Wallace and Richmond have taken the Pagan approach into the season. He mentioned in his press conference that his entire list bar Cotchin has played the last four lead up games. He was confident of over running us in the second half as he new we had 4 or so players under done. Ratten has taken a different approach to the season. He wants us to work our way into the season and be able to improve fitness levels in the next few weeks.

Richmond and Wallace need to win early rounds. They will begin to struggle in the last third of the season.

Hopefully, with base fitness and now a couple of weeks of match conditioning we will see a stark improvement in the list and we will start to finish games a lot stronger than we have in the past few seasons.

Have faith guys. I think you will however, start to see us play our better football after round 3 or 4. We will see improvement week by week. Belief in the game plan and of course execution will be critical in the next few weeks.

We are in for some really exciting times. Thursday was a blip on the radar. Sure we would have liked to win, but look at the greater scheme of things.

they've struggled in the last third of the season for as long as i can remember.

and i think that's a pretty encouraging outlook linchpin. obviously we don't know what goes on inside the club but it seems we will improve as the season goes on, given we're going into the season with judd, setanta and stevens underdone; hammo, kreuzer and fisher unavailable for the early part due to injury and plus we have walker to come back for the 2nd half of the season. added to this, our players need to adapt to the new gameplan and are improving with every match so i think this season will finish better than it starts.

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Last edited by true_blue3 on Mon Sep 26, 1981 5:07 pm; edited 92 times in total

QFT

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Mjonc signing off at 8888

Finally some positivity!

GO BLUES!

Pardon my ignorance, QFT?? Enlighten me??

QFT = Quoted For Truth

Taking the p1ss? or being serious??

on the topic ..it was really interesting to hear GT mention he had coffe with Pagan and Sheeds during the week and he mentioned that all 3 had some strong views on fitness coaches.. they mentioned that the fitness guys tend to dictate the fitness program for the year and this was common at many clubs. he noted it was still a relatively new trade for footy and many fitness guru's were really experimenting with teams and he would likely not even have one if he were to coach again. dermie also commented that there is no proof that players are any fitter than when the coach used to control the training and that the jury was still out on how much value these personnel added to a team. GT went noted in the year that he ignored the fitness coaches St Kilda won 14 straight.

what has this got to do with the blues ... not sure but it was obvious that the blues are not as fit as they were under Pagan and i think we will really struggle in the next 3 weeks until our players get fit enough

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The glass is neither half full nor half empty. Rather the glass is twice as big than required.

My physio used to work for the Saints, in the Grant Thomas era, and he can't stand the guy and thinks he is to blame for their continuing soft tissue problems. Seems Thomas thought lots of short sprinting was the best way to condition the players.

He was advised by the physios that this actually causes detioration of the muscles, but he wouldn't listen and the players kept doing lots of short sprinting. And hey presto - lots of soft tissue injuries. My physio ended up leaving because the fitness department's advice was ignored by Thomas who apparently knew better. Talk about a control freak.

Who me?

Never

Good post. The only issue is that what may be in our longer-term interests doesn't necessarily coincide with the draw we've been giving. Not that I'm expecting anything spectacular this year, but you might argue our draw allowed us to get away to a fast start. And by the time we're up and running, we could be getting to the harder part of our draw.

i have not got the draw in front of me ... but what games and in what round did you think we would win games in?

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The glass is neither half full nor half empty. Rather the glass is twice as big than required.

Me neither. But I'm assuming games against Richmond, Melbourne and Essendon* would be classified as some of our easier contests. And I'm pretty sure we're playing all of them in the first 6 weeks. Presumably after that, it gets a bit harder.

Thanks to linchpin for not getting so spooked by the Richmond result.

Disappointing, yes. End of the world as we know it, no.

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moonlighting again?

Come on Turtle boy....

This is where the 'real' action is....

GO BLUES!

I take it that the inverted commas around 'real' means that it is open to my interpretation?

Agree 100%. Wallace did the same thing when he arrived at Richmond in his first season as the club needed early wins and a big boost of morale. They then faded and got beaten convincingly as the season wore on. Some felt we used to completely fall away 2/3 of the season in, I'd rather us play better all year around and some players like AW, Judd, Fisher, Hadley, Hampson and Kruezer will be a boost when healthy and fit.

I also think that it is pretty obvious that our football skills were appaling under Pagan and aparently Ratts has spent more training time on foot skills.

You can't have everything at once, you need to approach things from a point of fixing greatest need first.
Basic skills were our greatest need when Ratts took over.

The team was never going to click round 1 - new coach, new captain new game plan, new players, new winning attitude required....
Please have patience.

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"Carlton's most loyal, their bruised and battered egos now seemingly a bad dream, drank beers, murdered pies and cheered every time Judd touched the ball."