Mega Thread The 2015 Buckley coaching megathread

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TradeDraft

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It's not just him, it's all of them. They never make the right decision or a savvy enough to hit a target even if the opponent is within a metre of them. all the good sides, will hit that target, irrespective if there is a player "in the vicinity". It opens up the play.

Our guys play scared "safe" footy. Which pretty much means, you could field any player with no league experience to do what they are doing out there. Laughable.
and They have no Confidence in the Teammates or Themselves at the moment and Maybe even Bucks
 

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ksardog

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In Bucks' press conferences I'm sick of smug looks like it's just a breeze. He needs to say what we are doing wrong and make players accountable! Name names!
He is like a duck at the moment, all calm above the surface, below the surface is paddling like crazy. Not fooling anyone
 

ottoman

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I went to the game, not for a result but for the chance to see what we have been working on all summer and what we can expect to do in terms of ball movement, transition, hitting targets, decision making and defending an opposition. It's fair to say all of the above on exposure have failed miserably.

It's the same old stuff. We cannot kick in to any free teammates. Every team we have played in the Nab Challenge has been able to hit targets via kick in. We simply always kick long to a contest. Rubbish.

We cannot defend kick ins. The opposition slice us up with free targets at will.

Our ball movement is laborious and slow. There's no creativity, we don't use the corridor anywhere near enough and it's predictable. Too many guys are too slow of mind or poor kicks of the footy when the ball is in their hands.

We still get caught up on "contested footy". The most dangerous area on the ground is the outside. Win this area and you control and ultimately win the game. The Dogs obliterated us in this area. They always outnumbered us on the outside. Even when we got first hands on it, all our guys are within a 1m of each other. We were boxed in, with nowhere to go.

The Dogs' players were always moving, hitting every contest on the move. Be it in attack or when defending out inside 50s, they were always moving making it harder to be tackled. Our movement is static, flat footed and no tackle seems to stick. When they do, we allow our opposition to always be able to release the ball out via handball.

How many times can we do loopy handballs to players who are under pressure?

Why do we persist by not playing our best forwards, actually forward? Elliott is our best small forward. He is a weapon and he is now spending too much time on ball. This is seen as the next step in his evolution but the reality is, his form and output will suffer individually and team. The boy is capable of being a 50 goal a year player. He, Fasolo, Broomhead, Karnezis and De Goey need to be our small/medium forwards. No more Blair or Goldsack who have no influence on the scoreboard or via assists. It's laughable having forwards who cannot score.

Cloke must be getting frustrated and rightfully so. The guy works his ass off and the delivery is not even park standard let alone league standard. Always over his head, wide, at his feet or on top of his head outnumbered. We have the best power forward in the comp and we cannot hit him or create space for him.

Our defence is the worst in the league. Brown and Langdon aside, the rest are not up to it. Williams and Sinclair could be but Toovey is no longer best 22- he is a shadow of the player he once was and Ramsay is lost at sea. Kicking skills from this mob are atrocious. How can you ever hope to be the "best transition side in the comp" when this group of players is kicking the footy? Bucks, please, turn it up.

There have been no improvements thus far and overall it seems like we are still going backwards. The results are irrelevant, it's the way we are doing things.

I'm all for playing Kennedy, Broomhead, Freeman, Scharenberg etc with regularity at the expense of guys like Blair, Toovey, Goldsack, Frost, Crisp etc. If we are going backwards we may as well improve the kids and young guns.
I liked this post once because that is all the system allows me to do but it deserves 10 likes.
 

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Trickster

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Given our shaky nab challenge start, I thought its worth delving into whether things would have been rosier under Malthouse if the succession plan didn't occur. For mine, I'm not convinced.

The intention of this is not to criticise either coach but rather try and see through the current noise and emotion of our losses to date and last year to see if we would have been a better team.

While Buckleys into his 4th year and we're trending down, it's worth remembering Malthouse won a flag after 8 seasons at WCE and other than his first or second year, didn't take the dogs into finals at all after that.

If Malthouse continued coaching in 2012, would we have done better than 4th? It's hard to see it on the back of the retirements of Davis and Brown (who was instrumental in our success) not to mention critical season-ending knee injuries to Krakouer, after his brilliant 2011 season, and Ball who was a vital grunt player at the time while Caff and Keefe also went down robbing us of depth.

In 2013, we effectively lost Beams and Thomas for most of the year, while players like Johnno, Didak, Jolly we're also down on their output and well past their prime while Tarrant had retired and we had traded out Wellingham and Dawes.

If anything Buckley has been courageous (and IMO well considered) in trading out players like Wellingham, Dawes and possibly Heath Shaw (though that hurt us more) to bring in first round players via compensation / trade. Where this has fallen down is that the like for like free agency replacements didn't fire meaning Lynch didn't fill in for Dawes and Young has been too injury prone to replace Wellingham. Jury is still out on Broomhead and BK which were our compo picks though the logic for doing this is there given we hadn't brought in early first round talent for a few seasons prior to that. In addition, our fitness seemed to drop off while teams like Hawthorn and Sydney clearly went past us.

Winning premierships is not easy and while we think 2011 got away, at least we won 2010. More than St.kilda can say after a 20-2 season in 2009 and no success at all despite great seasons from 2008-2010, with a long rebuild ahead of them now.

While we have a lot of talented youngsters now we just need to get some game time into them. I agree the skills of the players have been disappointing and the game plan seems stagnant at the moment, but I'm just hoping it's due to a young team still trying to learn the ropes together.
Maybe it's the 'rebuild we had to have'. Anyhow I still think we're on the right track but hope that our list can stay injury free while we pump some games into these kids and rise to challenge again sooner than later.

Thoughts?
 

PieMan!

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Given our shaky nab challenge start, I thought its worth delving into whether things would have been rosier under Malthouse if the succession plan didn't occur. For mine, I'm not convinced.

The intention of this is not to criticise either coach but rather try and see through the current noise and emotion of our losses to date and last year to see if we would have been a better team.

While Buckleys into his 4th year and we're trending down, it's worth remembering Malthouse won a flag after 8 seasons at WCE and other than his first or second year, didn't take the dogs into finals at all after that.

If Malthouse continued coaching in 2012, would we have done better than 4th? It's hard to see it on the back of the retirements of Davis and Brown (who was instrumental in our success) not to mention critical season-ending knee injuries to Krakouer, after his brilliant 2011 season, and Ball who was a vital grunt player at the time while Caff and Keefe also went down robbing us of depth.

In 2013, we effectively lost Beams and Thomas for most of the year, while players like Johnno, Didak, Jolly we're also down on their output and well past their prime while Tarrant had retired and we had traded out Wellingham and Dawes.

If anything Buckley has been courageous (and IMO well considered) in trading out players like Wellingham, Dawes and possibly Heath Shaw (though that hurt us more) to bring in first round players via compensation / trade. Where this has fallen down is that the like for like free agency replacements didn't fire meaning Lynch didn't fill in for Dawes and Young has been too injury prone to replace Wellingham. Jury is still out on Broomhead and BK which were our compo picks though the logic for doing this is there given we hadn't brought in early first round talent for a few seasons prior to that. In addition, our fitness seemed to drop off while teams like Hawthorn and Sydney clearly went past us.

Winning premierships is not easy and while we think 2011 got away, at least we won 2010. More than St.kilda can say after a 20-2 season in 2009 and no success at all despite great seasons from 2008-2010, with a long rebuild ahead of them now.

While we have a lot of talented youngsters now we just need to get some game time into them. I agree the skills of the players have been disappointing and the game plan seems stagnant at the moment, but I'm just hoping it's due to a young team still trying to learn the ropes together.
Maybe it's the 'rebuild we had to have'. Anyhow I still think we're on the right track but hope that our list can stay injury free while we pump some games into these kids and rise to challenge again sooner than later.

Thoughts?

Agree so much :thumbsu::thumbsu::thumbsu:
 

Trickster

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I'm no fan of Mick, but this is wrong. He had a premiership in three seasons at WCE and two flags in his 9 year tenure, without missing finals once.
Sorry I should have been clearer, I meant a flag after 8 seasons of coaching not 8 at WCE. My point is that he took the dogs into the finals early and then had no finals appearances till WCE. So if he wasn't given another opportunity and was tossed out after 4-5 years at Footscray, he likely wouldn't be where he is today.
 

Robroy22

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Can there be any other way to portray the Mick V Bucks stuff?
Can one of you super talented theorists please start one that contains the moon landings and aliens and stuff....
Or can you do one that contains super models?

cmon....think laterally
 

Trickster

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Can there be any other way to portray the Mick V Bucks stuff?
Can one of you super talented theorists please start one that contains the moon landings and aliens and stuff....
Or can you do one that contains super models?

cmon....think laterally
I think as a supporter group there's elements that are still hanging onto this notion of how good we would have been under Mick nearly 4 years on.

Happy for this to be merged into another thread if mods see fit and going forward we always have a right to question the coach, but the sooner this whole debate about Malthouse vs Bucks ends the better.

My point is that people will have views on whether Buckley is the right man, but I think it doesn't do us as a club any favours to think he's stuffed Malthouse's team up when in reality it was probably on the way down anyway. If we're playing this way after end of 2016 and there's no improvement then he's likely to be gone as he's had 5 years.
 
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I think whenever this question comes up it's worth addressing just how brilliant this Hawthorn, and to an extent, Sydney sides have been.

I think it's come up quite a few times, but Bucks AND Derek Hine established after our 2012 Prelim loss that we simply didn't have the talent to keep up with the rate they were progressing, and it's hard to find anyone that doesn't agree, this Hawthorn side is simply one of the best of the past few decades, and even if all the blokes you mentioned had stayed, it'd still be hard to see us beating Hawthorn in a granny, we barely scraped past them in the Prelim.

And who's to say Malthouse wouldn't have pulled a John Worsfold, who despite being a great coach, simply lost his passion for coaching, and thus, his ability. It's easy to say Malthouse could have coached to a high standard until he dies, but there's a reason that every great coach has an expiry date, Malthouse has been coaching for such a long time, and it's an absolutely fantastic achievement which we will celebrate by smashing Carlton in round 5 this year, but every coach has an end, and baring the succession plan, it could very well have happened the last few years had he had stayed on.
Obviously we will never know.

Anyone who follows the EPL would have seen the transition that Manchester United went through once Ferguson left, he had the liberty to chose a successor and even still Manchester United fumbled last season and sacked that very successor, there was never going to be smooth transition to a new coach, succession plan or not and that's probably a point worth emphasizing.

I absolutely agree with every point you've made OP, and like you, rather then dwelling on how we could have potentially been a dynasty (we wouldn't have) i'm excited with the opportunity our youngsters have been presented this year to prove the doubters wrong.
At the members meeting at the end of last season, Bucks and Co emphasized we've been rebuilding for 2016 onwards, when we'll be up against the likes of the Bulldogs, GC, GWS and obviously Port at the top, nothing I have seen has changed that vision, and i absolutely agree we'll be a contender in 2016 onwards if this team stays healthy.
 
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