Kept the cats goalless last week. Couldn't kick a goal this week.
Missing Kez early ruined our already struggling backline.
Sorry to keep highlighting it, but Celine Moody, 63% game time. 2 hitouts, 1 kick, -8m gained. Not good enough.
I am surprised we recruited Celine. She has a history of injury and has very few runs on the board. She isn't getting any younger and she doesn't seem to be improving. That is very ordinary. I don't see her on our list in 2 years: there are better, younger rucks going around these days.
Breann is also lacking input this year. Jess Good is doing more ruckwork, and she is quite good at it, but she doesn't have the same presence around the ground. Breann can, but it is appearing less and less these days.
Our first home game for the year at 14:35 on Saturday. Geelong were finalists last year, so we won't be going in as favourites. They are short on ruck talent, while we are reasonable in that area. Hopefully, Geelong will be Felis Domesticus this weekend.
Good to come home against the breeze. None of our 3 rucks had big days: Bree Moody took a brilliant mark and kicked the goal, but didn't do a lot. Celine got injured. Good got taps.
[1] We need to address the structural problems out team has: (a) a general lack of pace. (b) lack of a tall, athletic defender. (c) Lack of pace in the midfield. (d) lack of small forwards who can keep the ball in and kick crumbing goals.
[2] Our MC needs to look at the decisions they've made. As was noted earlier, it is hard for them to win a game, but they can certainly go a long way to losing a game by making poor decisions and designing a line-up with major structural issues. We also don't demote guys who are playing poorly enough, nor are we rewarding good VFL form. We usually promote guys when they've past their form peaks.
[3] Our coaching staff has been pretty good over the last couple of years, but they don't appear to have a lot of tactical brilliance. We need to address that. We need to be able to react quicker when things go wrong. We don't tend to make many positional changes and they generally don't gel, because the players are neither prepared for them nor do they respond as they should.
[4] Our skills need a lot of work. Looking at Sydney and GWS, their skills are better than ours. They don't make the same mistakes twenty times. Their handball is on a totally different level to ours; they find guys when ours don't.
[5] Our fitness level is fine, but we need more of our players on the park more often. Hopefully the new guy can keep our injury numbers down.
[6] Intensity: the fanaticism towards the ball and the man could be seen easily in the GWS-Sydney game, especially. We need that. We've rarely played with that commitment, even at our best. We're not going to win a flag until we can show the same level of commitment and desire to get the ball at all costs.
I hate losing, especially to Brisbane, but I can be happy for the last half: we stood up when other teams this weekend (Port and Bulldogs) just gave up. If we hadn't been blown away in the first half ...
We really stuffed up with our selections. The Match Committee have some serious work to do. Picking half-fit players is just not smart, no matter how desperate we were. We also have some players who need to take a good, hard look at themselves, some coaches who need some tactical brilliance (we don't have much) and a lot of work on our skills and fitness. The last weeks of this season have been a disaster.
Voting is as usual: you have 15 votes to award pretty much as you will, with the following provisos: [1] 15 votes in total, no more, no less. [2] No more than 10 votes for any one player (even Sam Walsh or Patrick Cripps) [3] Three players at least must get a mention. [4] A grade for the game, A+ (what I want to see) to F-.
