Re: AFL Rd 5 2022 Post Game Carlton vs Port Adelaide
Reply #108 –
I watched the game on Sunday, and I went to the Hawks and Bulldogs games.
Funny thing is, in all of these games, I don't think the opposition were suddenly all that brilliant in the second half. They all played solid, consistent football without actually tearing us apart, and ground us down until the scores were ridiculously close. We made it far easier by forgetting that we needed to continue scoring as well.
The clear and obvious momentum swinger in all of the games was the way in which we played in the second half - we lost all sense of run and urgency, and reverted to the slow, unimaginative game that has plagued us for so long. And unfortunately, we are not very good at it either.
Look at our 2nd half scores in those games....
Bulldogs : 12.4 in the first half, 4.2 in the second
Hawks : 9.5, 2.3
Power : 12.6, 2.4
This isn't about changes in tactics, or positional moves - it clearly seems to be an attitudinal thing, we go into a form of cruise control, and cannot get the engine started again when we need to. We have all seen it in front of our eyes - we are in complete control, and then for some reason, we cannot get a goal to save ourselves. Then the muscles start to tighten up, the kicks start missing, the marks are dropped, the handballs don't hit the mark. And the harder you try to stop it, the harder it is to stop......
The one saving grace is, it is in our own hands and heads to fix this. The downside is, anyone who is behind us at half time will have a real belief that we can be run down.
Good sides don't worry about the scoreboard - they simply follow their process for the whole game, and the scores that come from that are the by-product. I think our second halves are a symptom of a team that is doing better than they imagined was possible. The trick is to mature into a team that expects to win every single contest across the whole 4 quarters, and don't accept anything less.