I am of the age that I remember when the chant was "Shame Fraser Shame". I must admit I am struggling a bit with the "We Want Fraser" one. Surely the St.Kilda experiment of Lyon and Silvagni has run its course. I watched the replay of the Gold Coast game last week and I was impressed by the number of very good players they have, they just don't play as a team. St.Kilda don't have enough good players, and while they are well drilled and well prepared, they don't look committed. Not sure what their recruiting strategy is or whether it is working. Carlton wasn't as clean this week as last, which is expected, but we were pretty good. We next week not only do we make the ten, we finish up ninth and we may have a shot at Collingwood. Our skills look ok, our young guys are doing well, the spirit at the Club is good, our recruiting seems to be coming together, I am not sure what all the fuss was about at the start of the year.
Didn't think we could win this one but after I read the SEN pre-game preview, I thought we might be in with a chance. It was so poor that I thought people might be missing something. I said this a number of times, if you do the simple things well, hit your targets and kick your goals, it is a different game. I think we are getting better at standing up for ourselves without getting sucked in, I would like our tackling to get a bit better and some of our decision making an d field kicking can improve. Having won ten games means we have had a better year than last year. Big game this week against St.Kilda.
Besides the fact it is time to replace the coach, Hawthorn was coming off a bad loss and were really on from the start, especially Ginnivan. They were too big and strong, better organised, had better skills, a better run with the umpires, and put us to the sword when they had the opportunity to do so. This result shows how much we need to improve, but I think it can be done by having Weitering and O'Farrell on the park and having more goal kicking options up forward, like Moir, though he needs to improve. I wouldn't mind running McKay as our main ruck and having O'Keeffe as the backup in the short term as Riley develops. To the clown behind me last night, the continual abuse of Chol was borderline racist, if borderline. And if you have nothing positive to say about your team, don't waste everybody's time by continually saying it.
The way Hawthorn play they are easy to score against if they don't get the ball, however their slingshot football means they can score quickly when they do get it. To put it a different way, if David didn't have an aggot then his battle with Goliath would have gone a different way.
I thought our leaders were down, as well as the middle management players like, Newman, Hayward, Florent, Ainsworth and Kemp. I don't think they played bad it was just that they didn't impact as much as previous. I think Richmond has a lot of good players and I think they really believe they can beat us because of last season so they lift against us. So while I think our endeavour was good, our application was off, especially when Young went down, this seemed to unbalance the team. The missed free kick for McKay was a howler but didn't cost us, Walsh was stupid to give his free kick just before quarter time, but it should have been reversed, the free against Haynes wasn't bad but it should have been reviewed and over turned. They also missed a number of shots on goal but we missed more. We did get a lot of numbers around the ball, especially after quarter time, and our disposal has improved since the start of the year, but our decision making going into the F50 still needs to improve. All these things we will need to do next week.
I may have gone a bit early with my call to sack Josh Fraser, but I did call for Voss to be sacked the day he was appointed so it is always good to get ahead of theses things. For the first quarter and a half it was back to the good old Carlton we have come to love in frustration, but I thought half way through the term we started to turn it around with regards to endeavor. I am not sure we were fully turned on at the start of the game and we seemed to be happy with our performance last week against Geelong and we seemed to play like we were thinking about the bye. Ainsworth, Hayward and Florent have all added to our leadership depth on the ground spreading the load. We had six young guys, in Wilson, Dean, Smith, Cowan, Ison and Byrne, and three others with little AFL experience in Evans, Young and Derksen, but the other 14 players should now all be hardened professionals and play like it. I am looking forward to when we have HOF playing with Dean and Weitering in defence along with Wilson and Cowan. Finally, could some one please explain Walsh that when you are in front with about a minute to go in the match and you have the ball in your hand, then you hang onto the ball.
