Carlton Supporters Club

I agree, but there are plenty of people complaining about his game and how Grundy flogged him etc etc.

One stat......one stat is all that is based on. Looking deeper into that stat shows how ineffective that stat actually is in terms of the game.

Yes, Grundy got A LOT more hitouts.....but most of them went to a 50-50 (at best). Regardless of where they went, we still won the clearances. So you can ignore that stat. You look at the other stats and Pittonet had his measure. Not bad for a retread up against the million dollar man.

Maybe vs Collingwood you have to have a dominant ruckman, given they have a respectable midfield so your mids have it easier.
Cripps 21, Williams 20, Martin 12 possies...you would be struggling to beat most teams with those stats, thats three million dollar men who couldnt get it done for us with a break even ruck. Pendlebury has been a brilliant player but is old now and has slowed up and Adams is very good but wouldnt be AA anytime soon, Sidebottom see Pendlebury and then you get down to Sier and the Brown kids, Daicos etc who probably had a nil all draw with our second tier mids.
Crisp did spend some time in he middle and got a lot of ball but again not a qualified mid who you would back in vs million dollar a year top shelf draft pick mids to get the job done in a big game.

It just points to a big fail from our million dollar mids....

All 3 of those mids you mentioned spent time up forward.

Overall, they bat deeper in the midfield too, which was probably our biggest problem.

Either way, it was not Pittonets doing like same have made out.

Under the 2021 rules the ruck is critical, so ruck has been a big part of the problem in both our games.

In the past I didn't give much credence to tap work, for me it was all about 2nd efforts, tackles, blocks and smoothers. Pittonet has done OK in the non-tap part of the gig in the past but not at the moment, and now the 2021 rules have made clean taps more critical than ever before for a double whammy!

The problem is the stats are only as good as the words that define them, I think some of the stats used in AFL are quite rubbery, they aren't black and white like say an injection count or a death.

Some are even ambiguous, like the Contested Marking stat, a Contested Mark is Contested Mark even if there is no physical contact, some of the ruck stats are equally ambiguous. So to me that means they can be taken many ways, in both analysis and assignment, which makes them useless in isolation.

Context is everything, it's no like Moneyball, that's a Hollywood Fantasy.

The old saying of Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics definitely applies here. It comes down to the eye test and Pitonett was poor at centre bounces, Grundy got a lot of clean ball, which he hit away from the immediate area rather than at his hip.

Why does this matter? Well it takes Cripps out of the game. Cripps like to work in a phone booth, on that 1-2 square meters of space where he can use his size and strength to either get hands on the ball or tackle his opponent. What Grundy did by hitting it to space, gave the quicker and better drilled Collingwood mids space to run on to the ball, making Cripps near redundant as he doesn't have speed or explosiveness off the mark.

On a side note, in out two games we have had two periods where we have been dominant in play around the ground. Against Richmond it was the third quarter where we kicked all the points, but Richmond could barely get their hands on the ball. The other was the third/fourth quarter against Collingwood where we came right back and got to 7 points. Both times Cripps was up forward for most of the times, not in the midfield. This allowed our mids to match the opposition in speed and nullified their rucks hitting the ball out to space.

Problem is though Paulie, we all know De Koning is going to command big money in this upcoming contract renewal.