I’m going to quote Nick Riewoldt once again because just about everything he says is so logical:
"You can still see it, it's the eye test, it's the effort that the players are giving, it's the adherence to a good game style.”
Between the Essendon game in 2017 & the final game in 2018 the players lacked effort & adherence to a good game style. Essentially, the game style was shite & the players didn’t buy into it IMO.
I might just get my negativity out of the way early during the toey pre-game one period.
I still think Richo came in with the direction of making us as competitive as he could. Rather than where Carlton is now, which is starting to look like some linear progress, we have been in this constant "almost" challenging phase that never has a destination. I think North are on that now, possibly in a more opportune time though. But anyway, Richo gets every bit of competitiveness out of the side he has with his all out desperation game style. It's pretty limited but anyone who doesn't show up with their game face on will lose to it. The downside is that it's not great for longer term development. Last year the contract extension was probably a decision to let him develop beyond the now, but the backlash from fans made the board nervous and they made him go back to being competitive. Teams like Collingwood spent their time down drafting well and working towards developing a specific game plan. That's now bearing fruit for them.
We seem more like Richmond were under Wallace, always trying to play beyond our list and desperate for a player to come in and make up the difference. I'm worried we don't actually have any plan for where we are going under Richo. Ratten has helped but will it be any more than being more competitive while the list looks like even if it made finals it wouldn't trouble anyone.
We have to start looking at getting quality mids in and having something beyond frenetic running and hard work. I thought Carlton looked like they played Richo footy last night, not really good enough to trouble the serious players but good enough to give the fans a bit of hope. Gubby Allen is probably the most important person at the club now, he needs to quickly design a plan rather than saying stuff like we want a premiership by 2020 with nothing but hope to suggest we might get there.