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With yet another player debuting for us tomorrow night, my mind turned to how young players have gone in their first few games with Beveridge as coach.
For all the mad-cap intensity of our play - when we're at our best - under Bevo, one of the things I've enjoyed the most is how well the debutantes have generally played while he has been the coach of our AFLM team.
While I generally liked how we played under Wallet and Rocket, I was also envious of how more staid coaches like Mick Malthouse often seemed to get players to perform better in their first few games.
Now maybe it was a matter of the grass being greener on the other side, but it also seemed to me that we lacked a certain structure to assist these players as they started to transition to the highest level of the game. Bevo, on the other hands, seems very good at giving the newbies very structured roles and tasks, making it much easier for them to initially 'just do their job'. And we've had a heap of players since 2015 who've been really impressive in their initial games.
Now of course there's the issue of how to grow these players once they've got through their first set of games is another matter, and I don't think there's ever going to be an easy solution for that, especially once opponents work out the weaknesses of particular players who then have to try and adapt to that.
Things also get harder as expectations arise. But we've spoken at length about those issues in other threads, whereas unless I've missed it, we haven't had a thread discussing how debutantes, as a whole, have played under Bevo.
For all the mad-cap intensity of our play - when we're at our best - under Bevo, one of the things I've enjoyed the most is how well the debutantes have generally played while he has been the coach of our AFLM team.
While I generally liked how we played under Wallet and Rocket, I was also envious of how more staid coaches like Mick Malthouse often seemed to get players to perform better in their first few games.
Now maybe it was a matter of the grass being greener on the other side, but it also seemed to me that we lacked a certain structure to assist these players as they started to transition to the highest level of the game. Bevo, on the other hands, seems very good at giving the newbies very structured roles and tasks, making it much easier for them to initially 'just do their job'. And we've had a heap of players since 2015 who've been really impressive in their initial games.
Now of course there's the issue of how to grow these players once they've got through their first set of games is another matter, and I don't think there's ever going to be an easy solution for that, especially once opponents work out the weaknesses of particular players who then have to try and adapt to that.
Things also get harder as expectations arise. But we've spoken at length about those issues in other threads, whereas unless I've missed it, we haven't had a thread discussing how debutantes, as a whole, have played under Bevo.
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