AnythingsPossibleSaints wrote:Some books are crap and you'll know it after one page. Not everyone needs to read a book all the way through, or a lot of the way through to know for sure if it's crap, or not something they'll want to read.
And this "nothing to gain from pre-season games" attitude is rubbish. There is in fact an area in between "nothing" and "everything" and pre-season games fall somewhere in there. You can gain essential match fitness, you can get more used to a game plan (especially a new one), you can try different things to see how they work, the newer members of the team can gain confidence and get used to playing at the higher, faster level, without having to do so with premiership points on the line and so on. There are plenty of things to gain, for those that see everything as an opportunity to better themselves and move forward. Teams that haven't won much in recent times also use them as an opportunity to get used to actually winning a match, which can become a habit. Apparently West Coast are one team doing that, wanting to build a "winning culture", according to what one of them said when interviewed after the match last night.
If your attitude was correct, then if there were no "compulsory" pre-season matches, no club would play a single game before round one, because there would be "nothing to gain" from them, but I guarantee you they would organise games amongst themselves, if the AFL didn't organise them for them. I hear that a couple of clubs even did this a couple of weeks ago, on top of the NAB Cup matches they were to play and I'm pretty confident they didn't do that because there was "nothing to gain" from doing so. I'm sure they just did it to waste their time and energy.
SainterK wrote:
Geelong got smashed today.
Yes they did and this is what Chris Scott had to say about it: "It is hard to assess, but we're not happy," he said.
"We didn't come just to get a bit of match practice and not worry about the result. We expected to play better, the opposition were very good.
"We were poor, they were good.
"I would hate any of our players or coaching staff to think that it just doesn't matter because we wanted to play well and we played poorly, so that's a concern.
"You do need to be careful not to read too much into it, I'm not standing here devastated, but the competitor in me and the boys should be a little bit stunned because we want to play better than that."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/r ... 6295788978
And that's the thing. As far as I'm concerned, poor pre-season matches are only a concern if you went out there meaning to play well and be competitive and weren't. Geelong obviously did yesterday and that is why Scott was so unhappy. At least in their case they didn't have 9 of their premiership team out there, while Richmond were reportedly only missing Delidio, though.
I have no idea whether we went over there looking to play well and be competitive, but if we did, then that is a concern, because we were simply very, very poor and were not really very competitive, against the West Coast B-side, with a few of their A-side thrown in. If they had been as full-strength as us, it would have probably been an incredible thumping.
And even though we got some cheap goals in the last quarter, after WC had subbed off three of their few "stars" at 3/4 time, we still only managed to score 52 points (albeit in a shortened match), which is a sign that we still have much to work on in that regard.
The heat and our lack of fitness and match fitness were obviously factors, but I think we just have an awful lot to work on in the next few weeks. I fully expect we will and hopefully we'll hit the ground running, but we really do look to be coming from a fair way back. That's all I'm personally saying.
On top of that, "We had eight or 10 guys who were playing their first game for the season and I thought most of them played that way, like they haven't played any competitive footy," Scott said (of Geelong).
