Crashing packs was reasonably important yesterday considering how many crumbing goals we kicked. Certainly sometimes Butch gets caught out of position and has to resort to nullifying a contest rather than going for the mark, but just as often this is due to a poorly placed kick coming into the forward line. Either way it's better that he's putting the effort in to make the contest, rather than not bothering at all, as has occasionally been the case in the past when he's completely devoid of confidence.
He didn't lack any confidence in the first half, he'd kicked 3.0 and was doing everything that could be expected of him. Started the third quarter with a strong contested mark, but the badly sprayed set shot no doubt would've played on his mind. The rest of the quarter didn't bring a whole lot of opportunity up forward as we only had two more shots on goal, due to the drop in work-rate from the mids. But, I'll concede that he wasn't doing enough work up the ground during this time. I thought his work-rate improved in the last quarter, along with the rest of the team.
Perfect world, sprayed set-shots are a thing of the past for Butch and if they do happen he doesn't lose confidence. But we all know that he's coming from quite a long way back here, it's not going to be perfect straight away, if ever. I think he's undeniably improved his kicking at goal over the off-season, and I reckon his confidence will only continue to grow if he keeps it up.
Again, I didn't think he was great yesterday, there's absolutely room for improvement. But he wasn't too far off the mark.