Any chance our guys could start shepherding and blocking opponents so their team mates can get a run at / with the ball?
I hope so, it stands out doesn't it?
On Sunday night there was a prime example of how this affects the team. There was a kick out from D50 to Curnow on the HFF/Wing, it went over his head and he was running with the flight. Curnow could have easily ran onto that ball, marked it and kept going, he only had one laboring spud Scummer following him who Curonw could have easily burn off. Instead Curnow let the ball bounce, it bounced backwards to his trailing Scum shadow as it tends to do, and was turned over for a cheap ar5e Scum goal.
Curnow let that ball bounce because he had no confidence, no faith, no communications and no experience of others in the team sacrificing themselves for the betterment of the club. If we protected each other, the way the Dawks protect each other, if we gave some chop outs and some shepherds, he would have run onto that ball and into our open F50 without fear!
Sometimes football is that simple!
Of our current list only Scotland and Armfield do the good stuff regularly, the rest I fear are Sunday drivers, even Robbo!
They didn't stand "in the hole" when Fev was around.
As Setanta painfully found out.
That had been coming for sometime, it was bad but you could see Fev getting frustrated with O'hAilpin who would cut across in front of him and bring the defenders in with him. Entry after entry, week after week. There had been other remonstrations in the forward line before that day, not just Fev and O'hAilpin but Scotland, Cloke, Simpson and Stevens had all had a crack at big Carlos.
could turn a games on his own boot, even on bad days he come out in a single Q and change the outcome. None of this bullshiit missing shots for goal from 10 to 25m
We sort of took it for granted that after he left goal kicking would slide a bit, it made us a bit tolerant.
But seriously our goal kicking is a joke now, who is our goal kicking coach, Warnock?
I was already pissed off with AFL over the EFC affair, so much so I plan to go to way fewer AFL games in 2014 and I will concentrate on local football.
Further to this, until we convincingly defeat a quality full strength in form top four side I think I am going to give Carlton membership renewals a miss for here on.
I don't need it anyway, it is something I do voluntarily as I'm an MCG member. There are a whole bunch of my mates who make "membership donations" as such, and they are thinking along the same lines, some have already have pulled the membership pin this season! Most of us don't bother going to StEFCihad stadium for good reasons!
We are sick of seeing our dollars wasted, so the club will just have to get by with fewer dollars to waste!
I know this is sort of self defeating, but it is basically all the average member can do! Maybe then the board and club will get the message, even though they should have got it already given our clubs stalling membership numbers!
Does this mean Capuano is reason for the mess we find ourselves in? Rucks can't tap to advantage?
I have been saying this for several years now.
The spectacular failure to develop the ruck stock we have is because we must have a dud ruck coach. When they leave our club and walk into the No.1 role at other clubs, that is a tell, you know we have a problem not the players.
Secondly, our mids lack that someone explosive who can not just get the ball but deliver it dangerously to forwards. Our opponents, especially the Hawthorn's and Geelongs of this world, do that very well. This is something we need to address more than anything else, as we just don't get a whole lot of value from our clearances.
Not getting value from our clearances is true, when we do get a clearance we waste many, but the story is the same around the ground for us and the ruck situation is unrelated.
Our mids are not less explosive than the Dawks, the Dawks prime midfielders do not have great foot speed at all, their ball use, team work and decision making are their big strengths.
The two Dawks ruckmen are rated the in form ruckmen for the first three games this season, that is a reason why their midfield is going so well at the moment. Hale with little help from anybody else even touched up Sandilands on several levels!
Seriously, guys, Warnock is not that bad. He is far from perfect: most of his faults have been highlighted of late. However:
[1] He actually has a pretty good tank and does not do poorly on long distance running. He simply can't sprint for nuts. (Yet inferior to Kreuzer, and in the past inferior to Hampson as well!)
[2] At training his kicking is usually quite efficient. He has shots at goal and rarely misses, even from decent angles. However, he appears to lack confidence in that area, as his kicking for goal at senior level has been poor now for a couple of years. He needs work on his kicking, absolutely, but he isn't a dead loss in this area. Consider him as having a multiple year long yips. (Yet the coach states he has no future up forward!)
[3] His marking on the track is not that bad either. Getting him to mark consistently and under pressure seems to be the issue. Getting our players to trust him to mark the ball is also an issue: we do NOT kick to him even when he is free. (Averages 1 mark every 5 games, FFS he is 206cm, most rucks get more marks per week than he gets in a year!)
[4] He appears to drop confidence very easily: that is the thing that irritates me the most about his game. He really needs a good dose of persistence. (He needs to grow some cohonas!)
[5] Very few ruckmen take many marks against him.(If only small to medium forwards didn't mark against him too!) He generally keeps other ruckmen quite quiet around the ground.(Didn't you say he can't sprint for nuts, he isn't even contesting a lot of stuff!) He struggled in that regard against Essendon as the players he was playing against were much quicker than he was, so he didn't get to the contest. Also Essendon planned to use that weakness against him:(Everybody uses his weaknesses against him!) their plans worked, as we could not put any pressure on their defenders clearing the ball from defence. Things would have been considerably different if they were kicking long to a contest or kicking under pressure.....
If you want to know one of the major reasons why our midfield is struggling, it is because the 206cm guy who gets his hand to the ball first more often than not taps it directly to the advantage of an opponent! QED
It comes down to that Introvert / Extrovert mix again, we have too many of one!
Plus our players have been indoctrinated by Judd over the last few years to move on with play while he keeps three opposition players busy trying to rough him up. Judd actively encourages our guys to move on while he attracts the attention, in effect Judd was playing the role at Carlton that Cousin's had played so well at West Coast.
But in Judd's absence this doesn't work, and our players do not know what to do? The only mid who goes close is McLean who has a bit of mongrel and the body size to cope with the attention, Bell is starting to work into it and Armfield shows some promise.
Let me get this straight up from my recent reading of this thread.
Leigh Matthews, perhaps the best player ever to walk onto the field and now the possessor of a pretty spectacular coaching record, states Aaron Sandilands is over-rated.
Sandilands a player who per game averages 100% more marks and scoring shots, 30% more hit outs and possessions and 25% more ranking points than our Robert Warnock.
Yet many say Robert Warnock is not that bad, as Sam Newman would say, Ohh Really?
Perhaps Leigh Matthews in his aging state got the name wrong, can you guess who it should have been?
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.
Add that to the fact that we got creamed without the ball, and when we did get it, we turned it over at will, it resulted in our entire team being stuck in our defensive third of the ground.
To get out of the back line you must have a target for the ball and some form of transport to get it there. The likes of Garlett and Ellard are not targets, and blokes like Bell and Robbo won't get it there anyway!
Fair enough I wasn't at the ground so I can't say either way. Gibbs was at least in the game trying to make something happen.
At the ground I thought Gibbs was clearly our best player.. I haven't had the stomach to sit through the replay yet...
It is often the case that what Gibbs does off the ball doesn't get shown on TV, on TV his disposals look uncontested and soft. At the game you usually see him putting an opponent out of the contest early. Often on TV when you see him beaten in a one out contest, which isn't very often, it is because he has left his man to pick up a player someone else has dropped off.
