jim wrote:
Don't worry about individuals. Give them a good game plan that suits their strengths and watch these players suddenly come good. In our case, we need to let our players just take the game on. We produced the 6 best qtrs in years when we were allowed to do that against the Dogs and Hawthorn. All those young ones we bag we all very good. Right now we have kicked the flair right out of them and their confidence this stuffed.
Rexy wrote:
The club has to replace Barker before giving up on Bolts.
I was fortunate enough to attend the presidents lunch and sit in the pre game coaches briefing to the players pretty much this time 4 years ago at Barker's first home game after we sacked Malthouse.
It was against Port Adelaide at the MCG, a game we won.
A fair chunk of the briefing was trying to build up the confidence in the players that they didn't need to be scared of making mistakes anymore and to have confidence to take the game on and not worry about the angry old guy yelling at you etc etc- and strategically i remember as plain as day the drawings and writing on the board along with the discussions to look inboard and use the corridor, play on at angles where you can towards the middle to open the ground up and make the switch effective - no need anymore to stop and only bomb long down the line to a contest.
It's quite miserably deflating that here we are 4 years later almost in the same position , with the players lacking confidence, a gameplan of long bombing down the line and talks of sacking the coach for an interim to come in and lift spirits
That game was a ripper , I honestly can't remember our gamestyle for the rest of Barkers tenure but i do remember that several club "powerbrokers" were convinced Barker was the man for the long term gig and i was pretty much called a liar on this board at the time but it happened that some people who input significant amounts of support and money to the club were actually told by the club that Barker got the gig prior to the Bolton announcement.
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*(grow - fun - gah)

Yeah but whatabout your whataboutism.