Carlton Supporters Club

Very little positives to come out of the game, so i'll try my best to provide some.

1. The obvious one was Harry McKay. Big bloke who can take a grab, but good on the move too. Looks very comfortable running with ball in hand. Very good kick at goal, despite some yips he's experienced recently. Harry is back, but this version is 'the modern day dinosaur'!

2. How well GWS played together. How well they worked as a team. Why is this a positive? Because not so long ago, they were a rabble that were getting flogged week in week out and they had little hope apart from a talented list. Connect the dots and we see not all hope is lost. The difference is they have played 100+ games together and understand how eachother work. How many 'no look' handballs and kicks just happened to find a teammate today? Are they the luckiest team around or do they know how eachother play.

3. Cripps is probably leading the brownlow. Is definitely leading the coaches votes....and probably a whole lot of other votes as well. He was bound to have a bad one. Thankfully(?) it came against a side that we were no hope of winning against...at least not after the first quarter. Its best we don't 'waste' his good games.

4. We have played 31 players so far this year. Will be 32 when we bring in Kennedy next week. Should have been 34 with Pickett and Docherty unavailable for the year. We are finding out plenty about our list and plenty of kids are getting games in them. This will help long term. Players like Obrien and Stocker are not meant to be playing as much footy as they have been given the stage of their development, but it will help them long term in terms of what is required at AFL level. Short term pain, long term gain. The downside of going so deep into you list, and playing so many kids is what you see today. Too many indians, and not enough chiefs. A balance that will be restored when we get some more players back from injury.

So thats about all i got. 

There was one moment LOB tried to tackle a GWS lad (forget who) and physically couldn't get him off his feet. The lad just bent over and carried him on his back.

LOB simply doesn't have the size to compete effectively at AFL level and should not be put back until he does.

EDIT: That being said, LOB had more touches and more fantasy points than Cripps did today.....well so did 15 other players wearing a CFC monogram.

I watched LOB closely for a while today - he actually just stood there on one occasion and literally watched a GWS player with the ball just sweep past him without offering any form of a tackle. The guy literally just brushed past him and LOB just jogged away. I could not believe my eyes. This game should have been turned into a dogfight with us just scrapping to spoil their every move and disrupt their ball movement. We may have ended up with a much more respectable loss.

LOB was a fantasy selection at pick 10, Fisher tackles fine and is built like a baby whippet...lets be brutally honest LOB doesnt like contesting or tackling and we are not good enough to afford
players who like to sit on the outside looking for a cheapie and lose interest when its their time to tackle.

Maybe they all had the flu? 

I say that tongue in cheek, however our no. 2 wears his heart on his sleeve and gives his everything, JSOS, was as inept and ineffectual as all the others.

Are you referring to Dow as No2? In terms of Jack Silvagni, I thought he was one of our very few contributors and continued his 2019 improvement.

Heaven forbid we don't want to see anything happen  to Cripps, but it does throw another element into any evaluation of the process.

How much are we actually developing in the rest of the list if we are so reliant on him
He makes the players around him better , stand a little taller, and if he's curtailed we seem very, very ordinary.

I have rarely seen a midfield beaten so comprehensively as ours was beaten today. And they didn't have Ward and Coniglio. We have very serious midfield problems that need to be addressed. We are way off the pace

Totally agree, we need a couple of experienced bigger midfield bodies to help Cripps, Setterfield is a newbie kid learning the game and Kennedy has been injury prone.
and while he has been in the system a while is still finding his feet as a regular senior player.

Maybe more than small forwards we need a Marlion Pickett and Jye Bolton in the mid season draft who can help Cripps and give us some cover while Setterfield and Kennedy establish themselves.

I said at the start of the year, we need to get him out of the midfield for periods.
Someone asked why would you take your best midfielder out of the middle.

The answer is to develop multiple players and make us harder to play against.

The Hawks always had multiple avenues to goal even when Dunstall was at his best.
St Kilda relied mostly on Lockett