Ready for tomorrow evening.
After galloping out to a 39 point lead at quarter time, the Eagles actually outscored us for the remainder of the match.
Please explain.
Two goals after half time.
It has to be a coaching instruction surely to go from moving the ball swiftly by hand and forward movement to chip mark, chip mark ?
If voss is getting cheesed off by it something isnt going the way it should. To be fair, we were walking through tackles first quarter.
We clearly changed what we were doing after quarter time.
Our structure fell apart for a bit there when Charlie first went off too, and a lot of players weren't getting near the ball.
It seemed deliberate but I cant help but wonder if certain running patterns weren't being run which meant the ball was stuck at half back due to lack of options and them being covered.
Positives
- Win away
- Motlop still building
- Youngsters showing something
- TDK solid
Negatives
- TDK solid
- Played 1q well, poor thereafter
- Wildly inconsistent
- Consistently unconvincing
- Turn overs
- i50 efficiency and goalkicking
- Injuries prevail again 🤞
So much work to do. Can see us bottom 6 whilst others progress nicely
When we play slow - whether our intention or forced by opposition moves - we are terrible. We try to wind down the clock but can’t hit targets enough to wind down the clock and advance to our F50. The second half was shocking footy to watch. I get we had injuries but we’re talking WC here 🤦🏻♀️
Durds didn’t do much when he came on, acres continually gets caught trying to do too much, Cripps was well held, Hewitt was great for a while but then I didn’t notice him. Doch still looks a little behind the pace.
Ollie was good, Saad okay, McG amazingly pretty good.
I don’t know what else to think of that game, so odd.
Here’s a game plan..
Mark.
Stop.
Wait an eternity to assess options and when “play-on” called take kick under pressure.
Kick to a target kind-of on their own, kick to where they are, not where they could be if they moved away from their opponent, and give the ball lots of hang time so that perhaps 2 other opponents as well can get there to spoil or outmark.
Turnover.
It seems that IS the game plan
I reckon Weitering is either carrying an injury or has seriously devolved.
His 2 games, either side of the bye, were as poor as I can recall and this week wasn't much better.
He is completely lacking any serious acceleration.
He seems far less mobile and unable to elevate himself off the ground to get the same dynamic defensive punches and/or overhead marks that were his greatest weapons.
His kicking has deteriorated so much that he rarely finds a teammate unless that teammate is standing alone in a paddock.
Part of the problem with his kicking is that he is commonly standing flat-footed and lacks the mobility to kick through the ball - hence he regularly puts too much air under the ball and/or simply kicks it aimlessly as far as he can, which is not all that far these days.
We are exactly where we are. A mid table team.
We waited 10 plus years of crap to build a middle of the road team.
So many of the list just stay where they are many have stagnated or gone backwards and the kids get a tad better but never really come on to the point where they can influence a game.
Unless they do a fixture where we play WC and North 6 each we arent making finals with this list.
while i agree Weiters has had a few off weeks the very fact we are critiquing him is so sad - kinda means this list is potentially cooked. The bloke was our rock when all
around him was crumbling and now our sh1te culture has even gone thru to him. The one guy i thought would be immune. its bl00ldy sad.
I suspect he is carrying an injury that seriously reduces his mobility - that would be the better of the two cases.
I think it was against the Giants.
Weiters was jumping and his quad connected with a Giants player (possibly his face?? I cant recall exactly). Was limping around for a bit at the time. Never looked right since then.
Reckon it's a bad corky which would hamper him as you described above.
Honestly, all our A-graders have been sub par. It's our b and c graders that are standing up and covering....including some kids like carroll coming from nowhere.
Remembering we felisted him last year without having played a game in his years in the list.
He's played 8 so far this year.
Our goal kicking = pathetic
Motlop's goal kicking= absolute perfect pathetic
It's probably time for the club to offer a half-membership.
Members and supporters are only getting half a game. :(
Positives
4 points
Negative
Underwhelming performance against 18th
If the opposition doesn't turn up -- Cheats/Weagles 1st qtrs (and others throughout the years) -- we look a million bucks. But the moment other sides get to work, it seems we just don't know what to do other than attempt to close the game down - blokes go into their shells, become panicky, confused, discombobulated, skills evaporate, disconnected and just plain ordinary. Inconsistency reigns. A bunch of individuals once any heat comes into the game. Plus, we're really boring to watch.
Surely it's not a fitness issue.
If it was happening 15 minutes into the last quarter you could guess at that being a part of the reason.
But 15 minutes into the second quarter.... ::)
Curnow in a post match suggested they slowed things down a bit once they copped a few injuries.
Cant see the reasoning behind that given the injuries were to two tall forward/ruck
Nope it's a 'mental' issue.
And strangely it's one that affects supporters as well as players.
As well as we were playing, who amongst us watching on didn't feel that we would struggle to maintain the effort.
It was almost expected it would turn around.
I'm guessing it gets into the players heads too.
A silly mistake (and we had a few last night) can cause a momentum shift and when we lose it we almost always find it hard to get it back.
It becomes a case of 'holding on'.
We desperately need a couple of games of four quarter effort to break the trend, but looking at the draw, options for that are running out pretty quickly.
Our players are lazy. When we play well, we move the by hand quickly (to cater for lack of leg speed) and we look good. The minute the opposition apply pressure and close off space, we get impatient and go the useless long bomb to a contest. The talls dont seem to want to provide half decent one and the ball gets turned over.
When we play well under pressure from the opposition, we dont panic, we switch the footy from side to side and wait until an opportunity is created to then move the footy fwd. I saw players standing around doing SFA to get into space forcing the bomb or hack kick. craps me to tears and really, two weeks in a row we should have kicked cricket scores against those two defences. Losing two qtrs this week and 3 last week against those teams in an abomination.
Lazy... we deliberately changed mode to a different style.
Not sure where the idea comes from that this is an effort or desire based situation.
Its a tactical shift to a slower mode of playing.
Not sure where the idea comes from that it's lazy or based on a desire. They are clearly trying to play a different method that is not as contested and there is no practice like match practice. Occasionally our opposition are forcing this to happen but that wasn't what happened yesterday.
Acres needs a spell, he has been horrid.
Good teams dont need to change the way the play so much, we had the opportunity 2 weeks in a row to go on with it and we get too sucked into worrying about the opposition and what they have changed. To my eye, and clearly I wasnt at the ground, it looked like from about mid way through the second, players stopped running and creating space for themselves. The HB chains stopped and its like we went into conservation mode.
We have been run over a few times this year. This was not one of those times.
If the issues were easy to solve, I think the club has enough seasoned campaigners, across all departments, to have sorted them by now.
good teams change play and execute effectively another way.
We are trying to get better at that, but you cant improve it without doing it.
The tell was Voss getting annoyed in the coaches box. We have execution issues.
I dont want you to get upset I'm explaining your frustration, and why it's happening. I understand it its easy to say dont play this way. Thing is if we can work our way through this bit and improve it we might reap rewards from it in games where our other mode isnt effective.
We are in a situation where if we did happen to make finals it may very well depend on percentage.
If it was a deliberate tactic...(which for the life of me I can't understand, given the injuries were not to players where speed was a huge factor)
Why slow play down and dry up the scoring in one of the best opportunities we have left to improve our percentage?
Fully Agree, the attacking mode got switched off and we went back to our Soviet style conservative stoppage, mark and kick game.
No run and carry breaking the lines, just go back and take your kick and slow the game down, we got lucky that West Coast are so bad they couldnt take advantage and fumbled their way to a loss with some of the worst skills I have seen.
Brock is the worst footballer in the comp, give him the ball and its a guaranteed turn over as he has no idea how to defend or play safe down back. Same with Dewar who got a lot of the ball but butchered every kick, we need to thank those two for helping us win the game..
The glass half full version :
- we won by nearly 6 goals, similar to Geelong who beat WC by 7 goals
- traveling, away from Melbourne
- no Walsh, no McKay, Curnow out early, Cripps and Weitering down on form for various reasons
- a few players with a handful of games
- a few in game injuries
The glass half empty version :
- we played 2 quarters of good footy, against a team with one win, sitting last on the ladder.
Let the reader choose.
Doesn't sound like I missed much; I was in hospital with a cracked rib and didn't follow a second of the game.
I'll look at the replay today as I recover, but it sounds like the only thing I missed was Charlie's injury. :(
I understand the need to experiment.
I'm all for going full bore on experimentation once our season is out of reach.
Play kids, or fringe players who may be on one last chance.
Play around with structure
Try players in different positions.
I'm not sure in a senior match where you are still a finals chance though is the best time or place.
If it was in fact a deliberate move...
We didn't gain much from changing things up, if anything...
-For a start the side we put on the field (and ended up on the field) is probably well short of our best 22 so any learning opportunity only applies to those playing>
-we lost an opportunity to improve on our percentage.
-we may have re-inforced doubts amongst our players about our ability to play out a game.
(that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy...if they doubt... when one or two things go wrong it can get into their heads. Maybe that's what is happening already
-it didn't work, and a team labelled as pathetic by their coach at quarter time is suddenly competitive.
-it may work against a West Coast. Try it against a Collingwood and they'll run all over us. Different opposition-different tactics.
Recover quickly...
Just watch the first quarter. ;)
...and stay away from the footy shows this week. ::)
I went to the game WC let us do whatever we wanted for 1.5 quarters and after we were about 55 points up we then got incredibly lazy and arrogant with our disposal. We stopped making good positions and kicked to contests that we just expected to win and didn’t. No respect for opposition at all in this case but WC showed heart in second half something we don’t appear to have. I went to north game as well and they will beat us and they know it.
Two games out of the 8, but we have a game in hand on GWS. Bit of a bugger that Brisbane didn't beat them.
GWS are winning big games away but struggling at home.
Yes, Vossy explained that the loss of our two key forwards necessitated a change in gamestyle as we jury-rigged a forward line and second ruck. Silvagni was also in the rooms for a while after a late, high hit. I suspect that he was undergoing a HIA. We had McGovern in defence and Williams as our “tall” forward.
Has anything been said about Reid’s trip in Q1 ?
Or the elbow to Fogarty ?
Coaches' votes :
9 Adam Cerra (CARL)
9 George Hewett (CARL)
3 Jaxon Binns (CARL)
3 Mitch McGovern (CARL)
2 Harley Reid (WCE)
2 Alex Cincotta (CARL)
1 Tom McCarthy (WCE)
1 Jacob Weitering (CARL)
I've seen talk in the media about Harley's elbow on Fogarty, but nothing official at this point.
Not sure how much we changed and if it was planned or if it was something we did because of injuries.
However, there COULD be a need to 'experiment' a little bit.
If nothing else, you try this stuff against a hack team so that you have it nailed by the time you need it for a good team. Not sure how often we've tried it, but if its something we've been attempting all year, with the amount we've been overrun, it clearly needs more training.
At the end of the day, we won the game.
At the end of the day, our percentage is not something we need to worry about.
Hopefully we learned something and it helps us in the future.
Shows how much we've missed Cincotta, just seems to be one of the types who finds himself in the right place at the right moment.
Blokes like Cinc and Lord just go out and do exactly what is asked of them for the good of the team. A coach cannot ask for more than that.
Really enjoy watching the constant effort of both of these guys.
Good for Binns to be in the coaches votes.
Someone said earlier we are hell boring to watch - absolutely totally agree. It seems surreal after years of being on Friday nights and being howled down, that we turned it around and became an exciting team to watch! Thank god we’re not on Friday nights much anymore 🥱
I've heard Voss singing Cincotta's praises because he is so coachable.
Good Carlton teams have always been exciting to watch and played innovative football, we have shown we can play modern footy for a quarter or two this season with players like Saad, Ollie Hollands and Lord providing run and carry and lacing some passes to our forwards but then we default to this horrible slow Soviet cold war brand as I like to call it which invites errors and the opposition to take us on more and we become paralysed and stop to a walk. Its a consistent theme nearly every game and its so bad a lot of fans switch off and wont watch because you know where its heading if we are playing anyone decent.
Understand what you're stating here, Principal Lods, and if it were a one off I'd wholeheartedly agree, especially considering our ladder position.
However... there was very little different in the way we played to most of the entire season, sheesh, to the past few years. Doesn't seem to matter who we put on the paddock or in whatever position... We deliver the same results, shoot to the top of the mountain then gradually roll down to, or near, the bottom. And I actually don't think anyone knows why.
It's almost as if we've created a unique brand: look all conquering for a while, then shizen the bed. Whatever it is, it sure aint delivering the very best version of ourselves for anything more than thirty or fourty minutes! Gameplan, between the lugholes/psychological profile, diet, burden of expectation, development, selection, clueless coaching... FIIK.
That's the strange thing Baggers
We are being told we changed a few things up due to injuries.
But in fact the course of the match pretty much mirrored a lot of our performances this year.
For a bloke that's allegedly playing under duress, Jacob Weitering played one hell of a game. I know our defence plays as a unit and the work of Haynes or Saad may contribute to Hollands winning a contest or clearing the ball out of defence, but Weitering's individual effort was outstanding. Oscar Allen hardly touched the ball while Weitering had 23 disposals at 74%. Of course, Weitering and his fellow defenders accumulate possessions through switches of play and kicks to the pocket after a behind, but Weiters managed 10 intercepts, eight contested possessions and he killed 10 marking contests while taking 14 marks himself ... and he spent the entire game on the ground.
Oscar Allen has hardly touched the ball all year, is leaving as a free agent, doesnt care anymore and was also injured in the game and should have been dropped weeks ago but WC being the abysmal team they are have nothing else and are forced to play him. Weitering has been doing ok for a player who looks sore and injured at times especially when he kicks the ball. Got a bad corky or two a while back and I wonder if he really should have been rested.
I think you are putting a lot of stock into what Charlie said.
He is the one that said we changed things up due to injuries.
He also said the small forwards did well after he went off kicking a couple goals.
Pretty sure we only kicked 1 since he went off and that was Mitch McGovern.
So don't take his words as gospel.
I think people are a bit harsh in their judgement of the team. The outcome of two goals after half time again was disappointing but I think losing Curnow was a major problem for the team to overcome. Of concern was the missing of gettable goals which would change the narrative as was the dropping of marks. In the main I thought our decision making was better but we need to see it under pressure before we get to far ahead of ourselves. The first quarter showed how good we can play but the players need to keep believing even when things aren't going our way. The backline is really solid and Binns and Lord, though not fast, have given us a little more zip as has Cincotta. Our midfield is solid so I wouldn't be bringing in Pittonett and moving TDK forward. Stick with what is working and give Lemmey a chance. Safe option is to bring in Young but I think we need to find out if Lemmey is up to it. Wilson must also be close but there needs to be a spot.
Destiny is in our hands but we have tended to fumble it in the past.
Charlie basically repeated what Vossy said apart from his quip about giving the small forwards an opportunity to do their thing.
Durdin and McGovern kicked our last two goals after Charlie went off.
As I said, for a bloke allegedly carrying an injury, Weitering had an outstanding game. His ability to get to marking contests and spoil is amazing when you think that he is basically hopping to contests. Of course, his ten intercepts weren't that impressive because the ball just happened to land where he was standing ... ten times. His eight contested possessions probably shouldn't count because his opponents didn't really try.
Oscar Allen kicked four goals against the much vaunted and full strength Geelong defence a couple of weeks ago. He looked pretty competitive for a bloke who doesn't care ::)
https://www.afl.com.au/news/1345532/match-review-eagles-young-gun-learns-fate-for-stray-elbow
Harley Reid hit with a 2K fine.
Voss in his presser and Cerra and McGovern in post matches ...all spoke of changing things up.
Remember when we were 3 out of our last 30 under Bolton?
He was trying to implement a semblance of tactics and our guys weren't getting it for whatever reason.
It may have been because they weren't capable.
Things like game plans and tactics probably depend on the make-up of your list.
Do you try and make the players play to a plan, or do you develop a plan that makes best use of their strengths and weaknesses.
I'll take C, all of the above ;D
I’ve given up trying to get inside the heads of our players or trying to work out what might motivate or not motivate them. Our club is, I’m sure, a mystical place that bends minds and transforms reality. 🤩🤪
thats a philosophical question.
Tactics aren't suited to one type over any other. Yes you can run faster, or you can kick longer/shorter but often the variable is not based on what they can and cannot do, but rather what they can do well naturally vs what needs to be practiced.
Was Bradman the best because he was good? Or did he work harder at his craft?
If we have some that are suited and some that aren't wrich way do you play? Is this why Boyd isnt getting much of a look in?
What is can say this season is we seem to be trying to move from a game plan that relies less on our a graders playing well and more on a spread of players playing well which is the way we have to go to achieve anything if we are going to be any good when our A graders become B graders.
I don't think the rest of our list is at the level to take over some of the A graders work.Imo the gap is huge and that's why we struggle over 4 quarters when our stars fatigue or get taken out of games by opposition tactics.
They might not be without the opportunity but we are seeing different players getting to put their hand up and show something. Thing is, it might take them 20 games to get there, or show that they just cant get there.
Im neither here nor there on what we do. This season reminds me very much of 2012.
Allen is going to very well off if he goes to Brisbane, 6 year deal on close to a mill a year and it was reported on Footy Classified that WC will probably get the No 2 pick in the draft as compo from the special sauce formula with the AFL being over generous to help the struggling Eagles out. Reckon the Eagles wont play him again this season and look after their investment.