Had a chat with a Freo supporting friend, some things you may know (or not); he came from a basketball background, his best trait is his athleticism, he hurt his knee at a music festival though which negates his athleticism to some extent. This also affects his ability to find space around the ground. He doesn't enjoy physical contact, never has and it's not something which has improved over the years either. His contested marking is average, which is related to the inability to cope with physical contact, and his core strength maybe a little lacking as well. Goes to water under pressure, but dominated against 194cm ruckman in the WAFL so that's something. Also a touch of arrogance which she says is because he played for Subiaco, but I think that's a West Aussie joke 😅
In light of that conversation, I went back and re-watched his stat reel (highlights and lowlights both) on the afl website stats-pro thing I discovered a few days ago.
https://www.afl.com.au/stats/stats-pro#/Discover/CD_I290251/Clarke-Zac
He is still wearing some sort of support brace on his knee. He took a fair few hit-outs, a handful of those were to advantage, and I can actually see the athleticism so it's still there. I'm not sure about his ability to change direction, but he does have a bit of straight line pace. A couple of clearances, uncontested possessions and effective disposals which lead to goals. There were also a couple of spoils over Gawn, a tackle and a one percenter for shepherding his man away from the contest at one point. Good to see he's capable of it but I feel like he should be doing a lot more of that team stuff - the physicality is going to be important this week against Brisbane.
As we know there was also a lot of dumb stuff. Some really suspect disposal, got caught in a couple of chains of possession down the wing and screwed it up, first stuffing up a handball to Baguley that was intercepted by a demon when it fell short, another time meant to be a 1-2-1 with Adam Saad and instead he takes it from Saad and passes it to Walla who was in the middle of about 3 demons and under pressure, Walla inevitably got wrapped up in a tackle and we lost the momentum again. And then there's the Guelfi contested mark (come back to that in a minute) and the selfish shot at goal when we had two guys loose in the forward half ahead of him. You absolutely HAVE to slot those ones if you're not going to take the team option.
The Guelfi thing. The friend I was talking to also brought this one up. I think she's right when she says in that scenario Guelfi should have been blocking his man out of the contest. It was Guelfi's small forward that bounced off Clarke's hip and took the contested flier, with Guelfi standing behind them looking confused. But I also feel that any of our other talls would have worn the contact and still taken that mark. Moral of the story is, don't put a guy with suspect skills on the last line of defence.
You can rock and roll the footage in the video on this website relatively easily (always annoys me when you can't skip footage and this is quite smooth. Amazing).
https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/af...t/news-story/aab9610a5caf8784f8354b0d08d7862c