AFL Autopsy Practice Match - St. Kilda vs. Essendon - Mars Stadium 3:10pm 28/02

[BuffDog]

Felt like a two speed economy.

Very impressed with the young guys and particularly Johnson, Sharp, Nguyen, Caddy and Huss.

The senior players were pretty bad. The entire midfield, McKay, Redman all sucked. Maybe they were just going through the motions, who knows?

It’s still going to take at least two drafts/trade periods before we start to resemble a serious football team.

 

[ant555]

Yeah I've been a Scott supporter, but if there isn't improvement the drums will be pretty loud.
Longmire is available but probs for Tassie? I bet we look at Kenny.

What are you looking at as far as improvement goes?
There is already a shift in how we want to move the footy and the players we want to use with the footy going forward.
4 of last year's draftees played today.
Johnson and Nyguen certainly look like they have something to work with.
Roberts has to fine tune his kicking, but he can offer a bit in the midfield.
The ruck is what it is right now. Blakiston competes and does some good stuff, but he is not DeKoning.
Caddy is looking good. Langford as well now he is fit.
Yes, there are some gaps. There are players who need replacing but that is where we are at.
The drums can beat as load as thunder, but the reality is this is still a rebuilding list.
Until we have more parts will have issues.
At least we tried going forward as much as we could and simply did not just go backwards and sideways all the time.
Good year for me will be 8 or 9 wins and games into Sharp, Farrow, Kondo, hopefully Robey in the back end of the season. HEA, Johnson, Nyguen and Clarke. May and Visintin also getting 5 to 10 games would be good as well if it happens.
Then the likes of Caddy and Kako having some strong form again.
There will be games like today when it is hard to do a lot with the footy.

 

[ant555]

Have to add that not many sides will have players that can go with NWM. We lost by 40 and he was easily worth 20 of it.

 

[Skipper_]

Have to add that not many sides will have players that can go with NWM. We lost by 40 and he was easily worth 20 of it.

If not for him we probably would have been 3-4 goals up at half-time. Just an incredible player.

 

[ghostdog]

What are you looking at as far as improvement goes?
There is already a shift in how we want to move the footy and the players we want to use with the footy going forward.
4 of last year's draftees played today.
Johnson and Nyguen certainly look like they have something to work with.
Roberts has to fine tune his kicking, but he can offer a bit in the midfield.
The ruck is what it is right now. Blakiston competes and does some good stuff, but he is not DeKoning.
Caddy is looking good. Langford as well now he is fit.
Yes, there are some gaps. There are players who need replacing but that is where we are at.
The drums can beat as load as thunder, but the reality is this is still a rebuilding list.
Until we have more parts will have issues.
At least we tried going forward as much as we could and simply did not just go backwards and sideways all the time.
Good year for me will be 8 or 9 wins and games into Sharp, Farrow, Kondo, hopefully Robey in the back end of the season. HEA, Johnson, Nyguen and Clarke. May and Visintin also getting 5 to 10 games would be good as well if it happens.
Then the likes of Caddy and Kako having some strong form again.
There will be games like today when it is hard to do a lot with the footy.

Not about me. I just know how media manufactures popular opinion for clicks. If we don't improve, they'll be noisy, and it will be impatient Bomber fans feeding the wheel. That's how it goes.

 

[ydc55]

What are you looking at as far as improvement goes?
There is already a shift in how we want to move the footy and the players we want to use with the footy going forward.
4 of last year's draftees played today.
Johnson and Nyguen certainly look like they have something to work with.
Roberts has to fine tune his kicking, but he can offer a bit in the midfield.
The ruck is what it is right now. Blakiston competes and does some good stuff, but he is not DeKoning.
Caddy is looking good. Langford as well now he is fit.
Yes, there are some gaps. There are players who need replacing but that is where we are at.
The drums can beat as load as thunder, but the reality is this is still a rebuilding list.
Until we have more parts will have issues.
At least we tried going forward as much as we could and simply did not just go backwards and sideways all the time.
Good year for me will be 8 or 9 wins and games into Sharp, Farrow, Kondo, hopefully Robey in the back end of the season. HEA, Johnson, Nyguen and Clarke. May and Visintin also getting 5 to 10 games would be good as well if it happens.
Then the likes of Caddy and Kako having some strong form again.
There will be games like today when it is hard to do a lot with the footy.

Hallelujah.
Great post.
We have lots of kids who just need games.
I actually think we will go younger as the year goes on.
I think May will surpass wright who just isn’t strong enough with his hands and at 30 ain’t getting better now.
Blakiston is paid 300000 while de koning 1.8 million.
I reckon he competed ok.
I would have traded merrett and ridley last year and still feel it was the right move but too late now.
Kako is already in our best 6 players and we missed him.

 

[nipst@r]

Interested to see how much our coaching changes round 1. Hoping most of today was just trial game experimentation as coachong was a bit poor.

This years draftees look composed without actually having much impact on the game.

Farrow has the highest ceiling from this years draftees. He looks poised even when he makes a error.

Quite a few of last year debutantes have some big flaws that might be exploited early by Mitchell and other good coaches.

We also had a lot of chain handballs to the ground.

Biggest take away was Team selection is tough, with i think most spots should up for grabs. Merret, caddy, kako, mckay, reid, mcgrath, firioni, duursma, durham, caldwell and roberts but but the rest I think you could make a case for or against pretty easily.

NWM - ill watch saints games purely for him. How do you stop him.

 

[Foxx]

Had the ball enough, but overused it and made too many poor decisions.
Going to take a lot of time.

 

[Old Campaigner]

We need to have an honest conversation about Bradley Scott, he needs to sacked once the seasons over cause he’s holding us back. Need to start having dialogue with John Longmire or pick an elite assistant coach from a hawthorn, Brisbane, Geelong and keep it moving.

Merrett’s been a Liability with his kicking for the last 12 months, he’s really been essigntoned. Durham had a smelly game, idk if he’s been impacted by the knock from last week. Blackiston is dog . Perkins I like as a player but he’s not developing into the player I envisioned for him. Prior is another list clogger that needs to be delisted come the season ends. Fiorini is a solid player but he looks too passive and just doesn’t offer any physicality. Ben McKay is bloody awful, I used to hate BZT, but McKay might honestly be worse. When we signed him I had low expectations but holy f*** he is .

Positives, we really have a nice young core which we just need to get games into. We need to just keep investing In the draft and give Rosa more opportunities to pluck elite, physically imposing players cause we looked very vulnerable today. However the boys we selected in 2024 & 2025 look super impressive.

We’re going to be the youngest side pretty much every game this year, there’s not going to be any improvement. And it may well be worse next year depending on how much they cut into the list.

Shit results are going to be the norm for a while and there’s nothing changing the coach can do to stop that

 

[quotemokc]

We also can't expect our fitness level to become AFL standard in one offseason.

 

[Hazardinho]

We’re going to be the youngest side pretty much every game this year, there’s not going to be any improvement. And it may well be worse next year depending on how much they cut into the list.

Shit results are going to be the norm for a while and there’s nothing changing the coach can do to stop that

I get your point, so would you see out Brad Scott’s deal, because our list is pretty young and we could probably do with a couple more years of high end draft picks.
I did feel our younger players weren’t really the culprits of why we got slapped up today, I feel the senior players let us down and I just feel we concede the same type of transition type of goal every year with Brad Scott. It’s just a reoccurring theme and the annoying thing is Scott might still opt for the likes of Prior, and still continue pigeon holing our players into roles and positions they’re not comfortable or suited in.

 

[BennyGan]

Was the VFL team playing this weekend?

 

[Vander18]

Have to add that not many sides will have players that can go with NWM. We lost by 40 and he was easily worth 20 of it.

Yep - good luck to pretty much the entire League if Nas has you 1:1 coming out of the square with space in front.

Not sure who’s stopping that.

 

[MiguelM]

Actually drove down to ballarat as had no plans today and my wife is a saints supporter.
As others have said NWM is a star, we also had no answer to Liam Ryan, as usual.
Midfield seemed to be operating in 2nd gear so was hard to get a read and lets be honest theres not much to take out of these games.

Probably the biggest issue I noted is we still seem to have the issue where too many of our guys get drawn into the contest instead of maintaining their width so if saints win the contested ball they have heaps of free guys on the outside (probably a by product of our mids being down).
Other common issue was kicking poorly into 50, lots of deep kicks to goal square that just got rushed through.

On positive side thought blakiston was very impressive as were johnson and nguyen. Langford seems to be very mobile again and reid/mckay built into the game (although got very frustrated with them both trying to clunk marks with a slippery ball instead of spoiling to the boundary).
Huss also looked very lively in first half even if the opportunities dried up in 2nd half.

Ryan and NWM are going to be a special combo for Saints.

We dropped off in the second half so was just a training drill. Surely that is tha last time we see Prior on the wing though.

Good signs from a few young players. Sharp is going to be good. Works very hard up and down the ground. Thought our inside 50s were poor, always on Caddy's head in a pack. Caddy/2MP need to lead into space more but Saints do flood back there. May is a better contested player in the pack.

It is clear we need to draft some genuine speed into our team at some stage.

 

[Old Campaigner]

I get your point, so would you see out Brad Scott’s deal, because our list is pretty young and we could probably do with a couple more years of high end draft picks.
I did feel our younger players weren’t really the culprits of why we got slapped up today, I feel the senior players let us down and I just feel we concede the same type of transition type of goal every year with Brad Scott. It’s just a reoccurring theme and the annoying thing is Scott might still opt for the likes of Prior, and still continue pigeon holing our players into roles and positions they’re not comfortable or suited in.

Scott isn’t the weakest link, the age of the list is. If you get rid of him you’re improving precisely nothing while adding unnecessary instability, it’s just the dumbest, reactionary game day thread crap imaginable

 

[Howard Moon]

There's plenty of things that can be excused on kids, but the one constant we seem.to have always is dumb undisciplined acts (multiple downfields resulting in goals) and we are usually super slow on the uptake on new rules (had way more stand 50s, ruck infringements and we kept kicking up the line resulting in last touch frees) We always wonder why the umps hate us but we are usually our own worst enemy

These things should be within our control, even if our young list can't compete in other areas

 

[ghostdog]

I get your point, so would you see out Brad Scott’s deal, because our list is pretty young and we could probably do with a couple more years of high end draft picks.
I did feel our younger players weren’t really the culprits of why we got slapped up today, I feel the senior players let us down and I just feel we concede the same type of transition type of goal every year with Brad Scott. It’s just a reoccurring theme and the annoying thing is Scott might still opt for the likes of Prior, and still continue pigeon holing our players into roles and positions they’re not comfortable or suited in.

You mean like Prior on a wing? Because he was one of our most dependable backs by year's end last year.

 

[SpeckieMcVeigh]

Felt like a two speed economy.

Very impressed with the young guys and particularly Johnson, Sharp, Nguyen, Caddy and Huss.

The senior players were pretty bad. The entire midfield, McKay, Redman all sucked. Maybe they were just going through the motions, who knows?

It’s still going to take at least two drafts/trade periods before we start to resemble a serious football team.

It's pretty interesting just looking at the difference in ability relative to experience when comparing Dodo's picks with Rosa's.

With the exception of Langford, I'd say our best 6/7 players today were all Rosa picks.

 

[SpeckieMcVeigh]

Have to add that not many sides will have players that can go with NWM. We lost by 40 and he was easily worth 20 of it.

I think in the back half of last season he was the best player in the comp. And he's my pick for the Brownlow this year, just an absolute freak of nature.

 

[Red Black and Blue]

Have to add that not many sides will have players that can go with NWM. We lost by 40 and he was easily worth 20 of it.

Still can’t believe he went where he did in the draft. Even if he stayed as a half back, his kicking was already the most creative out of the draft in years.

 

[thepokey]

Scott isn’t the weakest link, the age of the list is. If you get rid of him you’re improving precisely nothing while adding unnecessary instability, it’s just the dumbest, reactionary game day thread crap imaginable

Yeah this is where I'm at. You bring in a new coach, say, at the end of this year, and they still have a very young list being put together. If this list matures and gets to a stage where we should be showing more and it's totally stagnating then that's a different discussion. Right now, uprooting it all again with a new coach and all the changes that brings is more harm than good.

Plus, its a damn practice match on the back of a year which was essentially just a wipe out year given the injuries.

Scott may very well not be our next premiership coach, but I think the work he is doing and contributing to undo so many years of bad club governance is really important. He's the first coach in a long time we have had that seems to know how a footy club should be run and he seems to at least be turning that around. If he doesn't take us to the point of having a real crack, then my hope would be that he will have done enough to leave the club in a far better place for the next person to take over than any of the previous 5 or so coaches have inherited.

 

[gillon]

Scott seems to be a great leader and isn’t looking for any shortcuts. Although, I have serious question marks on his selection and game management. I can’t recall any coaches that have actually achieved anything who missed finals in their first 4 years which will happen this year for Scott.

 

[Mercurial89]

Still can’t believe he went where he did in the draft. Even if he stayed as a half back, his kicking was already the most creative out of the draft in years.

Think it gives an insight into how potent elite skills can be in today's game. Not simply a good kick, but an elite kick.

His ability to keep that precision while operating at the speed he does is incredibly rare.

He's also probably the most watchable player in the comp for me, might not be be the best (has an argument) but definitely most exciting.

 

[brutus76]

NAS is a stud.

First half very good. Second half just ok.

Dyson's just a smart hard working footballer. The boy is a bit special

Prior on the wing is a la when we'd play Jake Kelly

29

Jake Kelly

Age

31

Ht

190cm

Wt

90kg

Pos.

D/M

Career

Season

Last 5

D

14.5

4star

K

8.3

3star

HB

6.3

4star

M

4.6

4star

T

2.6

4star

MG

157.8

2star

D

8.1

2star

K

6.3

3star

HB

1.9

1star

M

3.3

3star

T

2.6

4star

MG

104.1

2star

D

14.8

4star

K

9.0

4star

HB

5.8

4star

M

6.0

5star

T

4.2

5star

MG

107.0

2star

there = no no no

 

[ant555]

Scott seems to be a great leader and isn’t looking for any shortcuts. Although, I have serious question marks on his selection and game management. I can’t recall any coaches that have actually achieved anything who missed finals in their first 4 years which will happen this year for Scott.

Scott will probably not end up the premiership coach but each situation is different. Depends on when you take over the team. It is more the fact the rebuild coach never ends up getting the cream.
A few others like Hardwicke made finals in year 4 bit it was still another 4 years to the flag and almost getting sacked.
Goodwin was more than 4 but he was understudy to Roos for the early rebuild.
Clarkson was flag in year 4 but they had already drafted the likes of Buddy / Hodge / Mitchell / Lewis / Roughy etc before he got there.
Mathew Nicks is now 7th year in and took 6 years to play finals. Not that he has won a flag.
The state of the list is just as much a factor.
Scott will probably get moved on because no coach survives a 5 or 6 year rebuild which is what we needed.