- Sep 22, 2008
- 25,524
- 34,634
- AFL Club
- Western Bulldogs
- Banned
- #126
100%, there’s a reason ball use is better going inside 50 in a better structured forward line and it’s because there’s more options than just Naughty which spreads the defence and allows better ball use going in. Having the 3 talls even allows the guys like Cody & West to get the opportunities they had last night.Had to roll my eyes at Bev in the post game presser, defending last week's forward structure by saying the issue wasn't the lack of talls but our ball use going inside 50. Obviously better ball use is going to improve you no matter who you have up forward and how tall they are, but it was blindingly obvious that last night was a win for structure. JUH and Schache aren't particularly good but they played their role and it let Naughts and Cody do some damage.
I know that's just Bev not wanting to concede he got something wrong publicly, clearly they recognised the issue by their selecting of Marra and Schache. But my god do I hope it's something we stick with. Naughts in genuine 1 on 1s is almost impossible to stop.
You can see even last night Jamarra and Naughty still flew for the same ball a bit but this will improve with game time. We need to allow them to find chemistry - it’d honestly be an absolute nightmare for the whole team to go from playing 1 tall to 3 back to 1 and trying to adjust.
I’m happy to say as poor as our team has been at times this year if we’d played with the 3 tall structure all year we’d be right in the hunt for top 4 right now - but instead we’re playing catch up. That’s on the coaches 100%