he is doing well in the new role but equally makes you appreciate the holding down of key posts the 2 kids in dean and dersken are doing ad that is not easy and they have held up extremely well considering neither have played 20 games!
Agree, he is doing well, getting the best out of himself, and it does help highlight Derksen and Dean.
You have to pick and choose your battles, and good coaches get the most out of any list.
Fraser did this with our 2s before, just as he is doing it now with the 1s!
These Norbit business corporate types, that want the coach to be a gun marketer, business analyst, salesmen, etc., etc.., can go and get stuffed. All fans want is a football coach, not a spin doctor!
I don't think the list needs much, and I've been saying as much for the whole season, we are just one or two pieces off being in a position to enter the Top 8, turning more of those close losses into close wins.
The thing is as we are now seeing, a couple of wins instead of a pile of close losses, and the headspace of the entire list changes. It's not a big deal to get those extra wins, as long as the club doesn't b0rk things up.
At the moment Young is rucking and floating forward, and it's Pitto doing the D50 end, it helped let Harry and Kemp off the hook. Young doesn't have to be as accountable in F50, he can move to space and make himself an option and teams aren't standing a close defender on him, but that won't persist. On top of this, right at the moment at least, he has the perfect coach to get the most out of him by using him in his best role.
In D50 Young gets caught out in no man's land ball watching, he's not needed there at the moment because we have Derksen and Dean doing a job. In this regard he is miles off Weitering, Dean or Derksen, they do no hesitate they just back themselves in to influence the contest.
As I watched last night I was thinking the Lions were making the same mistake with Hipwood that we made with Young, just because someone has the size and shape doesn't mean they will make it as a defender.
As much as I like the two rucks, I suspect when Weitering is back Young might be the out, with Derksen filling the F50 role, Derksen is now probably our 3rd best contested mark and getting better just behind Weitering and Harry. I think Derksen could easily fill the role left vacant by Charlie, and float to wherever he is needed. In my opinion he's a great get, who recruited him?
They had close to a full side for mine, those players missing dont make up a 76 pt deficit in my opinion.
Not really, for the last half of the last quarter they basically had no rotations, which was a contributing factor to the blow out.
But in fairness to us the damage was already done early in the 2nd half, we kept up the pressure early in the 3rd when most were expressing doubts about our ability to maintain the pressure and contain the Lions for 4-qtrs.
I don't want to be negative, it was a great win, but on this result don't read too much into the scoreline.
This time of year is the traditional heavy work-load period for teams embedded in the finals, they usually pound the training track 4 or 5 weeks out and start to taper from about 2 or 3 weeks out, to be cherry-ripe for the first finals.
It's a point of difference between teams struggling to make the finals and teams already there, and it could explain some of the apparent flatness from both Brisbane teams this weekend.
The only thing countering that, is the fact the Lions were quite lucky to defeat us the first time, as Fagan coach pointed out!
Some reflections on what will be my favourite H&A game for the 2026:
[1] Pitto was murdered in the ruck. But did that stop him? Not in the slightest. He may not have won the taps, but he made Draper's and Fort's ineffective. He often sharked the hit out himself. he had 6 clearances and helped our mids stop Brisbane's avenue to goal. His tackle early in the game really showed that we were on. As the game went on, he started to get more taps himself. Pitto had a big night. We really missed him when he was out. For that matter, Lewis Young showed similar intelligence when it was his turn to ruck. He didn't get a lot of taps, but he sharked more than a few and made it hard to the Brisbane mids to get their hands on the ball. Both guys really stood up tonight.
I don't agree, I think it was Pitto's best game for the season, and probably Young's as well.
Fans think losing the tap is losing the contest, that is far from the truth, it's a misnomer that results from putting too much faith in the stats.
The purpose of the ruck contest is to get the ball heading where you want it to go, where you have planned for it to go, even if that means having the opponent direct it to that general location. You can control the drop zone of the footy, so that it's falls in the place your team is expecting, and you do not need to actually tap the footy to have that happen. You just have to make sure the opponent taps it to where you think they will.
They said Hayward, Florent and Ainsworth was a bust. They said Florent was a turnover merchant. They said Austin was a spud. They said Cripps was cooked. They said we play nothing like Brisbane. They said we can't afford to play two rucks. They said McKay should be traded. They said Kemp should never play F50 again.
Be careful with what they say, the internet never forgets.
For example, special comments man King had previously said we had a new game plan never seen before since Fraser took over, then tonight he said under Voss we'd be trying to execute this game all season and for whatever reason Voss could not get it done (executed)! Which is exactly what I've been saying for months!
In 2026 we play an almost identical game plan the Brisbane, but our execution and inconsistency has been bringing us undone, until tonight. We nearly beat them last time, which before tonight was in my opinion our best game of the season.
I'd also said we are just one or two players off a massive change of fortune, and it looks like Austin delivered, pity he's gone. The baby thrown out with the bathwater after Ma and Pa threw a massive tanti!
Not in my wildest dreams could I have seen a game like this.
Nobody could have, but when you think about how well we played against them to lose the first time, I thought that loss was our best game of the season.
We play so much like Brisbane, and it looks like they don't like it when they get some of their own medicine.
No mention of The Hyphen here, and yet over my life supporting Carlton The Hyphen was as good of a performer in clutch games as any, and had many great momentum turning games. But he wasn't with us that long and arrived "a foreigner".
Many fans show a bit of team colour history bigotry, but Judd, Diesel and The Hyphen deserve to be part of the discussions even if their blood isn't pure!
I've never understood why Ratts isn't in more of these discussions, career consistency, a 24x7 performer, he'd be up near the pinnacle in just about any other club's history.
But having said that, can you imagine the impact Cripps would have had if he was in a team surrounded by the likes of Diesel, Ratts, The Hyphen, Kouta, etc., etc., I doubt he would have faded into the background?
Some are influenced by peak performance, a great season or spectacular games, others think first of sustained performance over a career.
Cripps has both!
I think he has Kouta and some others covered in this regard, and to me Kouta along with Diesel might well be responsible for the two best individual seasons of footy I have ever seen.
