Blue Vain wrote:
We gifted them 85% of their score from turnover. We were caught in the hype of last week and thought we had found the magic formula of ball movement but it's a bit harder when you are playing a quality opposition. Lions didn't take the high risk kicks into the corridor. They moved the ball with system, workrate and method. That's the key. There is no easy, lazy method of moving the ball. You can't play West Coast every week.
We have to consider how many players we can retain in the 22 who can't kick the ball. They all offer something positive but 85 points from turnover? We won contested ball, hitouts to advantage, centre clearances, ground balls but we kept giving it back under little pressure and they made us pay.
I agree. The game reminded me of us against Geelong last year. They allowed us space to move the ball into areas of the ground they wanted, set up around those areas and then choked us to turnover the ball. We were kicking long from deep in defence to contests while they were kicking long from their defence to the wing/HF line after working the ball through our defence. It meant their forward entries were generally deep while we regularly turned the ball over at their half forward line or when we did get it forward it was a shallow F50 entry. We didn't seem to have an answer especially in the third. Was this a coaching issue, leadership on the field issue or that we just couldn't kick for peanuts (Walsh had a shocker with his kicking). I feel without Docherty at HB our defence lacks leadership. We looked like a rabbit trapped in the headlights at times, especially Young!
I don't think our midfield was beaten and there was nothing wrong with Harry's game. The major issue was our poor kicking which I believe then led to a lack of confidence in taking short kicks through the defensive setup, so we tooko the conservative approach down the line where they had generally extra numbers at the fall of the ball.