Injuries and the tipping point.

[CURLY]

Does anyone seriously believe injuries aren’t a factor in a teams success?

Today we had Lonie Allison Alerbaskas Bytal not picked of the available fit players. The rest were not able to be picked due to injury and unavailability.

On top of that we have players carrying injury that are desperate for a break.

Surely with list sizes and salary cap you can only do so much with a list of outs like ours.

[cwrcyn]

Clubs can manage having a few games a year where they're down on numbers, but if it's ongoing it becomes a physical and mental drain on the team. We've not had a single game all year where we've been at full strength, the best of it all being against Hawthorn where we only had four of our best 22 unavailable. Today we had Marshall, Gresham, Clark, Paton, Geary, Hannebery, Battle, Highmore, McKenzie, Higgins, and Carlisle unavailable. Admittedly, one third of that group would not make our best 22, but it's a pretty long list of competent AFL players.

[SaintPav]

Does anyone seriously believe injuries aren’t a factor in a teams success?

Today we had Lonie Allison Alerbaskas Bytal not picked of the available fit players. The rest were not able to be picked due to injury and unavailability.

On top of that we have players carrying injury that are desperate for a break.

Surely with list sizes and salary cap you can only do so much with a list of outs like ours.

Agree.

It's all covered under Chaper 4 in George Orwell for idiots.

[Gershwin]

I think there is a feeling that we rolled the dice on Hannebery, Frawley, Carlisle and McKernan and shouldn’t be surprised that they have been injured for most of the season. And we are playing a couple of players below the list allowance.
Makes it hard when you have injuries on top of that.

[CURLY]

Imagine being the backs coach look at your group at the start of the season. Then you have Roberton and Paton done before the season starts. Carlisle Geary Frawley miss basically every game. Then Highmore starts coming good he breaks a hand. Coffield cops injuries and top it off Joyce gets quarantined.

[B.M]

Injuries are the second most important factor in success in footy

[samuraisaint]

Imagine being the backs coach look at your group at the start of the season. Then you have Roberton and Paton done before the season starts. Carlisle Geary Frawley miss basically every game. Then Highmore starts coming good he breaks a hand. Coffield cops injuries and top it off Joyce gets quarantined.

This is a great post and completely on point.

I hope Carlisle can go around again next year, but boy, we've been unlucky.

[SaintPav]

Anyone know how old Jake is tracking?

[Crossy66]

Imagine being the backs coach look at your group at the start of the season. Then you have Roberton and Paton done before the season starts. Carlisle Geary Frawley miss basically every game. Then Highmore starts coming good he breaks a hand. Coffield cops injuries and top it off Joyce gets quarantined.

This is a great post and completely on point.

I hope Carlisle can go around again next year, but boy, we've been unlucky.

Totally cooked I think

[B.M]

Carlisle is well done

Lucky to get his hands to touch his knees!

[The_Dud]

Of course injuries have an impact, but every team has injuries.

The issue is using them as an inbuilt excuse, a get out of jail free card if you play bad. Going in to a game thinking “it’s ok if we lose, we can just blame injuries and I’ll keep my job” is pathetic and I hope the club isn’t that mentally weak. There are still 22 AFL players out there, with no excuses not to run and chase and play with intensity, or make good decisions and hit targets. The coaches can still devise a gameplan that works for who’s out there.

West Coast won a premiership a couple of years ago with some of the best players in the comp missing from their team.

Some of the revisionist history on here is hilarious. Roberton couldn’t get a game last year, Carlisle was in and out of the team too, and wasn’t even picked for the start of the season and again dropped before he was injured! Frawley is a 32 year old we brought out of retirement (and available today), and Geary is a player who should be in retirement.

Our backline is missing 1, maybe 2 from our best 22. Paton (who’s still young and by no means a star) and Highmore (who was dropped this year also). But with that a player like Webster has got a second chance now and is playing well. Howard and Wilkie are our number 1 and 2 backs, and they’ve both played all year.

Also with injuries comes opportunities. Without them would Dunstan, Webster, Long, Byrnes, Connolly etc had the opportunity to show something? Most of them have been very good.

[skeptic]

I’d have liked to have seen Clavarino play a bit more this season (and last).
Like the look of him and is a much better prospect than Joyce . How did ppl rate him ?

[CURLY]

I love it when people post that yeah we’ve got a heap of injuries but there no good anyway. Fact is we have 37 players to chose a team. S team that you have to find balance in as well. Now at the end of 2020 Roberton Carlisle were considered good enough to be playing AFL. Hell Carlisle was crucial in our finals win. Geary again exceptional in our final win. We keep some back up in Joyce add Frawley as we got exposed v Richmond. Paton was brilliant last season as well. Given that the injury problem has been all season it puts enormous strain on a playing group. Now we are running around with who’s available. Not who’s in form not you plays well against certain teams. We are playing players that are struggling due to various factors including team structure.

Injuries are a huge reason for what’s happened this season ridiculous to think anything but.

[CURLY]

I’d have liked to have seen Clavarino play a bit more this season (and last).
Like the look of him and is a much better prospect than Joyce . How did ppl rate him ?

Clav was ok disposal was a bit iffy but fair enough this stage of his career.

[Banger9798]

I’d have liked to have seen Clavarino play a bit more this season (and last).
Like the look of him and is a much better prospect than Joyce . How did ppl rate him ?

Clav was ok disposal was a bit iffy but fair enough this stage of his career.

I like him, good mark, great agility and second efforts, courageous.
Needs to add a few kilos of lean mass.
Keep him on the list

[shanegrambeau]

I hear that American troops in Vietnam instinctively recoiled from making close relationships with their fellow troops, even though they depended on each other to follow the team code in order to protect their lives.

When a team is forged and a 'bubble' is made, and if the players buy in to it, I am guessing it causes a fair bit of consternation when a player is ruled out through injury, but I bet that all the pop-psych rhetoric is quite effective at blanketing the impact that this has. It hurts, I am sure, and it tears at the team fabric when a player goes down.

Of course, players are encouraged to think otherwise and to imagine they are all role players in a mighty machine.

So I agree that the psychological impact of injuries must be very telling on other players to more or less an extent, based on their personality and the where they are at the time.

I hope Sincs has not done his hammy, because he's been such a feature of this 2021 season. A fringe player who has become a part of the top 10.

[bangaulegend]

I thought Clav was ok & did enough to show he deserves another year IMO

[Wayne42]

So many injuries or players missing for other reasons throughout the whole comp.

https://www.afl.com.au/matches/injury-list

[bigcarl]

Injuries are an inevitable part of football and you shouldn’t use them as excuse. In saying that, we’ve been hit this season where we are most vulnerable.

We can’t cover Ryder out or Marshall out and certainly not both at the same time. We’ve struggled to cover Carlisle - who has probably played his last game. That’s CHF, CHB and ruck. There goes your structure.

And losing playmakers such as Gresham, Jones and Hunter Clark has left us light on for X-factor in the midfield.

Apart from hoping for a better run with injuries next season, we need to be better able to cover those key guys. Particularly down the spine. Pace is important, but so is height and size. We need guys who can at least be competitive at CHB, CHF and ruck.

Whether that involves Battle or Claravino or we look to add talent I don’t know, but you’ve got to be able to cover the key positions.

[shanegrambeau]

Clav's , Collony's and Coff's kicking all dubious. But Max kicked OK! Max King kicking 6 almost makes me feel like we won., given the turn of events.

[The_Dud]

Look at it this way, is it because of injury Higgins kicked 1.6 vs Sydney? Or we kicked 5.17 vs Geelong? Or we lost against a bottom 4 side after being 6 goals to none up? Or we give that heartless performance against Port after our best win in a long time the week before?

No, injury had nothing to do with those.

Our season should well and truly still be alive despite our injury woes. No excuses for those above performances.

[SaintPav]

“Heartless”?

Tell that to Dan McKenzie or Highmore who played most of the game with a broken hand.

It was a 2 goal loss against a top 4 team who we have hardly beaten the last ten years. Hardly a heartless performance.

Incredible.

[Scollop]

“Heartless”?

Tell that to Dan McKenzie or Highmore who played most of the game with a broken hand.

It was a 2 goal loss against a top 4 team who we have hardly beaten the last ten years. Hardly a heartless performance.

Incredible.

I think he was talking about the spanking that Port gave us earlier this year

[Scollop]

Injuries are an inevitable part of football and you shouldn’t use them as excuse. In saying that, we’ve been hit this season where we are most vulnerable.

We can’t cover Ryder out or Marshall out and certainly not both at the same time.

And losing playmakers such as Gresham, Jones and Hunter Clark has left us light on for X-factor in the midfield.

+1

We don't have too many skilled playmakers who can deliver on their left or right like Hunter Clark

Plus, if Marshall and Ryder were both available for every match, I reckon we coulda been contenders

Having said that, I think opportunities to Jimmy and Tommy Highmore and the young brigade will be a positive for the team in 2022

[cwrcyn]

If you think replacing top end talent with novices or C graders shouldn't have an impact on performance then you ain't thinking. Based on that logic, during the 1990s, if you took Glen McGrath and Shane Warne out of the Australian cricket team and replaced them with a couple of state level trundlers Australia's bowling attack would have kept on being just as potent