Every side loses the stoppages and clearances at some point but find other ways to win.
It's not just stoppages, you can be down and beaten on any line but still win, in fact I'd argue they are the most important ways to win, when things aren't going your way you find a way to win. What you don't do is surrender to defeat!
Our problem is and Hoyne pointed it out before finals of 2023 is we have to dominate stoppages to win.
The problem for Hoyne was he works off stats and averages, but stats and averages do not account for opposition or personal changes or other real world influences.
If I recall correctly after Hoyne made that declaration we won a couple of games despite being beaten at clearances, and ironically the stats gurus then tried to justify those events with spin.
Of course, Cripps can dominate and we can lose, but then again so could Judd, two very different style of player. The winning stoppages stat in that regard, taken in isolation as some sort of waypoint, is completely useless.
When we had Charlie and McKay in tandem, creating and winning stoppages inside F50 which we did with monotonous regularity gave us nothing, because stoppages inside F50 is the antithesis of creating space.
A friend of mine thinks we are goal post obsessed, we spend all our time defending the goal posts on the last line, or trying to push deep into the goal square in F50. We win stoppages inside both 50m arcs, and either have a unless crack hack at scoring, or a hack out of D50, when we often have an option standing unattended in the clear on the defensive side, often inside range in the F50. Smith is different, he's the first player for a decade that I've seen at our club that isn't goal post obssessed.
Starts as mental IMO, then becomes physical and then it's a vicious circle. I don't think fitness is the issue.
I learned at the high level in a couple of other sports, state level, that victory is like revenge, a dish best served cold. It saves energy and maintains focus, you can be completely clinical and tactical in your attack on the opposition, and compete with a level of efficiency.
The emotional part is the exact opposite, it sucks the life out of you and generates waste, until you can get past it you'll be consigning yourself to suffer from inconsistency and chaos.
At one stage I'm sure I watched Walsh run towards FB like a goalkeeper while we're losing a stoppage on the HBF, that is not fitness. Was it tactics or panic?
On the free kick issue, are we ruining the game when we reward players who stage, it's not a skill but is it cheating? It's becoming a bigger and bigger issue in clutch moments, our game is going like soccer!
They have a sniper as a role model, and over the last decade they've built a game style based on it with smalls going the man in swarms, they are going to suffer a lot more of these small suspensions under the current rules.
Stand back and watch the Carlton hating media now claim it was nothing, and by inference that Weitering is either soft or was staging, hypocrisy given the goals to Green and Lynch.
I fear Moir is going to struggle under our faster game style, he seems best suited to the older stoppage / marking game style where he could be the 3rd man up in the contest.
To persist he really needs to make better use of his ambidextrous capabilities, if anything he seems to have gone backwards in that regard.
I rewatched the game, in the 2nd half we were at the contests, and if you watch the chain of play the thing that costs us many times were tackles failing to stick. In most scoring chains Nthmond had, a one stage or another a Carlton player had the ball carrier in a tackle but they broke free and disposed.
So it wasn't a case of not keeping up with play, and it wasn't a case of being in the wrong place, the problem repeated many times was not sticking a tackle.
The offenders weren't all newbies either, I think I noted Cowan, Fogarty, Ainsworth, Williams and OH among some others.
Multiple times tonight, Rioli more than once, took out opponents legs below the knees, often in a chase from behind. That's a free kick everyday of the week and it wasn't paid once tonight!
I think so, scrappy inside footy should be our go, and when the wind gusts that is the sort of footy you get, our average foot skills won't be such a handicap if both sides are missing targets. As long as we can force Nthmond into long kicking while keeping the intervening space closed up.
Tigers are a bunch of rebuild kids and battlers, as MBB said we should take care of them easily and have a big win imo. I don't expect to see us defending for our lives in the last quarter or blown away in one quarter like last week. Need a good win for confidence and while the media probably won't be impressed with anything we do at least we might get the club off the front and back page of the papers and settle a few people down .
I doubt the weather is going to be conducive to heavy scoring. Hopefully I'm wrong, but this is how luck like the luck of the weather, can influence a season.
The naysayers will claim I'm making an excuse in advance, I must be Nostradamus.
If you mean our F50, I agreed, and it's not because of the departure Charlie or SoJ, it because we've had this issue of low scoring efficiency right through and before the tenure of Charlie and SoJ. Even before Voss.
It's the one thing we seem unable to correct, and let's not forget relative to his predecessors Voss has corrected plenty!
Do we know when the problem started, some will claim the departure of Betts set in the rot! Ignoring coaches, economic and administration issues, the biggest football mistake I've seen our club make in my lifetime. Dick Pratt would go and get the best, we let the best go, and it burns us to this day!
