Carlton Supporters Club

When I heard that it took Mrs Baggers more than hour to reconfigure my body, as I fell through my own @rse.   

Ya see, that's what pees me off about Teague .... how can he not see what virtually everyone else can?  LOB is hopeless

Far be it from me to defend anything relating to LOB, i championed his dropping as soon as it was announced he was in the R1 team.

That being said, i wouldn't want Teague to say anything else. LOB cops plenty of whacks and his confidence would be rock bottom. What he needs is backing from his coach. Anything else and its to his, and the teams, detriment.

As long as its words, and Teague doesn't follow through by actually picking him!

LOB was better than Murphy in rd 1.

Was surprised to hear we had 10 more inside 50s than Collingwood.

Was surprised to hear we had 10 more inside 50s than Collingwood.

According to the AFL website the I50's were 60-48 in our favour. The really critical one that caught my eye was the marks I50, which was 13 apiece.

Teague is going full on with an aggressive forward half, forward press game. Clearly he wants to lock it in there and boost scoring. But the balance between attack and defence is off IMO. What killed us against the Pies was those quick and easy goals against a defence not set up for that.  I hope Teague goes a little more defensive from now on, and tries to put a spare behind the ball (not at centre bounce for obvious reasons), tries some more tagging, tries something with a more defensive minded midfield.

I thought Rnd 1 LOB wasn't as bad as many have made out, he made one significant clanger, but there were probably another 3 or 4 who made equally bad if not worse mistakes while contributing less than LOB.

LOB handed out a couple of hot potato passes as well, but he received some also. Ironically, you get some of the very same fans lambasting SPS for being tagged with the pill, but if he hands it off to a team-mate who gets pegged he'll be lambasted for that as well. It's a no win situation for players like LOB and SPS.

The one saving grace this year is at least we are scoring, so we are staying in games.  I thought we played pretty poorly against Collingwood, but it was still only 8 points the difference at 3/4 time, and it was the same against the Tigers.

TBH, I think our defenders have copped a lot of unfair stick this week over getting beaten 1 on 1 - the ball was coming in at a million miles an hour with little or no pressure on the ball-deliverer.  That is not the fault of the defence.

I think we have a lot of improvement left in the tank, so all is not lost.  But until our defensive play improves (and I am talking more about forwards and midfielders here), the 'W' column will continue have a smaller number than the 'L' column.

If we won, it would have been called winning ugly, which as I understand it, is a sign of a good team - when you can win even though you're not at your best. We are without question still a work in progress, but I would be extremely reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

PP....lots of "ifs"....fact is we've been doing those things and making those mistakes/clangers consistently over quite a few years now. Under Teague there's been way too many games where we've played one shocker of a quarter and then spent the rest of a game playing catch up...occasionally pinching a game.  Our skills at critical times in games continue to let us down and we've just got too many panic merchants in the team that turn it over easily.

Yes, we were close enough in both games against Richmond and Collingwood....but the cold hard fact is we lost them both. And lose this week and go 0-3 and it's another year of not playing finals. If we continue on like this, it becomes harder to retain someone like Cripps, or to attract quality players from other clubs.....Saad and Williams would've been sold a picture of a club on the rise and a top 8 finish right on the cards.