Structure and game plan

[meher baba]

In the more than a decade while Lyon was away from our club, he's clearly refined his thinking and has developed an approach which, while it is still strongly focused on squeezing the life out of the opposition when they have the ball in hand, is far simpler to execute that the 1.0 version. I was worried that it would take the players 1-2 seasons to learn it, but they're well on the way. Of course, as was the case in 2007-11, it does require them to run 10-15,000 metres per came at high speed, and that will be difficult to sustain. But they're doing ok so far: Hill's no spring chicken, but he absolutely ran his guts out last night, I've rarely seen anything like it.

I also don't think we can underestimate the input of Harves, Lenny and Enright into what we have seen in the first two games. Enright already had the defence nicely organised in 2022. Now the midfield has clearly lifted under Lenny and is working well in combination with the defence as per Lyon's overall game plan. I remember hearing Fraser Gehrig once observe that he thought that a forward line kicking lots of goals was mostly a tribute to the defence and midfield getting their acts together. And so it seems to be for us at the moment: a bunch of kids are running rampant because the opposition is being starved of the ball by the midfield and defence (and, outside of the ten minutes before half-time, our backline had it pretty easy last night).

I think we have been a bit lucky so far in that it seems that both the Dockers and the Dogs are on the way down this season. There are tougher tests ahead: the Bombers shouldn't be much of a problem, but they almost always are for us. If we can beat them and go 3-0 I'll start to believe we can make the finals.

On the negative side, it looked rather like Steele had damaged his shoulder again last night: indeed, I suspect there's been something wrong there all season, as he hasn't been his usual perky self. If he ends up missing a month or more, that's going to greatly increase the pressure on the rest of the team, as he bears a lot of the weight.