Can absolutely see that Bevo has an eye for the future with this team. That's why we didn't recruit a Tap ruckman so that English's development can be fast tracked.Don't want to pick apart specific players - enough of that has been done in this thread - but our game style was a lot different from previous weeks.
Good: defensive work against opposition ball movement was much improved from the way we got burnt on turnovers in the back end of the Sydney game, and against Hawks and Gold Coast. Collingwood are a better, more slick ball moving team than those three, yet we defending their quick ball movement better than those three teams. There was a period of about a quarter and a half of footy in the second and third quarters where Collingwood just didn't look like they had an avenue to goal and it wasn't because of the manic pressure that we applied in particular in the first two weeks, but rather just our positioning and structures held up behind the ball.
Good: We're developing a very crafty operating half-back line. Daniel has good vision. Duryea, Crozier and Suckling are all left-footers who make good decisions. Our forward line is trash and we're missing the quality hit-up targets from the half-forward line (sorry Sam Lloyd, you're not the answer), and whislt this half-back unit lacks a bit of dash and pace, they're good kicks and they make good decisions, something that will help us
Bad: The fact that when Libba didn't have as dominant a game as he did in the first three weeks, you felt that the other players didn't pick up the slack in helping us be that dominant contested ball team we have to be to push for finals this year, especially when the game was in the balance.
In Beveridge's time as coach, bar 2015, he's been a player who on the "contest/outnumber v spread and ball movement" spectrum of how to win the game has been heavily in favour of the former, and we've won games even with inferior quality ball movement through sheer outpositioning, outtrunning and outwinning the ball v the opposition. So it was kind of strange to see us be competitive in a game through, even perhaps, slightly better ball movement, but worse around the contest. For example when we got a couple of goals up late in the 3rd but the Pies went away with the game, it's not as if they "broke apart" the game by tearing the game apart with ball movement, but they just wore us down and got to more contests and thrashed us in the contested ball in the last quarter. That's something that we've won games over the last few years doing to other teams so it was strange to be on the receiving end of. But we can't rely on Libba having a rest of the season like he did the first three games, and we can't accept that we got beaten like that by the Pies midfielders.
Perspective:
In giving games - and not just games, but important roles - to the likes of English, Schache, Smith, Richards, even Gowers (not young, but young-ish and still inexperienced), Naughton, means that we see the importance of development, even this early into the season. It may be ugly, it may lose us games, and it may not "appear" a rebuild as we're still being competitive and pushing on the edges of finals - but our team selection is still rebuilt, so we have to keep that in perspective.
Even though he got touched up in the hitouts it shows him what it takes to be the very best and what he needs to work on.
Some of it also comes down to retention if we didn't give Tim some regular games he would be a much higher flight risk