But it works when midfield works. We were the highest scoring team in the comp during our winning streak this year. Didn’t even get close to that during last year despite more wins.
Review Freo Their Own Worst Enemy - Rd 19 Review
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Madas
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The eye test doesn’t tell me that but the stats seem to show otherwise I guess .
We are 901 inside 50’s for 208 goals
By comparison to say Collingwood
1031 inside 50’s for 259 goals
So the scoring efficiency is pretty close with the best
Midfield definitely a problem but I would struggle to say our forward line is good .
We are lucky Walters can kick straight
Rating Out of 5 for our forwards :
Walters 1
Amiss 2 ( young age , hopefully becomes a 1)
Treacy 2/3 - 2.5
Sturt 3/4 - 3.5
Schultz 2
Freddy 2/4 - 3 ( depends which Freddy turns up on the day )
Taberner 2
Corbett 4
Switta 2/3 - 2.5
Banfield 3
Colyer 3/4 - 3.5
Average - 2.6 ( maybe C+ )
Emmet ?
Kuek ?
I think you might have got that a bit wrong, or just a bit out of perspective.
By Round 12 we'd scored 945. We were the 11th highest scoring team. That was at the end of our 'winning streak' and included games against West Coast, North and Hawks - the bottom 3. GWS had outscored us despite only winning 4 games. And, their leading goal kicker at the time? Jesse Hogan. Another we let play for another team to make them stronger and us weaker.
I mean during that 4 week period, I.e the only time of the year our midfield was cohesive.
I suppose we could just make this about the midfield (which I've covered many times) and abdicate all responsibility off the forwards. I don't see how the mids can make space inside 50, form cohesive leading patterns, hold ground in a making duel, halve contests and take responsibility to kick goals. And, yes, sometimes you have to work your butt off and make something happen from limited opportunities. Good forward lines do this.
But sure, lets just lump it all on the fact the mids aren't kicking lace out drop punts on to their chests with no defenders in our front half.
What a cop out. How weak. We won the inside 50s last week, but lets blame the mids again. It's insane.
Good forward lines don't blame the mids. They win games.
Footskill
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Let's take Carlton who on paper had very good mid..and potent fwd line.. mids were playing s**t earlier and fwds were not performing. Mids are now firing and fwds firing...there is strong correlation...
Good supply is important for sustainability not relying on fwds to make miracle goals out of nothing ...not sure where we been blasted in the clearances and ball hardly goes fwd 50 you expect a good return
Good supply is important for sustainability not relying on fwds to make miracle goals out of nothing ...not sure where we been blasted in the clearances and ball hardly goes fwd 50 you expect a good return
Faster ball movement, front half turnovers, overall pressure. Makes a forwards job easier. Shallow entries that get turned over straight away because mids are bombing to no one instead of the leading forwards. Winning i50s means nothing when we’re kicking it to the advantage of oppo defenders. Just watch the difference between our forwards kicking i50 and our mids kicking i50.
And yeah like footskill said, Carlton couldn’t even crack 60 points with two Coleman medallist’s in their forward line when their mids were getting smashed.
I just don't see the point in the 'it's all the midfield' argument. West Coast won a Premiership with Hutchings, Masten, Shuey and Sheed. Handy players but all with horrid delivery - the difference being Rioli, Kennedy, Darling, LeCras, Cripps and Ryan didn't use it as an excuse. They got the job done. I want us to aim to win a Premierships as West Coast do. It's clear (to me at least) this forward line won't/can't and we're not even acknowledging it. The mindset difference is stark between the 2 clubs.
Oh well. I think I've made the point enough times now. If you can't see it in the statistics, with your eye or in the explanation, we move on with a nod of the head and a hearty handshake. We're all on the same team - the one that want's Freo to start winning.
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Agree, we massively over invested in forwards and left the cupboard bare in midfield depth. However we were also hurt by injury/form of those who were supposed to replace those we let go. It’s pretty clear this was the plan (and in Logue’s case had already happened last year.
Lobb < Jackson
Logue < Chapman
Acres < NOD
Colyer < Henry
Mundy > JOM
Tucker < Johnson
Blakely < Erasmus
Meek > Reidy
On paper we we’re upgrading everyone except Mundy and Meek, Mundy we’ve discovered is invaluable and JOM is in no way a like for like, which means we need to hope Johnson or Erasmus comes on faster than expected (or move Young into that role, which has finally happened). Meek would have been great for cover when Darcy is out injured but you can’t hold onto everyone when there’s no guarantee they’ll get a game.
Our issue is Chapman has been out most of the year which made the Logue decision look bad, likewise NOD has been injured/out of form which made the Acres decision look bad.
The decision to drop Brodie, then the subsequent injury has exposed our youth in the midfield, coupled with Fyfe’s injury woes and JOMs inability to impact the way we’d hoped means we have been forced to play small/young in the middle more times than we’d have liked and have been smashed in periods of games.
Clearly we were worried about Amiss and Treacy being too you and weren’t sure if Sturt would come on enough, which is why we brought in Corbett and Emmett to provide coverage/competition for spots. However given we already had Kuek at Peel and Treacy was depth for Taberner it does look like overkill now on the C graders and not enough A + B graders in there.
By drafting project players like Benning, Knobel, Davies, Williams and Draper we have severely compromised our depth coverage in the short term, long term looks good but I do wonder about this approach when we are supposed to be contenders.
In my opinion we don’t need to add 4 new kids to the roster in the draft, we have too many already in the squad, so I’d be happy to just take two live selections to the draft, maybe organise a pre-draft trade with GC to trade our last 3 picks for their pick 25 (or whatever it ends up being) on the night if they have decided to move pick 5 into next year. Then look at a mature age rookie or two depending on what we do with Hamling.
Madas
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“we massively over invested in forwards”
sorry but you lost me here , these words don’t belong on a Freo board
tucker was leaving because he wasn’t good enough and couldn’t get a game and is still s**t at North Melbourne. Blakely wasn’t good enough.
Replacing Mundy with people of that level is a fantasy. We replaced him with O’Meara who is superior to both, but not Mundy and had Hawthorn pay a lot of his salary.
Johnson and EErasmus are now hitting BLAKELY and Tucker levels and will surpass them soon.
meek was leaving because he couldn’t get a game. He wanted to leave, not us trading him.
Lobb wanted to go and good riddance to bad rubbish. So now we have a two ruck whole. Jackson is a good investment here. you can argue the cost all you like.
so “what we did” was accomodate two players out of contract demanding to leave, and replaced them with a 21 year old elite ruck/forward…and in no way did we make the rucks worse. This is a fantasy.
o’Driscoll and Henry should naturally have progressed to replace Acres. Henry has stepped up, O’Driscoll hasn’t stepped up.
im confused about your top up players argument. We can replace Mundy with bog average players, but can’t have a crack on the cheap at forwards?
now, we have Jye Amiss as an elite forward and Josh Treacy who is coming on Schultz and Walters are good enough.
We are lacking in medium forwards and one more small forward IMO, and have added Stanley as the outside run.
I think Sturt has shown enough that he’s good enough for the medium forward slot.
in this draft with the picks we have I would target small and medium forwards..
personalky think the biggest issue has been coaching.
After JL came out last week and said we’re going to bring forward the way we want to play next year to the last five games of this year made me think we’ve been working strictly to a blueprint for this year. The problem may be that we’d been inflexible about making changes when the 2023 blueprint wasn’t working.
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As in the number of forwards on the list, not the quality. We now have Tabs, Walters, Amiss, Treacy, Jackson, Corbett, Kuek, Banfield, Sturt, Emmett, Schultz, Frederick, Switowski and Colyer. That’s 14 players, plus we trained Fyfe all preseason as a forward.
In the middle we have, JOM, Aish, Brodie, Brayshaw, Serong, MJ, Erasmus, NOD, Henry, Williams, then drafted Stanley, that’s only 11 and one was a MSD pick while another is a Cat-b rookie.
That’s not a balanced list, no idea why we train/play Worner as a back when he was drafted as a winger, but we have. We tried to address our lack of mids by playing Hughes on a wing, it failed.
That’s what I meant by investing too much in the forward line, list spots are a commodity as well.
I understand why individually they left. I know what you're saying. That's not the point I was making though.
A couple of things in here though. Johnson was dropped this week, and Erasmus subbed. They'll both be good players, but to think we;d be able to have a competitive midfield for 23 games consisting of O'Meara, a 23 year old, 22 year old and 2 19 year olds is, as you put it, fantasy. That was the plan going into 2023. Then we wondered why we were getting carved up in the midfield. My gods. It's mind numbing I have to point this out again.
Secondly, You kind of hit the nail on the head a little here though: "two players out of contract demanding to leave"
And lastly, I honestly can't see how anyone can be confused by the 'top up argument'. Guys like Emmett, Wagner and Reidy are basically top-up players. Freo are drafting these players because we don't have picks to take value players - they're free and no one else wants them.
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Footskill
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Few games now in short time, where we had the dumb and dumber duo of Howie and Lyon commentating
It's not bad enough the blatant biases in their commentary for Melbourne teams but can't even get the Freo players name right.
One funny moment was when Howie called a play on the lines of, Henry (think it was Ras) has the ball tries to pass it off to Henry (here he had to catch himself if he was seeing double or realised his stupidity). Getting close to kelli Underwood calling Charlie cameron, Charlie Curnow
It's not bad enough the blatant biases in their commentary for Melbourne teams but can't even get the Freo players name right.
One funny moment was when Howie called a play on the lines of, Henry (think it was Ras) has the ball tries to pass it off to Henry (here he had to catch himself if he was seeing double or realised his stupidity). Getting close to kelli Underwood calling Charlie cameron, Charlie Curnow
Sometimes you gotta look deep if you want to rectify something that's been a bugbear for more than a footy generation.
Our fwd line has really been bereft of quality, let alone even depth dating back to pre-Pavlich.
I'm all for balanced list management but I'm happy we've gone in deep to search for fwd depth, my hearts been crying out for forwards we've got pieces to work with and and personally believe we've already locked in the two big keys with this search.
The potential to also unearth the likes of extra players that can swing mid creates a more attacking mid dynamic than what we've done in the past, finding defenders and swinging them to the middle-types instead. Young the current example, but is a great Mundy-type move.
I'd certainly like to keep developing the likes of Kuek, Corbett, Reidy but yep, I reckon we could swing our draft to focus on mid types while still picking the key position that slips.
Our fwd line has really been bereft of quality, let alone even depth dating back to pre-Pavlich.
I'm all for balanced list management but I'm happy we've gone in deep to search for fwd depth, my hearts been crying out for forwards we've got pieces to work with and and personally believe we've already locked in the two big keys with this search.
The potential to also unearth the likes of extra players that can swing mid creates a more attacking mid dynamic than what we've done in the past, finding defenders and swinging them to the middle-types instead. Young the current example, but is a great Mundy-type move.
I'd certainly like to keep developing the likes of Kuek, Corbett, Reidy but yep, I reckon we could swing our draft to focus on mid types while still picking the key position that slips.
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Few games now in short time, where we had the dumb and dumber duo of Howie and Lyon commentating
It's not bad enough the blatant biases in their commentary for Melbourne teams but can't even get the Freo players name right.
One funny moment was when Howie called a play on the lines of, Henry (think it was Ras) has the ball tries to pass it off to Henry (here he had to catch himself if he was seeing double or realised his stupidity). Getting close to kelli Underwood calling Charlie cameron, Charlie Curnow
I mute the commentary generally. I find having them on is like sitting in front of a Weagle supporter, one eyed, ignorant and basically no idea . Apart from those issues they’re great.
I really like the FPPs atm. We're a tall forward short (hehehe), but good otherwise.
KPD - Pearce, Cox, Hamling, Draper, Davies with Chapman and Ryan who had done it before.
KPF- Amiss and Treacy. Jackson is OK forward as well. We only have Kuek coming through though so we need at least 1 more.
Interestingly, Amiss is irreplaceable at this stage. Probably our most important player in terms of who we can't cover and the importance of his role. He wasn't even on the list 2 years ago, so it shows if you nail a draft pick then things can change pretty quickly.
Our forward depth terrible. It's basically Kuek and Emmett. That's not good.
Simply have to draft a forward with our 1st pick this year, and next.
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Tabs says hello
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