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Autopsy North lose to Carlton.

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Fuuuck these campaigners. This is nothing about the game plan, coaching group or strategy. It’s 100% about effort.

We had almost 30 less tackles (56:83) and they almost tripled our I50 tackles (8:23) and they doubled our center clearances (10:20). We had 10 more turnovers and 10 less interceptions marks. They just worked harder at the contest and we were scared of them. Simple.

All game we were smashed in the midfield, smashed in round three ground contested possessions.

Disgraceful. these pricks are laughing at every one of us who rock up every week to watch that puss.

Also Zurhar can gagf - 11 touches and 7 changers.
 
I've always backed Clarko when given the chance and will probably continue to. But this has never really felt "right" from the very start.
The initially feeling when he signed up was that it was too good to be true. Always felt like North had to "prove" themselves to him. I dunno. Hard to explain.
Then the whole Hawthorn thing which I think has permanently impaired him and still continues to take its toll in some form.
To go along with that, Viney never really seemed interested from the start and seemed to only be there because his mate asked to.
I dunno. Hard to explain but it just has never seemed right.
I don't even know if that he's over the hill. He just seems like a shadow of his former self.
I hope that he comes back in a big way but it's just very hard to see at this point.
 

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Left with family at three quarter time. Won't be going again this year. The club is cooked, the umpiring is cooked and the AFL is cooked.
My old man left at 3qtr time and we were watching it on the couch!!!
 
That was truly disappointing, I don't think I have felt this angry, flat and depressed after the game in the near 50 years I have supported the club. Even the performances of the last five years didn't feel this depressing, it's hard to fathom that we have gone backwards despite all the top end talent we have drafted.

I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to go into everything that I think went wrong today (probably the last three weeks to be fair) but there are a few points I want to make:
  • Caleb Daniel is not the answer, he is in terrible form and is a liability in defense and should be dropped. I think we need to move Sheezel back.
  • It's time for Clarkson to make a real statement and drop Jy Simpkin, every lazy error he makes is deflating, and the team performance just drops away.
  • Our midfield has looked second rate and uncompetitive the last few weeks and it coincides with the dropping of Phillips. I don't think he is our best midfielder, but at least he puts in an effort on the defensive side of the game.
  • McKercher is weak, he shirks contacts and goes into the contest halfhearted, he needs to toughen up or we should ship back to Tassie.
 
Honestly, good on Carlton for putting the foot on the throat in the last quarter. Too often on modern AFL there's an unspoken agreement to just play out the strong and a 50 point 3/4 time margin is often shortened to 6 goals or so to paint over all the cracks.

Hard to hide from such a bad flogging.
I was hoping they'd kick another couple extra goals to make the loss 100 points.
 
I flagged this possibility last week and people laughed, given the political reality that’s about to smack the AFL and Tasmanian government in the mouth the risk of North being folded into a ‘Tasmania’ solution is very real and our performance to date is making it easier and easier for the AFL to justify
We will cease to exist in our current form soon enough. Selling our home games to WC and Freo isnt viable, being the worst team in the history of the VFL/AFL isn't viable either. As I said before, the club is cooked.
 
Lots on here are actually football knowledgeable (or at least they think they are 😉) - so please can someone explain what’s wrong with our club?

Please don’t talk president and stuff like that. It’s more a football issue.

I for one think Sonja has been a great leader of the club and tried very hard to bring in the right people to steer the ship.

So what’s going wrong?

Do we actually have a bit of talent or are our players just not very good?

Can clarko actually coach still - I thought so but now I don’t understand.

Are we being taught a game plan that they can’t play?

Please help me understand what’s wrong with our club.

Shocking skills across the field. We have maybe three players with elite foot skills. That's a death knell in modern footy.
Defenders do not communicate or help each other which leads to fumbles and turnovers
Combden is fools gold. Will intercept two or three but will fumbles three more and fly for three more and as a result will give up 2-4 goals.
Some defenders do not want contact and go to handball immediately (McKercher, Daniel) which invites pressure and then a turnover. Oppo forwards sweat on this.
Midfielders get sucked into the contest, the ball the gets walked out the front into space.
Midfielders are not defensively minded.
Midfielders do not work hard enough so the spread gets shut down.
Little connection in the clearances. Xerri often hits it where the midfielders ain't.
Many of our midfielders try and intercept the ball rather than laying a hard tackle.
We make some of the most baffling decisions when going into F50. High kicks when they needed to be directed, directed bullets when we need to float over the back, players (Simpkin) trusting their non-preferred when a precision kick is required.

Result: scores from turnovers or today scores from turnovers in front half.
 
Genuinely feeling so crap after that. By far the worst game this year.

The light at the end of the tunnel is getting further and further away and I can’t for the life of me understand how that can be. Longest, shittest, most pathetic rebuild ever in the AFL.

And we have no first rounder, no way we can ask for more handouts, and seemingly no way out of this mess.

Dark bleak times.
 
That was truly disappointing, I don't think I have felt this angry, flat and depressed after the game in the near 50 years I have supported the club. Even the performances of the last five years didn't feel this depressing, it's hard to fathom that we have gone backwards despite all the top end talent we have drafted.

I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to go into everything that I think went wrong today (probably the last three weeks to be fair) but there are a few points I want to make:
  • Caleb Daniel is not the answer, he is in terrible form and is a liability in defense and should be dropped. I think we need to move Sheezel back.
  • It's time for Clarkson to make a real statement and drop Jy Simpkin, every lazy error he makes is deflating, and the team performance just drops away.
  • Our midfield has looked second rate and uncompetitive the last few weeks and it coincides with the dropping of Phillips. I don't think he is our best midfielder, but at least he puts in an effort on the defensive side of the game.
  • McKercher is weak, he shirks contacts and goes into the contest halfhearted, he needs to toughen up or we should ship back to Tassie.
I think it’s a bit harsh on Jy but he does things that suck the air out of the doughnut.

If the Tassie team try to poach McKercher it could be like the McKay trade.
 

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A good and final personal reminder to be completely apathetic towards this team. It’s the hope that kills you.
 
Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom a sink hole opens beneath you and you hit new depths. Devastatingly humiliating. Another 5 minutes we lose that by a hundred points. There is no parallel universe where we should have allowed today’s result. Especially today. Lose by a few points. I might have accepted that…. maybe.

Our mindset is collectively so fragile you can see the group drop with the first turnover. Not helped when our captain is the main culprit in that regard.

Clearly our players have no trust, either in each other or Clarko’s “system”. Whatever this system is they’re either not good enough, not brave enough or just too dumb to implement it.

I think Im just about broken now. Never, ever miss a game and will probably continue to go but where the f*** is this club at and what does it stand for?
 
Can we get some horse shit down at the club tomorrow?
Again,
Ran with this one but my old man said that if I called a local sand and metal joint I’d be charged with the clean up and illegal dumping as well as a violation of EPA law.

Reckon someone just needs to go down a graff some lit shit that says sack ben amarfio or something
 
That was truly disappointing, I don't think I have felt this angry, flat and depressed after the game in the near 50 years I have supported the club. Even the performances of the last five years didn't feel this depressing, it's hard to fathom that we have gone backwards despite all the top end talent we have drafted.

I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to go into everything that I think went wrong today (probably the last three weeks to be fair) but there are a few points I want to make:
  • Caleb Daniel is not the answer, he is in terrible form and is a liability in defense and should be dropped. I think we need to move Sheezel back.
  • It's time for Clarkson to make a real statement and drop Jy Simpkin, every lazy error he makes is deflating, and the team performance just drops away.
  • Our midfield has looked second rate and uncompetitive the last few weeks and it coincides with the dropping of Phillips. I don't think he is our best midfielder, but at least he puts in an effort on the defensive side of the game.
  • McKercher is weak, he shirks contacts and goes into the contest halfhearted, he needs to toughen up or we should ship back to Tassie.
So we’re not three-peating then?
 

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Well the annual Good Friday humiliation is over.

Really can't say much more than that
 
Even the other worst teams in history don't concede goals as easy as some of Carlton's in the second half - walked it out of the centre, kicked it to the square, waited for us to basically give it to them, walked into goal while smirking at how shit we are. Is there any more emphatic evidence than that of just how far off the right track this club is and has been for 5 years now? Well, maybe - the fact we're still trotting out the it-will-turns and the non-linear-developments in interviews this deep into the hole proves the cultural corrosion of the club is complete; it's the opposite of nourishment, it makes me want to throw up.

As long as weak non-efforts are tolerated, the few players who actually try end up feeling they're expected to do everything and can't rely on practical support from their teammates, so they try to do too much and end up giving the ball away anyway. We saw this multiple times today - Daniel's HTB for diving on it in the first happened because he was the only player making stopping the ball being waltzed through a priority; McDonald's "high" against Curnow because he was the only one prepared to not just stand and watch it get kicked through; Wardlaw got caught in a throng of 3 or 4 opponents because everyone else thought their only role was to be an 'outlet'.

Personnel isn't going to change much if we can't get consistency of effort, but I'm angry with enough individuals to go for it anyway:
  • Comben is too clueless and limited for us to bend our backline out of shape to accommodate the one aspect of the game he's good at.
  • it says everything about how valuable Logue is to us that he seemed to spend much of the game covering Will 'Who?' White. Why he's in favour at all is a mystery to me.
  • McKercher played exactly the kind of trepid game he played last week, that basically everyone not paid by the NMFC thought warranted going to the twos; no surprises that changing nothing changes nothing.
  • Konstanty, loved his intensity in the first few games but even before the tone-deafness of over-celebrating his goal today he was either invisible or doing the Hollywood stuff (at one contest in the first half his attack on the ball was a cheap toe-poke - a telling option)
  • Larkey, he knows he's a great exponent of the standard set shot and we're clawing even in the first quarter if he just goes back, gives us time to steady, and slots a simple one from not far out... so of course he snaps it into the post instead, giving the ball straight back to Carlton for an easy quick transition into their own 50. Just the epitome of what not to do there, and he didn't do enough to earn the occasional error today.
  • LDU; I temper my criticisms of him quite a bit because I know I can be too harsh on defensive flimsiness even when a player is giving more than enough back in other ways, but I continue to think we don't get that from him and never have. Boggles the mind that we've committed so heavily to yet another player who needs everything to go right for him before he's worth it.
  • Powell and Sheezel in the midfield, same sort of problem there with limited attacking impact and nowhere near the needed ability to pivot to something more accountable. I like what both of them offer at their best, but we're a long way from getting that this year.

I could probably go after plenty more given what we saw today. Not the point, players having bad games isn't why we're in this hole and still digging - when players are dropping heads and resigning themselves to more losing and more failure rather than committing to the hard work required to gradually claw our way out of it, it's palpably cultural. Any club not totally inured to historical levels of failure would see this as basically a coach-killer - players who visibly aren't playing like they're invested in doing the small things to get results, whether while this game is live or just to fight it out honourably in preparation for the next attempt, is a clear sign of a problem. But the pattern is pretty bloody clear after the last 5 years - all part of the journey, nothing to see here, every club has peaks and troughs, no evidence of 'building' or 'developing' anything but we'll keep hiding behind those words and hope the fans are gullible enough to buy into them again. Games like this, seasons like this, decades like this: they happen either through apathy, or because people in positions of power genuinely expect that good things happen through passively waiting out the passage of time. Today was just the latest and most sickeningly emphatic reminder of how pathetic that mindset has always been, and where it was always going to lead.
 
5 players turned up today.
Wardlaw, Curtis, Xerri, Fisher and McDonald.
The rest were poor.
Griffin Logue the worst performance I’ve seen this year. Clearly is not fit and is not ready for AFL footy yet.
 

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Autopsy North lose to Carlton.

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