Western Bulldogs Football Club "Where it's cool to drool"
My view comes from Foxtel but at the kick ins players kick wide to the flanks and I understand the reason but in my limited view quite often I see a player straight down the middle 30 - 40 meters away totally in the clear.
Because teams are now expecting the wide kick I think every so often we need to look straight up the middle. Old school stuff the quickest way from point A to point B is in a straight line.
As for a plan B, go man on man and try and beat your opponent. Lock the footy down and try and get plan A working again. Makes for ugly footy is it a zone if you man up.
Don't piss off old people
The older we get the less "LIFE IN PRISON" is a deterrent...
We did change our game plan last year to be more defensive, and ended up with the least goals kicked against us but unlike the SAints we still kicked goals and were again in the top couple of goal scorers. However, with the injury toll towards the end of year, we were unable to sustain this in the finals.
FFC: Established 1883
Premierships: AFL 1954, 2016 VFA - 1898,99,1900, 1908, 1913, 1919-20, 1923-24, VFL: 2014, 2016 . Champions of Victoria 1924. AFLW - 2018.
So whats the reason for not being able to beat quality sides? Not good enough?
I think Hotdog was saying 30 - 40 m from the kicker not the opponent
In the past we use to be seen as a fast team. It wasnt cos we were fast running but more cos we were great at passing the ball upfield accurately, with little errors. Everytime we got the ball we made em pay.
This skill seems to have gone!
I believe there's nothing on this earth that we own. All we do is look after it for our children - Terry Wheeler
I'm with you; there has been a rewriting of our history, which avoids asking the real questions about last season's problems, and which relies on an overly simplistic analysis based solely on injuries in spite of what Gia, Bob and Rocket admitted at various times.
When I recall attempts to raise the matters early in the season we were told to wait and see... and we waited and we saw exactly what we were indicating as problems and then rather than face up to it we got the witch hunts and played the blame game.
If you pretend the problems don't exist because you don't like the question you don't get the right answers and you don't address our inconsistency which is the biggest hurdle between us and real Sept success.
I believe there's nothing on this earth that we own. All we do is look after it for our children - Terry Wheeler
I could enter into a blow by blow history but in brief the context is provided by the Bulldog Bite's posts. In a nutshell, the problems last season weren't solely as a result of injuries.
Our inconsistency and our inability to do more than struggle against ordinary sides and our total incapacity to match the good sides, against whom we had been much more competitive the season before, needed analysis and explanation, but those who suggested that we should do so were cried down.
Then we got the one idea answer when everything went wrong followed by the unseemly attacks on our players, which went on for weeks.
And it's still going on. Rather than try to analyse what was going on last Sunday we've got various states of denial, because some don't want to admit all the causes of our failure, others just attack the player or players they have developed a set against.
I believe there's nothing on this earth that we own. All we do is look after it for our children - Terry Wheeler
Yes, sorry it was from the kicker and as I said only TV to go on.
Also a bad spot to turn it over but if the skills are up and if you can get away with it you can quickly get pass the zone. But you need the skill and guts to pull it off, with sides following the pies around the boundary crap teams seem to get the numbers to the flanks.
All I'm saying the player kicking in shouldn't discard one up the middle if its on.
Don't piss off old people
The older we get the less "LIFE IN PRISON" is a deterrent...
Absolutely contingency planning happens - but it is generally positional and not stylistic. You train to have the best habits possible, which means relentless (endless) repetition of your style...not styles plural - because you just can't manage it. Players need to be consistent in their actions and behaviors on the field if a side is to work together effectively.
In games like the one on the weekend we could have tried some positional tweeks to get things going and I suggested three that I would have tried in the gameday thread...they were related to three problems I could see. But that has nothing to do with playing style or game style or anything like that - they were changes to personnel inside the existing structures and aimed at re-enabling our ball movement.
Contingency planning will be positional (injury / player getting beat) and at times systematic (we aren't winning clearances for example) but they are not going to be related to 'how' we play. Suggestions like 'go man-on-man' at stoppages is (I guess) an idea of a contingency strategy of sorts...it is a structural change though and really wont change the style of footy we are trying to execute. If that is a backup structure for clearances then I guess we would have used it on the weekend...as we seemingly didn't, I guess it isn't!
All of this gets away from the key point though - solving the problem. What was the problem on the weekend? Getting consistently beaten around the contested (and by extension, for the lose) ball. How do you fix this with game-style? I am pretty certain the coaches dont instruct the players just to let the opposition have the ball...yet on many occasions that seemed to be the case.
What should I tell her? She's going to ask.