................. or a VFL unknown player I have warmed to Boyd and think he is in our best 22/23 and happy to give Austin a tick for his recruiting.
In fairness to Boyd he wasn't really an unknown, it was quite a surprise for some that he had slipped in the pecking order to become a MSD candidate, they had expected him to be picked up in the draft proper but for reasons we will never know clubs let him slide.
I suppose at the time he first nominated he was playing as a Wing / HFF, in the link man type role, and it was only his last season of VFL that he has settled into defence.
Criticism of Ollie is not about his tireless effort. He runs and runs and runs... but not enough comes from all that effort. Acres runs and runs all day as well, with considerable impact in games.
Ollie needs, like many others, to commit his body to tackling, his tackling efforts have been and are a liability... easily broken. The only reason I recommend dropping Ollie to the Magoos is so he can learn to add other strings to his bow.
The problem that Ollie and others like him have is the focus on weaknesses that the AFL brings, if you hesitate opponents see it and forever more know, they know where to stand and what to say to put doubts in your head, it's the sporting equivalent of a game of chicken and they know you've blinked before.
All AFL players have to continually improve their shortcomings, expect every opponent to know them, and if there is no improvement expect those deficits to be amplified week in week out.
However, i do know that Hollands (with Walsh and Cottrell) do more km's a match than everyone else in the team.
For me the only thing we need Ollie to polish up on is his disposal, making quicker decisions so he is not getting pegged with the footy, and hitting more targets. Even so his DE% isn't too bad, but once or twice a game he has a shocker that costs us on the turnover.
I'd love to see some Diesel sessions with some of our blokes to get the handball crisp and decisive.
I won't mentioned who my preferred out would be, it seems to be an emotional issue for some.
I think Boyd has a done a decent job in filling in for Saad and even Cincotta defensively but we miss that rebound and accurate kicking that Saad provides as it breaks up the play and those quick switches across ground often lead to thrusts forward where our big key forwards can be one out.
One thing I do know, he'll close the gaps and leave his own opponent to create the spoils.
Our D50 has been good in general, it's the run and unpredictable carry that I think we miss the most. Not surprising, the opposition have no idea of where Saad is heading, it looks like most of his team-mates struggle to know what he'll do as well!
Another thing, in Saad's absence McGovern has to cover more ground, and that seems to affect his ability to pick out targets like we know he can, which just compounds the problem of Saad missing on the rebound. Early in the season McGovern got to sit across the HBF, intercept and hit up targets on the F50, now he is all over the place.
We've talked through the foibles of just relying on the stats before, the AFL definition of things like pressure act or contest as used by Champion Data are so rubbery you often just have to be within 3 or 4 metres of the ball carrier. That's the main reason one rating system can give a player BoG while another often suggests they were mediocre.
He was terrible for much of the game but his last quarter was OK.
Williams offered way more effort, aggression and pressure than some of the others for most of the game, but when you have two or three around you offering nada you can be made look like a goose.
Did our MC overreact to some misfortunes? We had some close losses but they were really misfortunes or bad officiating that cost us more than once while stats continued to look pretty good in most areas. Now in the space of just a couple of weeks, a few tweaks and all the numbers have slide to the point last Friday we had almost no winnings areas.
The tweaks haven't helped they may have actually hurt.
We had a few discussions here a couple of weeks back, when Kennedy was made sub, that we seemed to be making some odd decisions relating to the MC and match day tactics. In effect we seemed to have willingly disrupted a winning formula to try and patch underperforming areas of the team, and in doing so it feels like we ended up pulling down the whole house. The part that was good is now waning under the strain of trying to bridge gaps, and we are left with almost no winning areas at all.
Saad, Motlop and hopefully Fogarty coming into the team will help. Dropping this game is not an option - either is two rucks.
TDK is more aerobic and faster across the ground than the bulk of the oppositions rucks and many of the opposition KPPs, he doesn't decrease either our pace or our aerobic capacity, he actually stretches opposition capabilities by increasing our total tall mobility.
If there is a run and carry problem, or chasing tackling issue, it's not from having our two rucks playing. A huge problem Friday night was that our SFs gave us stuff all tackles, Fantasia was tops with 3, Owies and Durdin just 1 a piece. How can it be that opposition score so heavily from turnovers on our HFF yet three SF players have just 6 tackles between them? Kennedy had more than them combined, and our next best was BigH!
It's untenable that you have three players basically not contributing, something is drastically wrong with our SF setup, and Fogarty isn't that much better than them but he's an arm and a leg ahead of what's currently on offer.
Before Trump became president everyone was saying he's dangerous and he will start all of these wars but the opposite happened.
Wars don't start in weeks or months, the build up takes years.
What's happening now is a build up that continued right through the Trump era and probably started well before it, he did nothing to arrest it. He was basically asleep at the wheel!
FFS, Trump openly admits to not reading the reports he is provided by officials in government, he gets the bulk of his updates off late night TV. That puts him in the same big fruitcake category with Mel Gibson and Sly Stalone!
If the US wants a celebrity in the White House they'd be better off voting in Mr Bean, even though he'd make similar blunders and also lie about it, he wouldn't do so maliciously like Trump will!
Agree, I think the holding and blocking at stoppages happens on both sides, it has to be very bad to be paid.
What happens to Walsh and Cripps is horrendous, our taggers barely make contact by comparison, our blokes are disadvantaged because we aren't being coached to go outside the rules.
Without being overly dramatic...Folks probably said the same thing about Czechoslovakia and Poland in the late 1930s. Once Ukraine is 'annexed' where to next for a Russian president who seems intent on 'returning' Russian borders to something resembling the USSR
The most shocking thing about this is how long it took for mainstream media to realise Putin has no target boundary, he won't stop.
