This was the main reason 2012 was so embarrassing.
Think back to the St. Kilda game where they went after ED curnow and ended his game. Then they smashed Carrazzo, and later on Murphy copped the same treatment.
Do the same to Richmond. Smash the little twerps into the ground!!
Tough to do that when your captain or better players have three opponents working them over and your team-mate in Tuohy or Henderson jogs past with an invisibility cloak on! ACoS and a couple of the younger guys Macreadie, Wettering, Ploiwman and Williamson are rapidly fixing this problem, but good riddance to those piddly players we've "lost"!
We still have a couple of Tarzan's who play like Jane, guys who happily jump all over someone's back but miraculously always find themselves out of the contest when the ball comes in slow and high with them in front. Thankfully, their ranks are rapidly thinning! There is nothing more disheartening for a team than having one of the giants wearing a Tom-Thumb heart!
I think that is normal, when you are the Carlton of recent times you don't put your limited available attacking weapons on guard duty.
We don't have enough experienced attacking talent to leave the ones we do have tagging!
Malthouse went tag crazy in the end, a sign he had lost it, his whole plan was stop him, stop him, stop him, stop him, stop him, etc., etc., etc., leaving the possibility of a win to dumb luck. While it's true you have to stop the opposition scoring to win, you still must score yourself!
The league's best player last season was a basketballer.
Our best player was a goalkeeper.
Imagine how good they would have been if they had focused on footy their whole lives?
Yes, no doubt that will be the case!
Also the massive rise in fitness and physicality has, as Lods points out, greatly increased pressure acts on field. At the moment the girls are playing catch up in terms of decision making and experience. They are all now fit enough to get to the contest and influence the disposal, but they are not experienced at playing under such pressure. The tell for me is how many of them are still goal orientated, they still try to pick up the pill and head straight through a wall of opponents for goal.
If you want to judge how much they have improved, it will probably show when their normal state level season starts later this year and the fitness and talent is spread across many teams.
Voting for the Hosking's can be a curly one, the commentators frequently called the wrong name when numbers were obscured despite the tell-tale shoulder strapping Jess wore which should have made the identification unmistakable.
The naysayers are founding their arguments based on what women do relative to men, it's pointless.
They don't get that the AFLW is a totally different game, so comparisons with AFL are pointless.
Like comparing Go-Karts to F1. They can race on the same track with the same priorities, rules and a similar skill set but that is where the comparison ends. Yet you can easily understand and respect both sports. Why is it so hard for some to accept females playing football, that seems to be the issue underlying many negative posts!
Those particular boys you're talking about would have as much or even more muscle definition and strength than the 18yo female. It's 's not always about weight. Female's will only kick it 60% of their male counterparts hence if they're playing on a full size ground scores will be very low. juts have to take that into account. Like female cricketers, female footballers need to play on a smaller ground if you want higher scores.
As DJC says, inside 50 is a useless stat for females, inside 25 or 30 is critical.
Comparing females to 14 or 15 year old boys is pointless. Lance Whitnall, Bryce Gibbs and Watson Snr were playing senior football at 15.
I think the girls need to look at Tayla Harris' kicking technique, I think it's better suited to female anatomy. I've seen something similar in martial arts, girls are far more effective at roundhouse kicks than direct kicks. Perhaps it's something to do with their hip and pelvis structure. But for this to be effective in play coaches have to change some tactics, the targets will need to be more lateral.
Girls were hyper and both teams ran themselves into the ground very early which had a negative effect on the 2nd half spectacle. I suspect we'll see a correction in the balance between defence and attack in coming weeks.
I'm not buying into the naysayers and those philosophically opposed to females playing football. They should start a sky is falling thread elsewhere!
The Game
Counter-intuitively, the massive increase in player fitness and strength has had the opposite effect of what many expected. The game was generally congested because of the tactical focus on tagging. Players like Vescio, Chiocci, Stevens, Davey and Harris no longer have a natural advantage over the rest. You won't see them easily breaking lines like they did last season.
I wasn't expecting the negative tactics from the coaches, I was expecting AFLW to be more attacking. The focus on tagging and defensive structures is all new for the girls, they applied it very well perhaps even better than the men. But the newness of this in their game means the attacking players are yet to sort out how to deal with it. So at least short term we are likely to see less dominance by the likes of Vescio, Pearce, Harris, Brennan, Phillips, etc., etc..
Pound for pound the girls attack the contest and each other as hard if not harder than the men.
I think the AFLW Executive would be a bit worried about the aggression and vindictiveness on show, too much of it and the game becomes intimidating for many girls. The soccer mums(ie. The FA) would see that as a win.
Don't get between the Lioness and her Cub, or in the AFLW case the footy or a team-mate!
I thought the two best players on the ground were both Collingwood, Chiocci and Molloy. But it was clear our defensive structures kept the Pies outside a comfortable scoring zone.
Shorter kicking, 25m to 30m, the girls are as good as the guys hitting targets by foot, judging them as deficient when they miss a 40m target is like judging the guys at 60m!
Handball is still a problem, the lack of power is causing some congestion because handball range is diminished. But see my question about the ball below.
I don't buy into the new rules making the AFLW game congested and corridor centric, the real cause of that is the coaching tactics and the increase aerobic capacity and strength of the weaker players who were previously just chook runners. Some of the body transformations in one pre-season are astounding, there were no unfit players out there.
Keep in mind these girls only assembled for pre-season in November, hardly full-time professionals yet!
Having said that, the new rule will have no effect on play if the umpires are unable to divorce themselves from bringing players back directly over the mark. In any case teams have already learned not to chase the footy so the delay in getting the pill to the nearest player negates that rule. At best it needs tweaking at worst it's not effective.
It may be because of the significant changes in body shape, but it appeared to me the girls were now using the full sized footy. Last year they used the smaller size footy, can anyone confirm the situation for the current season?
Looking at the two teams last night, our list management versus the Pies, I'm not sure we can sustain that game style and make an impact on the finals. The Pies were significantly bigger in build and height, we've gone the diverse mosquito fleet route. That is not a detraction from the play of the smaller girls who often took down larger opponents.
Maddison Gay will be the AFLW best player within a season or two. She moves and thinks like her male counterparts, as team-mates improve she will become an attacking weapon.
I'm a bit concerned about Lauren Arnell and her future, I can see why she stood aside from the captaincy. It's clear the average AFLW player is now faster and stronger, Lauren no longer has the leg speed to keep up and her strength and aggression are no longer an advantage. I hope she can prove me wrong.
Overall I'm very happy with the progress the girls have made, if the guys showed this sort of improvement we'd be on a 3 year rebuild not a 20 year hiatus!
Cannot believe the level of wagon jumping going on in the media, you'd think we were flag favourites! I know this happens for many clubs, but it hasn't been part of our media landscape for so long it's hard to remember another case!
At the moment I've been unable to ID the sources, so;
If this is our clubs doing, a new look media department, then kudos to the club as they are light years ahead of where they were in the past!
If it's the sycophants at News Ltd and Fairfax, trying to beat up a story before an expected fall, then fork off the lot of you! In the nicest possible way!
It's using our senior players so it will be effecting them and I'm hoping it won't be adversely effective on our main season.
Shrug shoulders.
I don't know what you read to end up with this but meh for me the main allure of Carlton is watching our team play afl footy and whilst I'm happy for our women's team and wish them every success it is merely a detail.
I don't have daughters, but I can understand why some people are so frustrated with the way women in sport are perceived.
I think they deserve every bit of attention they get without the need to judge them relative to men. I do not see them as halftime entertainment or a curtain raiser there just to fill in the blanks. I'm sure you don't mean to infer that they are just a sideshow.
I see the elite in the girls, even if it is a different kind of elite to the men!
Starc's never had an ODI issue in any country hence his outstanding average, economy and strike rate. As for Tests, his best Series comfortably was the last Sri Lankan Tour.
Starc's a good ODI bowler, a great finisher to the low order, but I think he's well away from where we need him to be when bowling to the top order.
Starc's figures are greatly bolstered by those cheap wickets he picks up at the bottom end of the innings. Not that isn't in someway valuable but the figures are distorted, when you drill down from the general match stats into the details this becomes quite apparent. Lots of those four wicket hauls are three tail enders.
We need another bowler or two that make it harder for the top order, for the tail end I'd back in most of our better ODI and 20/20 bowlers to clean up the tail if they were given the opportunity!
