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avid wrote: ↑Tue 09 Apr 2019 2:24am
I was there! (First time ever in Perth!)
It was frustrating to watch, but exciting too. We attacked audaciously and relentlessly, and couldn't quite get it over the line time and time again. We were so close. Freo defended well. It wasn't really due to poor kicking.
Freo had one or two extra better players. Walters was one of them, and Luke Ryan (who i'd never heard of) saved them in defence.
Sad about the result but happy about our performance.
Billings and Marshall great bonuses.
Freo had 20- 6 inside f50 entries in one quarter...
Every time they won a clearance, they seemed to sweep it forward without much response from our guys.
It seemed they were buoyed by the roar of the crowd, which made me disheartened (the crowd noise)
We didn't have many clear scoring chains that I could see,
and our goals came from just being scrappy and fighting hard. Always seemed to have less time than them.
Really happy with Gears, what a fighter
Yes, our first quarter was obviously crap.
After that I thought we fought well.
We did miss not having Tony Lockett at full forward. But, in the circumstances, I felt proud of our effort.
saintspremiers wrote: ↑Wed 10 Apr 2019 4:52am
Reality with a lot of our key position players out we lack the cattle.
We are relying on the 2016/17 grit and determination and pressure to win games.
Doubt we can win 10-12 games though as we did then - good teams will soak up our pressure and have the skill to outplay us and win.
That’s so true. It feels like we’ve gone back to a game style that suits our poorly skilled list (ie the 2016 / 2017 pressure on the man / ball / press high and hard) after some bright spark (ahem ... Kingsley... ahem) tried to change us into the Dawks highly skilled retain possession 2012-2015 style. At least the back to the future plan of this year gives us a chance to compete.
As most posters who’ve been to a couple of games live this year will have noticed - we haven’t fixed the ‘bomb it high to a forward’ problem so beautifully and regularly executed by the hideously unskilled-by-foot Dunstan and Ross (& to some degree, now Gresham too), all we’ve actually done is placed a competitive tall forward in good form (ie Bruce) back there to make it look better.
saintspremiers wrote: ↑Wed 10 Apr 2019 4:52am
Reality with a lot of our key position players out we lack the cattle.
We are relying on the 2016/17 grit and determination and pressure to win games.
Doubt we can win 10-12 games though as we did then - good teams will soak up our pressure and have the skill to outplay us and win.
That’s so true. It feels like we’ve gone back to a game style that suits our poorly skilled list (ie the 2016 / 2017 pressure on the man / ball / press high and hard) after some bright spark (ahem ... Kingsley... ahem) tried to change us into the Dawks highly skilled retain possession 2012-2015 style. At least the back to the future plan of this year gives us a chance to compete.
As most posters who’ve been to a couple of games live this year will have noticed - we haven’t fixed the ‘bomb it high to a forward’ problem so beautifully and regularly executed by the hideously unskilled-by-foot Dunstan and Ross (& to some degree, now Gresham too), all we’ve actually done is placed a competitive tall forward in good form (ie Bruce) back there to make it look better.
Seems to me we are more composed coming out of the backline which is good, but the trade off is that it gives the opposition time to get back. There is less space to lead in the fwd 50 and the kicker under pressure to get rid of it bombs it long. Its one of the reasons i think it would be good to have Marshall go forward and take a grab.
The option is to run and gun from the backline and risk those huge mid ground turnovers that cost goals as defenders get caught out of position.
