What I mean is if we continue to play
Houlihan Stevens Johnson WIggins Cloke we will always finish middle road

Some people predicted we would finish 4th

I went yesterday BV and that effort was flower pathetic
Soft footballers who when the game is on the line are mentally weak and turn to shit. Same blokes same deficincies. Pathetic.

Will the MC have the balls to do something about it.
Doubt it

Grigg is another who won't go when its his turn. I don't mind naming them.



The number of times I saw a Carlton player mark the ball, and then without even looking up the field, turn and kick to a player sideways AND backwards, beggared belief.

There was no run. Why not? I know we had this problem at the start of last season, and I know it improved and we ran over sides as the year went on. But being fit later in the season doesn't get you to the finals if you can only play half a game of football for the first 10 weeks.

Cons:

Still have a long way to go, we are 7-12 at best.

We revert back to old ways as soon as the game is played on the oppositions terms.

we will improve but it is a matter of when.

the coaching panel are still on L plates & it shows by the lack of structure change when things are going badly, they must learn to mix it up.

I probably would have moved Fev up the ground or taken him off completely as we went back to the old kick it to Fev no matter where he is or how many he has on him, this took away other options & let the players move responsibility on to him, insted of them looking for other options, which incidently we did very well in our first two wins.

In other the players have to take responsibility for kicking a score & not drop their bundles, good sides don't do that, we are not yet a good side.

Pros:

Paul Bower.

Simon wiggins's attack at the ball when he crashed Roberts -Thompson. (should have inspired the side but didn't)

_________________
We are the maybe blues

Not sure about you but i don't want a learner coach developing this team.

I know many of you don't support my thought on here but i'd love to see Paul Roos or Choco Williams coaching our club but what i see is a major issue is that theer are to many past players with there fingers in the pie.

I doubt a Paul Roos or Choco Williams would wanna join a club with past players pulling the strings.

..but Clarkson, Roos, Williams, Worsfold and Thompson were all on L plates when they took on their clubs. They all won flags.

Give it some time. Fans on this site are looking rather sookie. Should learne how to deal with losing a game.

We are developing a side. It doesnt happen over night. There will be a few trade periods and drafts before we are complete.

For now lets see what we can learn from a game win lose or draw and take that experience forward through the season.

Sitting around sulking and pointing fingers and thinking you know more than those in charge is counter productive.

I don't care if Roos is a premiership coach.

If he ever coaches this club I will gouge my eye out with a rusty spoon.

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Congratulations CK95

Fair enough. Though i would have thought they were in the coaching for many years more than Ratts was before they took over

You say we are a young team but i disagree with that. Players like Fev, Judd, Wiggins, Cloke, Stevens, Simpson, Waite, Thornton, Houlihan, Scottland, Carrazzo and Hadley are 25 or over. 12 players 25 and over and another 3 years of 'development or learning' and these guys are pushing closer to 30 and Stevo and Fev past that.

How many more years can we afford to develop with the talent pool compromised and not much more coming through

and miss the chance of SEEING our next premiership.

But at least he's not a puppet, right?

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WADA medical director Dr Alan Vernec describes Essendon* FC drug case as biggest scandal in team sport the world of sport has seen. #WC2WB

#GUILTY

Young team not young players. They are about 26 games in.

I can see us being 5 and 5 after ten. Id expect to see us string a few wins together towards the end of the season.

We stuffed up 2 games. We have to learn from out errors not sit around and point fingers and give up on a plan that we have only just started.

Reckon it will only take one big quarter to get us back on track.

Judd's 24 now, isn't he?

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And so while others miserably pledge themselves to the pursuit of ambition and brief power, I will be stretched out in the shade, singing.

CON:

We're still too reactive.

We were dominant pretty much through the match, and led pretty much everywhere except the scoreboard. We know we've got talent, so why are we reacting to the other team's moves rather than the other way round. They should be worrying about what we're doing.

And in the last quarter, when we were only 2 goals down, and every person watching knew Sydney were just going to block up the game and grind out a win, why were we still zoning off players, especially Rhyce Shaw, who looks more like Stewie Griffin with a Swans jumper on, rather than going man-on-man? If we had have gone man-on-man, we could have forced a turnover, and snagged a goal, and given the team the lift it needed to take the match, which was winnable right until the dying minutes of the last quarter.

_________________
And so while others miserably pledge themselves to the pursuit of ambition and brief power, I will be stretched out in the shade, singing.

I only saw the second half of the game so can't really offer a useful opinion, but I'll offer a barely informed one anyway.

PROS
Bower back to his best
JR, despite being everybody's whipping boy is continuing slow but steady development. Remember Chris Egan was taken pick 10 in that draft
Time for a few changes

PROS/CONS
Juddy is super but where would we be if we hadn't recruited him. His excellence allows the horribleness of others to be overlooked.
Waite - great ball getter as loose man, sporadic disposal, but we need another tall forward. How about just trying him up forward all game

CONS
Game plan that seems based on moving the ball as slowly as possible and as wide as possible
MC not proactive or imaginative. Rather than aping other coaches ideas, lets have a few original thoughts of our own

The 'we're really young' excuse. Are we younger than the Hawks of last year?

Cloke is a battler but is too slow for CHF. Always has been and always will be. He is either a sacrificial ruckman who is undersized but can take the hits that would otherwise fall on Big K, or a powerforward for the Ants. Hope the coach watches how Cornes took Campbell Brown apart in the last qtr for Port and moves Waite forward.

Sammy J is a great battler, but at this stage offers little around the ground or near goal. I don't think he has taken a contested mark. Perhaps the MC (from reports at the Ants) are experimenting with the idea of playing Setanta as a pinch hitting ruckman (even tho he doesn't have the technique)

Sick of the coach coming out with the 'we had our chances and didn't take them" routine. If we win the first qtr do we win the match How about we look at how we blew a 27 pt lead against the ordinary Dons and managed to lose, or how the Swans totally dominated us for most of the last 3 qtrs. The game goes for 4 qtrs. Sure we need to take our chances but we also need to create chances for 100mins not 20mins, and nobody should take solace from the 17pt margin. Two goals at the fag end of junk time when the Swans had eased up, made it respectable. But with 2mins to go we were 5 goals down having only kicked 7 for the match. That is a really bad loss.

How about the coach offers some explanation on the deathly slow ball movement, or why we don't appear too have any plan B.

Need much more grunt. Pity AB is injured. I think he is too slow for the AFL, but you'd always pick him against the Swans. Pity Brad Sewell slipped thru to Hawthorn as a rookie. That is the sort of player we need.

Cons: all the goddamn sooks on here who think they know better and are sniping every player as "will be a good player not a star" or "doesn't go when they have to".

We were a PP side just two years ago, yet you're expecting Rome to be built in day.

And you want to destroy the foundations of the side and drop experienced players to chuck in two more raw players against a physical team.

We should put you on the match committee.

He'll be 26 in September. Melvey makes a good point. As Allan Jeans once said, it's later than you think.

This line gets trotted out all the time
We pay our membership
I actually flew up to Sydney for the game
I love the club and if I reckon we put in a pissweak effort like we did yesterday I will say it .So what.
In reference to Murphy yeah I reckon he will be a good player but not a star.
His kicking lacks depth
He is not quick
He makes too many mistakes but he will be a good player but IMO not as good as other number one picks.
Gibbs needs to get more contested footy.
Has brilliiant vision and a great feel for the game but needs more grunt.
Nearly 50 games now. No more excuses.

I will take the opposite view of yours and say that some supporters are too easy on the club.

And we wont go further up the ladder until changes are made whether it be attitude or personal.

As I have stated yesterday was a shit effort against an average team with their 2 best forwards out. 30 points down half way through the last quarter.

Ordinary

Shane Crawford( yeah he may be dimwitted) but has played over 300 games of footy said that whenever Hawthorn went to play at the SCG that the hawks and other teams find it VERY difficult to play against them and come away with the points.

We kicked ourselves out of this game and i have no doubt that had we have been 12.3 at half time Sydney would not have locked the game down and we would have won easily.

pros:

- got a chance to get out of town and head up for the game
- met princes park whistler and his 2 carlton chums by accident in the macquarie pub on wentworth ave. will look out for you guys at etihad!!
- bower did well, not sure he had too much to beat
- judd tried hard to get some run going but kept finding himself in their midfield crush. why we can't block / shepherd for him is baffling

cons:

- still can't bury these friggin hoodoos even though we're making them a focus. felt really filthy about this at game's end, and the "flower off back to lygon st" spray we copped as we trudged off in silence didn't help.
- melvey! look mate, roos is NOT gonna coach us or anyone else. he knocked us back and i'm convinced will bow out soon and good luck to his successor!! also PAHHHH-LEAAAAZE take a leaf from a poster like elwood blues. he predicted that johnson would not cut the mustard. do you see him coming on every loss with a I TOLD YA SO? and don't give me crap about having other stuff in your life or waiting for your missus in a hotel somewhere .... if you had such a full life you would've got over THAT slogan and daniel rich by now ...
- no run in this team when the game goes into lockdown. i know that things may have been different had we kicked straight but fact is we have blown big leads to both brisbane and Essendon*.
- serious lack of on-field leadership support for judd.
- we not only rely on judd from a footballing perspective but are psychologically reliant on him too. when mcveigh kicked that goal from a classic swans stoppage you could see heads drop. how mcveigh was able to get on his own was remarkable given the way he destroyed us last year at the dome.
- gibbs has caught this sideways soft option disease. would prefer to see him back himself and try to straighten us up. i would prefer him try that and occasionally stuff up.
- fed up with seeing opposition 2nd tier players show the sort of structural discipline and support that our guys can't / wont
- not sure what ratts is doing with the structure but if he's trying to get a zone thing going he needs to get the right people in the right roles. hated seeing that passage in the last qtr with the ball deep in our forward line. they had all 18 guys in our F50 and bizzarely our guys followed them in. from a set-play stoppage they broke and cleanly got the ball to their FP without us getting anywhere near applying some pressure (ok the swans player missed the set shot but that's not the point). surely a zone set-up would've seen us get 2 lines of 3 across the 50 m line and centre to prevent them getting out that easily.

look, i have no idea where the blame lies, either the players wont do what ratts wants them to do or the coaching staff are not preparing us in the right manner. reckon the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

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... an eagle flew out of the night. he was something to observe, came in close i heard a voice, bending stretching every nerve, had to listen had no choice ...

I generally agree with that. Nothing wrong with calling a spade a shovel.

Gibbs's long kicks and kicks inside 50 have been disappointing for a class player. He also needs to start running with the ball when he takes uncontested marks, it's been a bugbear of mine for a while.

I will say that fans, like the media, tend to overreact to a couple of good or bad games. We've made it hard for ourselves now, but there will always be ups and downs throughout the season for any team. I think it's been so long since we've been any good, that we assume that now we're on the way up, we'll have an unimpeded path to glory. AFL is a great comp because almost every team is tough and competitive. Every improving team hits hurdles on the way up. Hawthorn are something of an exception, but they had disappointing spells on their way.

I guess I am with Keogh on this one.

When the coach sets a public goal of finals and we lose two weeks in a row to ordinary opposition, i don't think it is outrageous to be critical.

We were a PP side in 2002. So we've been ordinary for a long, long time. I am not sure who the experienced players referred to are, but any player who is experienced has been part of years of ordinary Carlton sides and need to prove they are part of the solution and not the problem.

Supporters can say that the coaching staff is beyond criticism and that players need to take no responsibility for their performance, and that we never have to be concerned by losses. If we all accept that we will be Richmond.

I know what a really great Carlton side looks like and we are a long way away. That's not such a big issue, but I want to see improvement. I reckon we have played better against much better Swans sides a number of times over the last 7 years.

The season is new but it is hard to imagine how any Carlton supporter could not be desperately disappointed at the last two weeks.