Happy New Year- only 3 months and a week till we get to play for Premiership Points!
So anyway, I wanted to see what people thought about our tactical options were in 2015. So I've created a thread for this purpose.
The main thing that came out of our 2014 season was our +1 in defence strategy. This was a resounding success. In the H & A season, we only conceded 243 goals. In comparison, our 2004 Premiership defence conceded 258 goals and our 2011 nadir season we conceded 390 goals.
The dilemma we face is that everyone knows how we're going to be going about things. There's no element of surprise in our defence anymore. Opponents can develop counter strategies. So, Ken and the "Teal Curtain" (thank you El_Scorcho ) have two options- tinker with their gameplan, or they can back themselves to be just too good for the opposition.
I personally think that they'll trust themselves to have improved enough over the off-season to defeat possible counter-measures, but I'm curious about Round 1 where we play Freo yet again, and Ross Lyon is a pretty canny operator who may come up with some interesting ideas to get his team scoring against us.
The other area where we will have new tactics is around Paddy Ryder. I think this will affect our forward setups more. We didn't get enough scoring power in our key games in 2014, and in our slump (which I consider to be the period between the two Sydney games inclusive) we defended okay but couldn't get enough scoring happening. My own two cents is that our key small forwards will actually play a greater role with the bigger men getting the attention so I'm looking for Angus Monfries and Jake Neade to be really key figures in scoring more goals.
This is the thing, I know Ken is a really defensive minded coach, but gee we need to score more goals....
So anyway, I wanted to see what people thought about our tactical options were in 2015. So I've created a thread for this purpose.
The main thing that came out of our 2014 season was our +1 in defence strategy. This was a resounding success. In the H & A season, we only conceded 243 goals. In comparison, our 2004 Premiership defence conceded 258 goals and our 2011 nadir season we conceded 390 goals.
The dilemma we face is that everyone knows how we're going to be going about things. There's no element of surprise in our defence anymore. Opponents can develop counter strategies. So, Ken and the "Teal Curtain" (thank you El_Scorcho ) have two options- tinker with their gameplan, or they can back themselves to be just too good for the opposition.
I personally think that they'll trust themselves to have improved enough over the off-season to defeat possible counter-measures, but I'm curious about Round 1 where we play Freo yet again, and Ross Lyon is a pretty canny operator who may come up with some interesting ideas to get his team scoring against us.
The other area where we will have new tactics is around Paddy Ryder. I think this will affect our forward setups more. We didn't get enough scoring power in our key games in 2014, and in our slump (which I consider to be the period between the two Sydney games inclusive) we defended okay but couldn't get enough scoring happening. My own two cents is that our key small forwards will actually play a greater role with the bigger men getting the attention so I'm looking for Angus Monfries and Jake Neade to be really key figures in scoring more goals.
This is the thing, I know Ken is a really defensive minded coach, but gee we need to score more goals....