Review Round 9, 2025 - North Melbourne vs. Brisbane Lions

[Nuggo]

Can you put a hard tag on a Ruckman lol

 

[Tom14]

McDonald hasn't been cited

Dogshit from MRO lol. It is a matter of interpretation, but to me he at minimum braces for contract - which he know has been cited before.

 

[martinson]

Dogshit from MRO lol. It is a matter of interpretation, but to me he at minimum braces for contract - which he know has been cited before.

Don't see the difference between this and many others that have resulted in suspensions.

Plus Berry went into HIA protocols

 

[Happy_Neale]

To not even be cited just shows how flawed the system is, had they reviewed it they would have had to give him three weeks thanks to the rigid MRO system rules, would have been way too harsh.

 

[Section 5]

Can you put a hard tag on a Ruckman lol

Zorko is up for the task.

 

[Nuggo]

Zorko is up for the task.

But on whose shoulders is he going to be on.

 

[dlanod]

But on whose shoulders is going to be on.

Clearly on the shoulders of giants.

 

[Grasshopper17]

Will Ashcroft missed so many tackles today.
Harris was out played in the the 3rd and forth quarters.
If I could give negative votes and take points off players for player of the year I would

We missed a lot of tackles as a team. We also allowed North out the front of stoppages a LOT. I guess the two were somewhat related.

While I was sitting behind the goals at the southern (cheer squads) end and being relatively close to ground level it was hard to tell what was happening further afield all the time, I suspect much of that was due to our positioning around these contests. Perhaps our mids got ahead of themselves, and got ahead of the ball as a result, before we'd actually won clean possession.

The fact this happened over and over again, and more and more often the longer the game went, is concerning. I wonder if it also speaks to the fact we lacked that extra running player to rotate through our midfield after Berry's substitution, and were running closer to empty than we might have been normally.

I don't think we can discount the difference the choice of sub had on our performance. Some of us were unfortunate enough to be at the MCG in 2022 when we lost to Richmond. We led by 6-7 goals midway through the 2nd quarter when we lost Bailey, also to concussion if I recall correctly. We replaced him with Darcy Fort, which turned out to be a disaster, left us way too tall, and we coughed up that lead quite dramatically.

You probably can't sheet it all home to that but I'm sure it had a large influence on Sunday's result. There is no way known Gardiner should have been the sub after we'd already gone in with 2 tall forwards and 2 ruckmen. But I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here. The question I'm sure we all want to know is why!?

Making Dizzy the sub locked us in to gambling on a tall guy getting injured, but even if that had happened and we'd had say McKenna or Tunstill as sub, it would have been far easier to adjust with 2 talls ahead of the ball rather than having one too many as we did.

Shifting Dizzy to defence was also a poor move. First of all he had minimal impact anyway. Second of all what we should have done was to play him as essentially a decoy full forward role alongside our resting ruckman, and get both Hipwood and Morris well up the ground, ideally one on each flank/wing, almost to the point of having them be our tall targets coming out of our defensive 50. I mean for goodness sakes we still had Dunkley playing that role on multiple occasions, and as good as he is at it, having him doing that on top of all our tall players was just nonsensical to me.

From there, playing 4 talls ahead of the ball, even if one of them was on the bench most of the time, I would have locked us in to playing a Melbourne style of game where we kick long down the line to marking contests, making the most of our overhead capabilities, and eschewing virtually all ideas of lateral ball movement. Yes, it would have been bloody boring to watch but it also would have required less work rate from our midfield, where remember we were already one short.

Playing that way is not complicated, doesn't require a great deal of training, in a way it would be like wet weather footy. It also would have allowed us to avoid the quite ridiculous situation where Comben was playing on (and beating) Cameron.

I can only imagine that the selection of Gardiner came down to partly "well he did his job against Gold Coast" and partly "oh well, it's only North". If that really is the "why" it's pretty damning on the match committee but I simply can't think of any other justification, and it might also explain the relatively poor attitude of a number of our players, even if it was subconscious.

But it's not all bad. There was a pretty cool sunset



And the old man spotted this at the start of the second half. He's not a big footy fan but he quite likes numbers. What can I say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?

Thanks to all 6 players for bloody standing still for just long enough!

 

[martinson]

We missed a lot of tackles as a team. We also allowed North out the front of stoppages a LOT. I guess the two were somewhat related.

While I was sitting behind the goals at the southern (cheer squads) end and being relatively close to ground level it was hard to tell what was happening further afield all the time, I suspect much of that was due to our positioning around these contests. Perhaps our mids got ahead of themselves, and got ahead of the ball as a result, before we'd actually won clean possession.

The fact this happened over and over again, and more and more often the longer the game went, is concerning. I wonder if it also speaks to the fact we lacked that extra running player to rotate through our midfield after Berry's substitution, and were running closer to empty than we might have been normally.

I don't think we can discount the difference the choice of sub had on our performance. Some of us were unfortunate enough to be at the MCG in 2022 when we lost to Richmond. We led by 6-7 goals midway through the 2nd quarter when we lost Bailey, also to concussion if I recall correctly. We replaced him with Darcy Fort, which turned out to be a disaster, left us way too tall, and we coughed up that lead quite dramatically.

You probably can't sheet it all home to that but I'm sure it had a large influence on Sunday's result. There is no way known Gardiner should have been the sub after we'd already gone in with 2 tall forwards and 2 ruckmen. But I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here. The question I'm sure we all want to know is why!?

Making Dizzy the sub locked us in to gambling on a tall guy getting injured, but even if that had happened and we'd had say McKenna or Tunstill as sub, it would have been far easier to adjust with 2 talls ahead of the ball rather than having one too many as we did.

Shifting Dizzy to defence was also a poor move. First of all he had minimal impact anyway. Second of all what we should have done was to play him as essentially a decoy full forward role alongside our resting ruckman, and get both Hipwood and Morris well up the ground, ideally one on each flank/wing, almost to the point of having them be our tall targets coming out of our defensive 50. I mean for goodness sakes we still had Dunkley playing that role on multiple occasions, and as good as he is at it, having him doing that on top of all our tall players was just nonsensical to me.

From there, playing 4 talls ahead of the ball, even if one of them was on the bench most of the time, I would have locked us in to playing a Melbourne style of game where we kick long down the line to marking contests, making the most of our overhead capabilities, and eschewing virtually all ideas of lateral ball movement. Yes, it would have been bloody boring to watch but it also would have required less work rate from our midfield, where remember we were already one short.

Playing that way is not complicated, doesn't require a great deal of training, in a way it would be like wet weather footy. It also would have allowed us to avoid the quite ridiculous situation where Comben was playing on (and beating) Cameron.

I can only imagine that the selection of Gardiner came down to partly "well he did his job against Gold Coast" and partly "oh well, it's only North". If that really is the "why" it's pretty damning on the match committee but I simply can't think of any other justification, and it might also explain the relatively poor attitude of a number of our players, even if it was subconscious.

But it's not all bad. There was a pretty cool sunset

View attachment 2314391

And the old man spotted this at the start of the second half. He's not a big footy fan but he quite likes numbers. What can I say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?

Thanks to all 6 players for bloody standing still for just long enough!

View attachment 2314394

Comben looked like a Superstar on Sunday.

He's not that good is he so the issue is he always had a free jump at it with no physical pressure applied. Plus we kept kicking it to him.

I reckon the sub decision cost us the game in the end ,absolutely , and your observation that it was only North and we wanted to give Dizz a leg up is on the money.

We can go away from that only copping 2 points and having learnt something.

 

[Grasshopper17]

Shocking game but thought we scrapped really well at the end of the game to prevent north getting a score. A minor positive I guess

Yes, agree with this. But even then, North were the last team to score and really at the very end they were still the only team who looked like scoring.

One thing I'm putting on watch a bit over the next few weeks is the next stage of when good teams noticeably play in bursts. For a few weeks, quite a few weeks often, they play well enough for long enough to get the win. That's largely been us this season.

After a few weeks of that tho, it gets harder and harder to have enough of those bursts, and have those bursts be long enough, to get the wins. And that's when the losses start. We've seen this with plenty of teams. Maybe it's motivational, who knows. There's still a lot of the season to go. Time will tell whether Sunday's game was the start of that see-saw over-balancing for us.

 

[Grasshopper17]

Thought the Harris 50 meter penalty moment was reflective of the majority of our players attitude / mindset during the game tonight. Just really poor and we seriously lowered our colours.

Yes we looked to be self-destructing at that stage. Not to mention the original decision was also correct unfortunately. It seems our guys need to better understand the current holding the ball rule.

 

[Grasshopper17]

Fagan made a good point in the presser that if no one else has a draw this year a draw is as good as a win.

Lol. I was thinking that in the last 90 seconds. Once Hipwood kicked that point the key was to not let them score. Payne's thump over the boundary line was a beauty. They had loose players everywhere and it was kicked to a contest. Thankfully.

Yeah North really butchered a lot of their attacking forays on Sunday, often kicking straight to our guys despite being under little or no midfield pressure. It was basically the reason their clearance dominance didn't really have a lot of scoreboard impact (in that we didn't lose).

 

[Grasshopper17]

It's a wet wig not a wet week. Ever tried to throw a wet wig ?

Wet weeks are pretty slow tho

 

[Grasshopper17]

It actually wasn’t that cold there last night .

Yep I didn't even put on my jacket till half time

 

[Grasshopper17]

You live there? Less than 15 is bloody cold for Queenslanders.

Nah, I flew down. It really was fine. Conditions absolutely no excuse.

 

[Nathan Barley]

I found the dizzy sub criticism a bit interesting. We were hurt the week before subbing off a tall forward for a small forward.

I didn't hate it

 

[Grasshopper17]

I'm not sure they played out of their skin. They played well enough to win comfortably but just couldn't finish off. They seemed to be smashing us in clearances.

Wouldn't be surprised if they won a few games in the run home.

I know we're not here to debate the quality of otherwise of our opposition's performance, but if nothing else I thought North's on-ball pressure was consistently excellent for basically the whole game.

 

[Grasshopper17]

Xerri absolutely destroyed Oscar, and while he was beating Fort, Fort was doing a lot better than Oscar against him. So fagan (rightly) took oscar away from the contest. I know some people are complaining about Fagan's inclusions, but we would have lost that game had Oscar taken all the ruck contests yesterday. Fort was a great inclusion just on that. Dizzy was a head scratcher though, but my biggest problem was Kiddy coleman not being in the squad. He is probably in our top 1-6 players. Fagan brought Ashcroft in right away, and Kiddy should have been afforded the same respect. You don't leave out an A grader, and if Kiddy isn't in next week's team, i'll actually start to get frustrated. Especially with Berry out, there's absolutely 0 excuses to ignore him next week.

I think the fact that Coleman's had a fair history of soft tissue injuries, even before his ACL, has contributed to the caution we've taken with his return compared to Ashcroft and others. Which I think has been fair enough.

 

[Grasshopper17]

How about making the sub a concussion sub only? ie if they come in, the player they replace has a mandatory week off

That was the original plan way back in 2021 or whenever but it got expanded to be a "medical sub" before Round 1 of that year.

 

[Grasshopper17]

It matters not about "deserving" to win

All that matters is the final score.

The final score was a draw.

Speaking of which, that draw was in effect, as good as a win. Unless another genuine contender also plays a draw, we have separated ourselves from the field.

Now I'd like to trot out a few good old hackneyed lines in the context of this result :-

"This is the draw we needed to have"

"Grand Finals aren't drawn in May"

"It was a good performance but we're just taking it one draw at a time"

"Obviously it's a bit disappointing but if we carry this form for the rest of the season, we're confident that more draws will follow"

"We knew that as long as we stuck to our game plan, we'd eventually get the draw"

"It's a tough road to the finals but a few draws at the business end of the season will give us a chance at equal 8th"

" They say a draw is like kissing your sister but have you seen my sister....She's HOT!!!"

To be fair... If we draw every single game from now until finals, we'll make finals comfortably and if other results go our way we might even be a sneaky top 4 chance.

 

[Grasshopper17]

I found the dizzy sub criticism a bit interesting. We were hurt the week before subbing off a tall forward for a small forward.

I didn't hate it

I can't believe this. I came here this week to eat humble pie and say "you were right all along about Dizzy".

And now this.

Fair dinkum.

 

[Ceebee]

Nah, I flew down. It really was fine. Conditions absolutely no excuse.

What stand were you in , we were in the David Boon stand .
I agree the conditions were fine .the night before was freezing after the training session .

 

[Grasshopper17]

What stand were you in , we were in the David Boon stand .
I agree the conditions were fine .the night before was freezing after the training session .

Yeah Boonie stand, pretty much right behind the goals and the North cheer squad.

 

[Sunny Land]

What stand were you in , we were in the David Boon stand .
I agree the conditions were fine .the night before was freezing after the training session .

Was in the Boon stand also. Not a bad day for Hobart. The boys have played in much colder conditions in the past. Weather wasn't an issue at all.

 

[Ceebee]

Was in the Boon stand also. Not a bad day for Hobart. The boys have played in much colder conditions in the past. Weather wasn't an issue at all.

It definitely wasn’t .