Re: Defence and percentage
Reply #3 –
This is probably something that's not surprising given our ladder position... but I wasn't aware of how badly, in comparison to other sides, we're going in the defensive stakes.
We keep lamenting our lack of goal kicking ability but looking at the ladder this morning one of the things that stands out is the number of points scored against us this year.
While our "Points for" are not radically different to the other teams around us at the bottom of the ladder our "Points against" are more than 100 points behind the next highest
Gold Coast 1930
Brisbane 1919
Carlton 2054
We're looking at our worst result since 2007 when we had a mind numbing 2911 points against.
That rather pathetic result was counter-balanced by the fact we did have some semblance of an attack back then and managed to score 2167 pts leaving us with a percentage of 74.44%
In fact our percentage at the moment is lower than at any time during the dark years.
If we maintain our current percentage, 65.2%, it will be the lowest since 1901
So while there's a bit of work to be done to fix up the attack, our defensive efforts across the ground also need to be addressed.
Its always been a bit alarming.
Without going into stats figures, and the rest of it, since we started "coming good" back at the end of 2008, there always seemed to be patterns of our play that I can often recall commenting to myself and my brother in law the following statements:
1. You cannot make mistakes like that, and expect to win games of football. Chris Judd, and Fevola seemed to get us across the line in spite of this sometimes but even they could only do so much.
2. We are far too easy to score against.
3. We look like boys playing against men today.
4. Scoring seems to be a herculean task for us today, and then we would concede one almost instantaneously at the next centre bounce. (this one was usually against the better sides of the competition).
5. We cannot seem to string together 4 quarters of good footy.
I was watching the Hawks vs Geelong game (no foxtel and the AFL app kept crashing on me on saturday night although I saw the first quarter before the AFL app bombed out) and there was an interesting stat mentioned about Hawthorn at 3/4 time when they were up by about 4 goals, and on 97 points. In 82 matches, they have only lost once when they have scored 100 points or more and that was against Geelong with a kick on the siren by Tom Hawkins to win the game a few years ago.
We seem to be fair way off this, and whilst our best footy has seen us score pretty well, and whilst doing the scoring we were not conceding, we have not looked like showing the sort of form that premiership aspiring teams do at any point during the journey over the last 15 odd years and as soon as momentum swings, we were often accounted for easily enough.
Hopefully that will change soon, but we need to become one of those teams that are tough to play against and can mix it with anyone. Thats why the second half of last season was so encouraging with so many close fought battles against the top sides even without the wins. We finally seemed to be trending in the right direction.
This year its all come crashing down again.
I heard Hardwick state in a presser a few years ago, that we need to stop playing on emotion, because when your up your up and when your down you are a non event, and I get the feeling that we have been a very emotional outfit over the last few years.
Topic: Defence and percentage (Read 5256 times)
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