How we are failing this season.

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How we are failing this season.

April 04, 2025, 06:36:34 pm

This is a long essay that I'll post as a number of sections. After all, we've a lot of problems at the moment.
Besides, I've have to now.

Fitness:
This is our Achilles Heal at the moment. We’ve led at half time in all 4 games this year, yet not once could we bring the win home. It is so obvious, as we turn the ball over a lot more in the second half than we do in the first half. Our skill and decision making drop off terribly as the game goes on.
What can we do about it? That is the question. I don’t know how we can lift our stamina this season, to be honest. But our fitness guy needs to seriously restructure his program if we are to be competitive at any time this season.
We had issues with our previous fitness guru, and fair enough, considering the sheer number of soft tissue injuries, but we have gone back so far that we can’t be competitive, no matter how hard we try.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #1 – April 04, 2025, 06:41:52 pm

Quote from: crashlander – on April 04, 2025, 06:36:34 pm

This is a long essay that I'll post as a number of sections. After all, we've a lot of problems at the moment.
Besides, I've have to now.

Fitness:
This is our Achilles Heal at the moment. We’ve led at half time in all 4 games this year, yet not once could we bring the win home. It is so obvious, as we turn the ball over a lot more in the second half than we do in the first half. Our skill and decision making drop off terribly as the game goes on.
What can we do about it? That is the question. I don’t know how we can lift our stamina this season, to be honest. But our fitness guy needs to seriously restructure his program if we are to be competitive at any time this season.
We had issues with our previous fitness guru, and fair enough, considering the sheer number of soft tissue injuries, but we have gone back so far that we can’t be competitive, no matter how hard we try.

Fitness may be an issue, but we seemed to go downhill from half-time on and that suggests it wasn't a factor at the point where they took over and dominated the game.
We wouldn't have been exhausted by then.
Surely we're fit enough to play more than a half.

It may have been more of a factor later on because we were coming off a short break and they were coming off a bye.

Off season is when the endurance phase of the program should/would have occurred. It's too late now to be going into heavy endurance work with games each week.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #2 – April 04, 2025, 06:46:19 pm

We actually had more run in the 4th because we spent most of quarter 3 camped in the backline.

Either that or Collingwood did enough to build a commanding lead then stopped. They went to a level that was difficult to keep up with for us.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #3 – April 04, 2025, 06:50:20 pm

We had three or four players bail out of contests last night, they can't play next week.
That's not fitness that's commitment and confidence..

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #4 – April 04, 2025, 06:55:10 pm

It's a bit like a race.
We're at that dangerous, fragile state where even if we're in front we're looking over our shoulder to see if they're coming.
And when we see they are, we tighten up and get overrun.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #5 – April 04, 2025, 07:14:23 pm

Lack of physical fitness has an effect on mental 'fitness' and the ability to stay switched on.

We have a lot of mental issues at the moment that may (in part) stem from a lack of physical fitness

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #6 – April 04, 2025, 09:31:23 pm

Ruck
We have serious issues with out ruck setup. And it isn’t the ‘play one ruck’ or ‘play two rucks’ issue.

Tom is a great player, but he is not a great ruckman. He gets his hands to the ball a bit, but rarely managing to guide a tap to one of our players. Twice this season, Rounds 1 & 4, the opposition ruckman was the BOG. In Round 3, taps from English directly led to 3 goals.
Why? Tom is not the strongest ruckman going around. He is a jumper. However, not one in twenty contests allow him to get a decent jump at the ball. Opposition coaches have worked this out: the opposing rucks move in first and shepherd Tom out, so he can’t jump at the ball. He has got one, repeat one, free kick for shepherding this year.
Tom also is not a very defensive ruckman. He usually runs around on his own, rather than sticking close to his opponent. It works fine when we can get the ball, but he killed us twice this season so far.
If you look at our guys practicing before the game, they only practice the Tom leap, never the contest of strength. The other thing is that Cripps seems to be the target about 80% of the time. There are times when only he and Tom practice taps. Why not the other mids? Certainly, this season there have only been half a dozen times when a tap has come to Cripps in the clear.

Marc Pittonet, on the other hand, is a bull ruckman. A couple of years back he was out-muscling guys like Gawn consistently. However, he has struggled to do this since his knee injury. He is still out bull, but he has been injured again. I’m not sure where his future lies, but he is more effective in the tests of strength that are most modern ruck contests. Alas, he doesn’t get many possessions around the ground, but he can play a close checking game.

If you look at Collingwood’s Cameron, he is a very limited ruckman. However, he is particularly strong and gets his hand to ball when Tom can’t.

Certainly, our mids are not getting first access to the ball. It is a measure of how good they are that they have been as effective as they have been.

Our future? Well, we have a young ruckman who could be a bull and who is very competitive in Hudson O’Keefe. However, he is still some way off from being able to beat the Gawns, the Nankervises or the Camerons of this world.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #7 – April 04, 2025, 09:50:30 pm

It's not TDK's fault the AFL changed the rules to allow the straight arm fend off, now blokes like Nankervis and Cameron can stand flat footed and basically push the jumping ruck out of the contest. It's running him into the ground because he's working much harder for less of a result.

It's a disgraceful change to the ruck rules, which basically come about due to opposition clubs complaining about TDK jumping into and over the weaker ruck options. I don't understand how club's can have the rules change to suit themselves, while we suffer the consequences of long term planning and recruiting that has basically been disassembled by the opposition with the help of the AFL changing rules.

Ultimately, we have find some new game tactics for TDK and the team, or we will continue to suffer.

Also, with regard to H and his headspace issues. It's not impossible requiring him to ruck is contributing to his problem. He says he is keen to get amongst it, but his words do not match his body language in ruck contests, which at best looks timid and reticent, a rabbit in the headlights. If we've broken one of our Coleman Medallists just to satisfy some largely baseless and ludicrous plan, then we probably deserve our fate. Stop listening to stupid hypotheses and coaching numbers, and start coaching players to play football with footballer tactics.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #8 – April 04, 2025, 09:56:00 pm

Centre Setup:
Our centre square setup is not helping us. If you look at teams like Port, Hawthorn or North Melbourne, their mids often break forward. Their ruck often taps to the front and so the mids run forward, where they can kick the ball deep into the forward line.
What do we do? We almost exclusively tap to the back. You see us practice it before the game. The only time when we tap forward is when Tom gets his own ball and breaks forward.
As a result, we start our attacks from 30 – 40 m further behind. Our kicks are often under pressure, because out mids are not quick. The ball falls much shorter and it takes longer, allowing the defenders to have a better chance of interfering with out forwards.

Our mids are not that quick, but our basic centre setup isn’t significantly different to what it was under our two previous coaches. We have had a number of different midfield coaches, so why do we do the same thing?

Our midfield will be transformed in the next couple of years as Ben Camporeale, Jagga Smith and the Walker brothers come on line. But what of now?

The other thing is that we don’t play a negative player at the centre contests. I’ll get to that later.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #9 – April 05, 2025, 11:17:51 am

Taggers:
If you saw the Round 0 game where GWS smashed Collingwood, you would have noticed Bedford on Daicos. Bedford was brilliant; he never let Daicos get an easy kick. Result? Collingwood loses forward impact.
Do we have a guy like Bedford? No. The closest we have in Cincotta, who is out injured. Even then, Cincotta never played in the centre square.
We do not seem to like the idea of tagging a good player out of the game and haven’t now for at least 3 coaches. Yet other teams prosper by doing so.
Cincotta has certainly shown some capability here, but we don’t always use him effectively.
I would really like a young, strong, very quick player to play the midfield tagging role, like Bedford does for GWS, someone who can seriously concentrate on his opponent and punish the bugger! I would also like to have the tagger play in the middle, which we are loath to do.

Re: How we are failing this season.

Reply #10 – April 05, 2025, 06:13:02 pm

Quote from: crashlander – on April 04, 2025, 06:36:34 pm

This is a long essay that I'll post as a number of sections. After all, we've a lot of problems at the moment.
Besides, I've have to now.

Fitness:
This is our Achilles Heal at the moment. We’ve led at half time in all 4 games this year, yet not once could we bring the win home. It is so obvious, as we turn the ball over a lot more in the second half than we do in the first half. Our skill and decision making drop off terribly as the game goes on.
What can we do about it? That is the question. I don’t know how we can lift our stamina this season, to be honest. But our fitness guy needs to seriously restructure his program if we are to be competitive at any time this season.
We had issues with our previous fitness guru, and fair enough, considering the sheer number of soft tissue injuries, but we have gone back so far that we can’t be competitive, no matter how hard we try.

We used to finish games strongly (ie the 2nd half) under Russells program.