Sidefx wrote:
What an interesting game that was.
Firstly, how good was Cincotta on his debut.
For the Anti-Voss crowd, I think the undervaluing of the Saints defence and it's structure vs our game plan and 4 other teams this year, is being a little short sighted.
They have a great system that has only leaked an average of 59pts, you'd be a fool to take that away from them so early in the year.
The question is if and when they will be worked out like we were last year.
As for our game plan, last year we were getting smacked on the rebound with a rush forward at all costs game plan, leaving our "slow" midfield with its pants down to defend.
While the attacking was great the defending was wide open and not only to teams that had a great rebound game.
Voss and co have obviously gone about trying to add layers of tempo to the game with controlled movement, something we seen Adelaide facilitate well last week.
I am all for this if we want to win a premiership, the issue is we currently lack the cattle to do this.
Of our top rebounding defenders with good foot skills (Williams, Doc, Saad & Boyd) we only had Mc Govern on the back line clearing the ball from the D50 which made us very predictable and even easier to defend.
So the only option then was to try and change the angles up and switch the play to move forward = slow ball movement.
As a criticism I feel if we were going to play that way and knowing how good the Aints were at rebounding, we needed to let the forwards be out numbered in F50 and create a defensive wall with the extra players for repeated F50 entries that would've eventually hit a target.
But then again with forwards that can't kick the football, would've it mattered.
I thought Pitto played well and getting first hand on the ball helped our midfield out massively.
But then we broke down with our kicking ability, both hitting targets and kicking goals.
And playing against the top defensive side in the league, you need to hit targets and kick goals.
Acres has a terrible kick, he cost us a couple of goals himself. Lucky for him he has running power and a good contested side.
Fisher is a spud, I hate to use that term but he adds nothing to the team, too small, can't kick the footy, cant lay a tackle and has no vision.
Although Cerra had 77.3% kicking efficiency, geez.....some of those kicks cost us drive and goals also.
Both Cerra and Acres were bombing a lot of kicks coming out of defence, this is where Saad and Doc are sorely missed in both accuracy and creativity.
Cripps, Charlie, JSOS and Harry need to have goal kicking practice all week.
Voss and co need to come out hard at them and say, no more kicking around the body, I'd rather you miss a drop punt then try that BS anymore.
This is what both killed any momentum in the game and lost us the game this week, an ineffective forward line.
No point winning all the stats and getting the ball forward if the forward line can't capitalise on it.
With the suggestions of adding Dow, watch the VFL, Dow can't kick the footy either. While he gets the ball he would've been smashed the last couple of weeks.
I get he is getting high disposals in the VFL, but he still goes missing for large chunks of the game also and even though I would like to see him play, aside from Ed I'm not sure who he replaces. Even Fisher is playing a role (although very poorly) Dow doesn't/can't. We need Owies or Martin back.
With all this being said, if we can't have players around the field that can actually hit a target by foot, we may have to go back to the mayhem style of moving the ball forward at all costs.
Either way, as in last week (and to be fair the previous weeks were not good either) our skills let us down again.
The players need to have a good hard look at themselves because they are professional "footballers" that can't kick the footy, you can't coach that.
Great post.
And your first paragraph in particular, we aren't paying the Saints any respect at all.
One thing that annoys me about our supporter base is our grandiose sense of entitlement and complete lack of respect for other teams.
We are not a top 4 side, and that's ok. We are 7-10th at the moment, because of said deficiencies. We need some luck to hopefully jag 7-8th and taste finals, and do a mini cleanout at the end of the year and some tough trades (TDK looking at you), and things can change very quickly.
But lets stop acting like we "deserve" to be top 2.
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