Re: Northern Blues vs. Williamstown Sunday 6th April at Visy
Reply #76 –
We have to be very careful about assessing the weekends NB game, it was a team with 17 AFL listed players up against a team with exactly none!
For example, some have pumped up Casboult, but given his size, the stellar pre-season we hear reported giving him a new level of strength and fitness added to his ability to mark. Meat, now possibly in his AFL prime at 23 years of age, should be clunking 15 marks and kicking 7 or 8 goals against sides like that.
He kicked 1 and Jack Anthony was our main target up forward!
Of the kids playing Cripps, Graham and Temay did really well but had Scotland a General all day telling them where to go and when to go there. Kids often do well when clubs haven't seen them yet, the proof comes late in the season when they encounter re-matches, and we do not want them butchered before they mature like a few others we could name.
You can only comment on what you see, Spotted One.
Willy is a club that has had the wood on us, so getting up against them was something to be pleased about - especially considering they had their tails up and our boys fought back to win (though, yes, probably shouldn't have trailed by that much to begin with - first game and silly mistakes cost us). We all know the realities and what it will take for some of these kids, but you have to start somewhere and some of them showed a good start. I was more buoyed by the likes of Cripps, Giles, Reynolds, Sheehan, johnson, Holman, Wood, Graham & Docherty than what I have witnessed running around in the NBs for a while. And regardless of the negative opinions of Levi Casboult... again, you can only comment on what you see and I saw a bloke giving it his all and clunking quality contested grabs. Although his 'tap work' is not up there with 206, his effort and contest in the middle and around the ground was good and encouraging.