Spurr

[blue shark]

We need, every club needs, better use from the back line.
The best kicks in our team?
Bennell, Hill, Walters....Johnson, Mundy

For the most part, forward of centre.

I want to put a spreadsheet together for the squad listing their retained metres gained numbers, because the best one there is the guy we need at half back - and we need three of him. I just can't find it.

Time is also against Johnson, so we need to look at the future too. Don't mind the idea of Mundy at halfback, opening
up a spot for someone else in the midfield.
Spurr, Ibbotson are good intercept marks, but slow on their feet with decision making, same as Dawson, they need
players on the outside to receive the handball, run the ball forward.
The ten metre exclusion rule should help in this regard?

 

[UFO Tatsu]

Time is also against Johnson, so we need to look at the future too. Don't mind the idea of Mundy at halfback, opening
up a spot for someone else in the midfield.
Spurr, Ibbotson are good intercept marks, but slow on their feet with decision making, same as Dawson, they need
players on the outside to receive the handball, run the ball forward.
The ten metre exclusion rule should help in this regard?

I do not think time is up for Johnson. Make him the sole loose man in defence and swap Ibbo out for another KPD. I do not think he can match it one-on-one either.

 

[Big Animal]

I can't believe he is escaping the wrath.

I begin mouthing off about his hacktastic kicking as soon as he marks the pill, just so I have enough time to fit in all the hatred.

Mentally cooking Duffield was a mistake Lyon should grow to regret. Pissing Duff off has left us with Ibbo as the only halfway decent kick in the backline (anyone who thinks Marblecalves Johnson is going to play all season should consider a job as an affirmation writer for Sunshine Rainbows and Lollipops Co) and Ibbo takes so long to make a decision, that he may as well not bother having a halfway decent kick.

Sutcliffe is rubbish
Sheridan is rubbish
Dawson is Dawson

but Spurr, Spurr sucks dead dog's balls.

Dad? Is that you?

 

[meima]

I do not think time is up for Johnson. Make him the sole loose man in defence and swap Ibbo out for another KPD. I do not think he can match it one-on-one either.

I love you when you go purely technical , you absolutely nailed it. Can you change your buddy hannath to somebody else really can't see what area he can improve on.

 

[UFO Tatsu]

I love you when you go purely technical , you absolutely nailed it. Can you change your buddy hannath to somebody else really can't see what area he can improve on.

Hannath is just perfect the way he is

 

[salim malik]

Hannath is just perfect the way he is

Looks like Tarzan plays like....... .Fill in the dots.

 

[Righteo]

I can't believe he is escaping the wrath.

I begin mouthing off about his hacktastic kicking as soon as he marks the pill, just so I have enough time to fit in all the hatred.

Mentally cooking Duffield was a mistake Lyon should grow to regret. Pissing Duff off has left us with Ibbo as the only halfway decent kick in the backline (anyone who thinks Marblecalves Johnson is going to play all season should consider a job as an affirmation writer for Sunshine Rainbows and Lollipops Co) and Ibbo takes so long to make a decision, that he may as well not bother having a halfway decent kick.

Sutcliffe is rubbish
Sheridan is rubbish
Dawson is Dawson

but Spurr, Spurr sucks dead dog's balls.

What an eloquent argument you've strung together, the 'dead dogs balls' comment just gives it that added gravitas.

 

[youmewe]

Hannath is just perfect the way he is

Whatever you say Jack.

 

[Nickos66]

Looks like Tarzan plays like....... .Fill in the dots.

... Mayne?

 

[Rob]

He escapes the wrath because he's the only bloke in the backline that can take a ****ing mark.

 

[Bigger]

Only 300 plus posts in 15 years . All the crap we've been through in those 15 yrs and you post this. You must be really pissed off.

Curiously I am actually a fair bit more positive after the Gold Coast game than I was after the Dogs game, where we looked like a Freo side of old playing in Melbourne at sparrow's fart on a Sunday morning, when you just knew half the team were hungover and the other half had meetings later in the day with reps from other clubs and were wondering what to order at lunch.

We are trying to move the ball quickly but we have played two of the quicker sides in the competition who feasted on how wide open and s-l-o-o-o-w our centre square and general stoppage group can be when we get the balance wrong.

The reason I am caning Spurr is because he really burns us by foot and there's only so many crap kicks you can carry. He takes plenty of courageous marks because he plays tall. But we have genuine talls down there (and Ibbo, who also plays tall) and Spurr can't play on the genuine talls and he can't stop speedy smalls. Whatever you gain with the marking you lose with the kicking and our currently fragile confidence gets drystroked when a ball gets instantly turned over coming out of defence. You get caught in that effort-skills feedback spiral - poor skills means greater expenditure of effort equals diminished skills equals the need for more effort - so on so on so on until someone vomits or realises the answer.

We have plugged the backline's skills deficiency with Hill and that leaves our midfield - which is trying to open up and be more risk taking and skills dependent - short of exactly the character we need to get the new game plan humming.

Obviously Bennell is going to make a difference to this equation but we saw what happened on Saturday when Hilly went in the middle.

We used to always get the midfield balance wrong - the perception was Freo was a bit flakey so we went all short, doughty warrior type; the perception then became we were too short and one-paced so we loaded up on skinny halfforward flanker types and ran them through the middle; swinging wildly from one extreme to the other.

And we're tending to do that again while we plug the obvious skills gaps in the backline.

(And Brady Grey isn't the answer. At least, in the backline. He's a turnover machine. I would play him as a defensive forward with the sole aim of killing campaigners. Just killing them.)

Part of the answer is to play to our strengths rather than pretend we are a team we just aren't.

Use the big bodies and battering rams we have in the stoppages, but surround them with speed and/or skills. I don't want Nathan Fyfe kicking the ball out of the middle. I want him getting it to Stephen Hill or Michael Walters to do that.

**** it, I'd even take Matt de Boer on his knees, covered in another man's blood, shovelling the ball out by hand to Hill or Walters and them kicking it to Nathan Fyfe.

Or I'd take Michael Barlow accidentally tapping it in the path of a running Weller or Langdon who can take the ball down (rather than fumbling it to Clancee Pearce who can take a year getting in exactly the right mindset prior to kicking or to Danyle Pearce who can run away from goal and then wildly blaze from fifty out).

Gold Coast didn't care what we were up to in the middle because they were sharking the ball and FEASTING on our poor skills, lack of speed and our insane insistence on repeatedly trying to pull off what works so beautifully at training - get the ball to Fyfey and sit back to watch him work the magic. It's like an economist who works out the perfect economic model - but leaves out "time" and "money" as variables because they're either not available or a bit too hard to predict. We obviously don't train with three blokes trying to work their way up Fyfe's arse when he gets the pill, surrounding that cluster**** with speedy runners, forcing the turnover and moving the ball quickly the hell out of there. We don't train for that because we don't have that (and we don't want to kill Fyfe ourselves.)

(It doesn't help that Mundy is plainly out of sorts and has fallen for the new captain's trap of thinking he has to win the game all by himself).

Anyway, excuse the lengthy post.

I went through a week of thinking we made a mistake extending Lyon's contract because he has missed the boat, but I realise that he hasn't, it's just going to take a while to get the balance right and security of tenure is a good thing while we rebuild/rejig.

(Spurr, however, still metaphorically mouths the generative apparatus of expired canines).

 

[stax on the mull]

Interesting think piece Bigger Animal, but does it flesh out on topic of your post called Spurr? Answer = No.

Here's the quote from Brent Guerra from the Fremantle website player profile on Lee Spurr. Chew the fat over this.

"Lee has had a great pre-season and on top
of his play on the field, he continues to show great leadership in the backline. He’s a tremendous kick of the football with both feet and we can rely on him in the backline to deliver the ball at a high standard."

 

[mike91]

haha
why don't you tell us what you really think?
subtle as a brick through a plate glass window
i like it
big footy is much more fun when your team is shit

Melbourne had (hopefully still have) a Simpsons thread dedicated on trolling their own players, was hilarious.

 

[Unique Name]

Interesting think piece Bigger Animal, but does it flesh out on topic of your post called Spurr? Answer = No.

Here's the quote from Brent Guerra from the Fremantle website player profile on Lee Spurr. Chew the fat over this.

"Lee has had a great pre-season and on top
of his play on the field, he continues to show great leadership in the backline. He’s a tremendous kick of the football with both feet and we can rely on him in the backline to deliver the ball at a high standard."

'High standard' and 'tremendous' are not terms I would use to describe Spurr and his kicking ability.

He loves to hoof it out of the backline, sometimes to our advantage, sometimes not. I don't think I have ever read a post on our board commenting about how good Spurr's kicks are. Average at best IMO.

 

[stax on the mull]

'High standard' and 'tremendous' are not terms I would use to describe Spurr and his kicking ability.

He loves to hoof it out of the backline, sometimes to our advantage, sometimes not. I don't think I have ever read a post on our board commenting about how good Spurr's kicks are. Average at best IMO.

Which goes to the point that he doesn't escape the wrath from BigFooty posters as the first line of the first post of this thread claims. But I wonder how many of those posters would even know when he is kicking on his non-dominant foot.

 

[Unique Name]

Which goes to the point that he doesn't escape the wrath from BigFooty posters as the first line of the first post of this thread claims. But I wonder how many of those posters would even know when he is kicking on his non-dominant foot.

Spurr's ability to kick the ball off either foot isn't the issue, he usually kicks the ball well. It's the hoofing part that I have a problem with, that and the poor decisions he sometimes makes coming out of the back line (That centring kick he did against the Bulldogs).

 

[PapaJ]

Curiously I am actually a fair bit more positive after the Gold Coast game than I was after the Dogs game, where we looked like a Freo side of old playing in Melbourne at sparrow's fart on a Sunday morning, when you just knew half the team were hungover and the other half had meetings later in the day with reps from other clubs and were wondering what to order at lunch.

We are trying to move the ball quickly but we have played two of the quicker sides in the competition who feasted on how wide open and s-l-o-o-o-w our centre square and general stoppage group can be when we get the balance wrong.

The reason I am caning Spurr is because he really burns us by foot and there's only so many crap kicks you can carry. He takes plenty of courageous marks because he plays tall. But we have genuine talls down there (and Ibbo, who also plays tall) and Spurr can't play on the genuine talls and he can't stop speedy smalls. Whatever you gain with the marking you lose with the kicking and our currently fragile confidence gets drystroked when a ball gets instantly turned over coming out of defence. You get caught in that effort-skills feedback spiral - poor skills means greater expenditure of effort equals diminished skills equals the need for more effort - so on so on so on until someone vomits or realises the answer.

We have plugged the backline's skills deficiency with Hill and that leaves our midfield - which is trying to open up and be more risk taking and skills dependent - short of exactly the character we need to get the new game plan humming.

Obviously Bennell is going to make a difference to this equation but we saw what happened on Saturday when Hilly went in the middle.

We used to always get the midfield balance wrong - the perception was Freo was a bit flakey so we went all short, doughty warrior type; the perception then became we were too short and one-paced so we loaded up on skinny halfforward flanker types and ran them through the middle; swinging wildly from one extreme to the other.

And we're tending to do that again while we plug the obvious skills gaps in the backline.

(And Brady Grey isn't the answer. At least, in the backline. He's a turnover machine. I would play him as a defensive forward with the sole aim of killing campaigners. Just killing them.)

Part of the answer is to play to our strengths rather than pretend we are a team we just aren't.

Use the big bodies and battering rams we have in the stoppages, but surround them with speed and/or skills. I don't want Nathan Fyfe kicking the ball out of the middle. I want him getting it to Stephen Hill or Michael Walters to do that.

**** it, I'd even take Matt de Boer on his knees, covered in another man's blood, shovelling the ball out by hand to Hill or Walters and them kicking it to Nathan Fyfe.

Or I'd take Michael Barlow accidentally tapping it in the path of a running Weller or Langdon who can take the ball down (rather than fumbling it to Clancee Pearce who can take a year getting in exactly the right mindset prior to kicking or to Danyle Pearce who can run away from goal and then wildly blaze from fifty out).

Gold Coast didn't care what we were up to in the middle because they were sharking the ball and FEASTING on our poor skills, lack of speed and our insane insistence on repeatedly trying to pull off what works so beautifully at training - get the ball to Fyfey and sit back to watch him work the magic. It's like an economist who works out the perfect economic model - but leaves out "time" and "money" as variables because they're either not available or a bit too hard to predict. We obviously don't train with three blokes trying to work their way up Fyfe's arse when he gets the pill, surrounding that cluster**** with speedy runners, forcing the turnover and moving the ball quickly the hell out of there. We don't train for that because we don't have that (and we don't want to kill Fyfe ourselves.)

(It doesn't help that Mundy is plainly out of sorts and has fallen for the new captain's trap of thinking he has to win the game all by himself).

Anyway, excuse the lengthy post.

I went through a week of thinking we made a mistake extending Lyon's contract because he has missed the boat, but I realise that he hasn't, it's just going to take a while to get the balance right and security of tenure is a good thing while we rebuild/rejig.

(Spurr, however, still metaphorically mouths the generative apparatus of expired canines).

Ha ha. That's a great read. Had a shitty morning and that cheered me up a bit. Can't say I agree with every word, but lots of it is spot on too.

BTW, the bit where you say we need to play to our strengths ... I literally said out loud 3-4 times on Sat, we're not playing to our strengths. So yeah, I hear you on that one.

 

[TheMcManusNose]

Curiously I am actually a fair bit more positive after the Gold Coast game than I was after the Dogs game, where we looked like a Freo side of old playing in Melbourne at sparrow's fart on a Sunday morning, when you just knew half the team were hungover and the other half had meetings later in the day with reps from other clubs and were wondering what to order at lunch.

We are trying to move the ball quickly but we have played two of the quicker sides in the competition who feasted on how wide open and s-l-o-o-o-w our centre square and general stoppage group can be when we get the balance wrong.

The reason I am caning Spurr is because he really burns us by foot and there's only so many crap kicks you can carry. He takes plenty of courageous marks because he plays tall. But we have genuine talls down there (and Ibbo, who also plays tall) and Spurr can't play on the genuine talls and he can't stop speedy smalls. Whatever you gain with the marking you lose with the kicking and our currently fragile confidence gets drystroked when a ball gets instantly turned over coming out of defence. You get caught in that effort-skills feedback spiral - poor skills means greater expenditure of effort equals diminished skills equals the need for more effort - so on so on so on until someone vomits or realises the answer.

We have plugged the backline's skills deficiency with Hill and that leaves our midfield - which is trying to open up and be more risk taking and skills dependent - short of exactly the character we need to get the new game plan humming.

Obviously Bennell is going to make a difference to this equation but we saw what happened on Saturday when Hilly went in the middle.

We used to always get the midfield balance wrong - the perception was Freo was a bit flakey so we went all short, doughty warrior type; the perception then became we were too short and one-paced so we loaded up on skinny halfforward flanker types and ran them through the middle; swinging wildly from one extreme to the other.

And we're tending to do that again while we plug the obvious skills gaps in the backline.

(And Brady Grey isn't the answer. At least, in the backline. He's a turnover machine. I would play him as a defensive forward with the sole aim of killing campaigners. Just killing them.)

Part of the answer is to play to our strengths rather than pretend we are a team we just aren't.

Use the big bodies and battering rams we have in the stoppages, but surround them with speed and/or skills. I don't want Nathan Fyfe kicking the ball out of the middle. I want him getting it to Stephen Hill or Michael Walters to do that.

**** it, I'd even take Matt de Boer on his knees, covered in another man's blood, shovelling the ball out by hand to Hill or Walters and them kicking it to Nathan Fyfe.

Or I'd take Michael Barlow accidentally tapping it in the path of a running Weller or Langdon who can take the ball down (rather than fumbling it to Clancee Pearce who can take a year getting in exactly the right mindset prior to kicking or to Danyle Pearce who can run away from goal and then wildly blaze from fifty out).

Gold Coast didn't care what we were up to in the middle because they were sharking the ball and FEASTING on our poor skills, lack of speed and our insane insistence on repeatedly trying to pull off what works so beautifully at training - get the ball to Fyfey and sit back to watch him work the magic. It's like an economist who works out the perfect economic model - but leaves out "time" and "money" as variables because they're either not available or a bit too hard to predict. We obviously don't train with three blokes trying to work their way up Fyfe's arse when he gets the pill, surrounding that cluster**** with speedy runners, forcing the turnover and moving the ball quickly the hell out of there. We don't train for that because we don't have that (and we don't want to kill Fyfe ourselves.)

(It doesn't help that Mundy is plainly out of sorts and has fallen for the new captain's trap of thinking he has to win the game all by himself).

Anyway, excuse the lengthy post.

I went through a week of thinking we made a mistake extending Lyon's contract because he has missed the boat, but I realise that he hasn't, it's just going to take a while to get the balance right and security of tenure is a good thing while we rebuild/rejig.

(Spurr, however, still metaphorically mouths the generative apparatus of expired canines).

Solid rant, love it.

Yeah Spurr is pretty much the definition of average kick despite his excellent intercept marking. You could hide that when Johnson was 100%, McPharlin was up and about and Duff was playing well. Now having Dawson, Ibbo, Spurr and a regressed-by-foot Sutcliffe down back is an issue. Who will deliver the ball?

But you make a point about Brady Grey which I 100% agree with; he will never be the back pocket messiah unless we want to end up with no hair as a collective fan-base.

So really with that in mind, the only real option I see for fixing our disposal issues down back is to wait for the development of Hughes, Tucker and maybe Nyhuis as your small to mid defenders, and hope Collins or Ueber can come on enough to push Dawson out next year (or we get Hooker who is acceptable by foot). Maybe Bennell's inclusion can also push Mundy to the HBF or something, at the very least he improves the team's skills collectively.

Still annoyed Riley Bonner went the pick before Balic, although no guarantee we would have taken him.

 

[maf303]

His "bad" kicks for the first 2 games from memory have the ones kicked back into the center.... maybe its the attacking game plan that's making him try it.

ALSO, In both games the SUN I thought was an issue. They should have closed the roof in the first game.

If you're not sure of a new game plan of where your teammates are, you might rush a kick and hope with obscured vision or might delay the kicks.. And I think this was happening both games....

And yes, yes I know the other team had the same conditions...but maybe they've been on their new/updated game plan longer... ????

 

[Ausbenito]

Solid rant, love it.

Yeah Spurr is pretty much the definition of average kick despite his excellent intercept marking. You could hide that when Johnson was 100%, McPharlin was up and about and Duff was playing well. Now having Dawson, Ibbo, Spurr and a regressed-by-foot Sutcliffe down back is an issue. Who will deliver the ball?

But you make a point about Brady Grey which I 100% agree with; he will never be the back pocket messiah unless we want to end up with no hair as a collective fan-base.

So really with that in mind, the only real option I see for fixing our disposal issues down back is to wait for the development of Hughes, Tucker and maybe Nyhuis as your small to mid defenders, and hope Collins or Ueber can come on enough to push Dawson out next year (or we get Hooker who is acceptable by foot). Maybe Bennell's inclusion can also push Mundy to the HBF or something, at the very least he improves the team's skills collectively.

Still annoyed Riley Bonner went the pick before Balic, although no guarantee we would have taken him.

Agree Mundy must go to half back and Hill for that matter Bennell's injury is killing us in the midfield but meanwhile Sheridan and Sutcliffe the great hopes need to stand up and be counted and give some run and carry though the guts as they were drafted to do.
Not all bad but take the $3 about us beating the Eagles perfect game to turn it around.

 

[magna cum loud]

Curiously I am actually a fair bit more positive after the Gold Coast game than I was after the Dogs game, where we looked like a Freo side of old playing in Melbourne at sparrow's fart on a Sunday morning, when you just knew half the team were hungover and the other half had meetings later in the day with reps from other clubs and were wondering what to order at lunch.

We are trying to move the ball quickly but we have played two of the quicker sides in the competition who feasted on how wide open and s-l-o-o-o-w our centre square and general stoppage group can be when we get the balance wrong.

The reason I am caning Spurr is because he really burns us by foot and there's only so many crap kicks you can carry. He takes plenty of courageous marks because he plays tall. But we have genuine talls down there (and Ibbo, who also plays tall) and Spurr can't play on the genuine talls and he can't stop speedy smalls. Whatever you gain with the marking you lose with the kicking and our currently fragile confidence gets drystroked when a ball gets instantly turned over coming out of defence. You get caught in that effort-skills feedback spiral - poor skills means greater expenditure of effort equals diminished skills equals the need for more effort - so on so on so on until someone vomits or realises the answer.

We have plugged the backline's skills deficiency with Hill and that leaves our midfield - which is trying to open up and be more risk taking and skills dependent - short of exactly the character we need to get the new game plan humming.

Obviously Bennell is going to make a difference to this equation but we saw what happened on Saturday when Hilly went in the middle.

We used to always get the midfield balance wrong - the perception was Freo was a bit flakey so we went all short, doughty warrior type; the perception then became we were too short and one-paced so we loaded up on skinny halfforward flanker types and ran them through the middle; swinging wildly from one extreme to the other.

And we're tending to do that again while we plug the obvious skills gaps in the backline.

(And Brady Grey isn't the answer. At least, in the backline. He's a turnover machine. I would play him as a defensive forward with the sole aim of killing campaigners. Just killing them.)

Part of the answer is to play to our strengths rather than pretend we are a team we just aren't.

Use the big bodies and battering rams we have in the stoppages, but surround them with speed and/or skills. I don't want Nathan Fyfe kicking the ball out of the middle. I want him getting it to Stephen Hill or Michael Walters to do that.

**** it, I'd even take Matt de Boer on his knees, covered in another man's blood, shovelling the ball out by hand to Hill or Walters and them kicking it to Nathan Fyfe.

Or I'd take Michael Barlow accidentally tapping it in the path of a running Weller or Langdon who can take the ball down (rather than fumbling it to Clancee Pearce who can take a year getting in exactly the right mindset prior to kicking or to Danyle Pearce who can run away from goal and then wildly blaze from fifty out).

Gold Coast didn't care what we were up to in the middle because they were sharking the ball and FEASTING on our poor skills, lack of speed and our insane insistence on repeatedly trying to pull off what works so beautifully at training - get the ball to Fyfey and sit back to watch him work the magic. It's like an economist who works out the perfect economic model - but leaves out "time" and "money" as variables because they're either not available or a bit too hard to predict. We obviously don't train with three blokes trying to work their way up Fyfe's arse when he gets the pill, surrounding that cluster**** with speedy runners, forcing the turnover and moving the ball quickly the hell out of there. We don't train for that because we don't have that (and we don't want to kill Fyfe ourselves.)

(It doesn't help that Mundy is plainly out of sorts and has fallen for the new captain's trap of thinking he has to win the game all by himself).

Anyway, excuse the lengthy post.

I went through a week of thinking we made a mistake extending Lyon's contract because he has missed the boat, but I realise that he hasn't, it's just going to take a while to get the balance right and security of tenure is a good thing while we rebuild/rejig.

(Spurr, however, still metaphorically mouths the generative apparatus of expired canines).

Well said Mission Man.

Spurr gets a pass because Spurr has a clearly identifiable skill set (a kind of mad courage that usually only the deathly stupid like Glenn Archer exhibit) that many of his colleagues in the backline don't possess. Yes, his kicking is poor, but Sheridan and Sutcliffe aren't much better at that and are defensively woeful. Sutcliffe couldn't defend a bowl full of broccoli against a well-fed toddler.

Really, there isn't enough Suban hate. Might be time to dig up an old thread.

 

[Taylor]

I think Spurr needs to be the guy taking the second mark out or defence, not the first one fifteen metres to the left and two metres in front of the guy kicking out of the goal square.

 

[Bigger]

Well said Mission Man.

Spurr gets a pass because Spurr has a clearly identifiable skill set (a kind of mad courage that usually only the deathly stupid like Glenn Archer exhibit) that many of his colleagues in the backline don't possess. Yes, his kicking is poor, but Sheridan and Sutcliffe aren't much better at that and are defensively woeful. Sutcliffe couldn't defend a bowl full of broccoli against a well-fed toddler.

Really, there isn't enough Suban hate. Might be time to dig up an old thread.

Yes.

Find those posts and then you too can revel in the feeling that is being proved right when have said your team is full of poorly-skilled footballers.

It's a great feeling.

 

[Silent Alarm]

It's a sign of the team when Lee Spurr is about seventh priority to be dropped and never played again.

He was a very handy player for four or so years. He came in and did a job right away. He'll be remembered fairly well by Freo supporters for being a classic back pocket in that he did his job, went hard at it, and was fairly tidy. His poor kicking is well overrated too; there are forwards who have kicks way more important who botch it more.

For me we would have arseholed Suban and D Pearce last year, Dawson at least by then, and Spurr would be kept only if we were worried about injuries in the back line. He's one of about 10 players who should not be on our list come 2018 and should not play again for the club.

 

[Eski3]

I mean, we can't drop everybody