever thought it was possible to record a 244 pressure rating in a half of footy going so big. the scope of what they achieved in that, with all that tall timber, really defies logic. pressure obviously leads to turnover, and i was absolutely wrong about what is possible with pittonet out there. obviously we hope it wasn't a once off miracle of sorts.


but, if we can keep doing that - pressure at that clip with so much size on the park, we will win a flag.

What actually *is* a pressure rating?

I know higher is better. Because fox told me. But what *is* it and how is it calculated?

We need to fix 2 more little issues but we are nearly there. I loved what I saw in the 2nd half.
Martin, Motlop and Fogarty will fix one issue - ground ball in our forward line.
2nd issue our zone need to be tighter to not allow the easy ball access with the chip kick.

Yesterday showed why some of us wanted TdK and Pitto to play. TdK forward gives us the weaponry.
When Cripps and Walsh are doing what they do - look out!!!
Big shout to some unsung boys in Bam Bam, Elijah, Ollie, Cowan (loved his presence), Young, Kemp and Boyd.

Megaman wrote:
Do we intentionally play shit to 'rope-a-dope' the opposition each week

GreatEx wrote:
We weren't that bad first half. Just needed to fix our D50 exits, and kick to the advantage of H&C more.

jake_h03 wrote:
Pressure rating was 150 in the first quarter. Went to 240+ in that quarter. We were a different team in the 3rd. Playing with the heart and energy from the second half of last year

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Just picking this one up from the match thread: I'll admit I don't know what these pressure rating numbers are based on (edit: I see from the last few posts that I'm not Robinson Crusoe there!) but it seems intuitive that turning the ball over when exiting the D50 makes it almost impossible to apply pressure because you're always going to leave multiple open scoring avenues. Vossy said as much in his presser, it's a chicken-and-egg scenario. I don't feel that we weren't trying as hard in the first half, just that we weren't smart or clean enough in that aspect of the game, making it too easy for the Giants to play through us and making it look like we weren't bringing the defensive heat. Obviously we had the stoppages and clearances purring from the off; once we figured out the defensive exits it allowed our pressure to show and we rebalanced the score from turnover. The second half was so satisfying because we showed for the first time this season that we can play both contested and turnover footy to a high level at the same time.

2nd edit: I agree with Surrey that F50 ground ball pressure was still lacking, and that is the third point of the premiership triarchy! But at least we know from earlier games that we can have that too, when certain players return from injury (and not at the expense of critical components of our stoppage and turnover games)

In the first half I thought that GWS was looking fantastic and my queries about who they had beaten were shut down.
Their tackling was manic and referred pressure through the roof. We kept making heaps of unforced errors.
But I wonder if they worked so hard early on that when we made our move, they were out of puff and couldn’t go with us.
For any swimmers out there, it reminded me of Cate Campbell at the Rio Olympics where she went out on the first lap in world record time but faded in the 2nd lap to crash out I think in 6th.
By contrast, we were more like Kyle Chalmers at the same Olympics who was coming last or second last at the turn but stormed home to win…


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