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#1
Well. That was a rough pill to swallow. Here are my thoughts...
The first thing I would like to get out of the way is the fixture.
One thing that seems to be a consistent trend across the entire competition is the unwillingness of coaches to acknowledge the role the fixture plays in a team's ability to win or lose games.
We hear phrases like "We have known about the fixture for months and have planned accordingly." Here is why I think this response is stupid and bereft of logic:
When we are dealing with fitness and fatigue, we are talking about the physical limitations of human endurance. The body has limits. The mind, as part of the body, has limits. When you approach or surpass these limits, the effectiveness of the body and the mind drops substantially.
No amount of 'planning' can lessen the amount of stress and fatigue put on a human body that is being constantly exerted. Tissue needs time to regenerate. The cardiovascular system needs time to recover from intense strain. You can 'plan' training regimes to focus on recuperation, but you can't defy physics and biology.
What this boils down to is, in my opinion, the following reality:
If you lessen the recovery time an athlete has over an extended period of time, the physical effectiveness of that athlete will drop accordingly. If you subscribe to the theory "planning for the short breaks can mitigate the effects of fatigue," I have a small challenge for you to entertain:
Imagine a team which had to play a game of AFL football every single day for three weeks. And that was their season. Do you think any team could completely deal with this kind of exertion through any means of planning? Do you think they would continually win without any physical downfall? Of course not. How stupid would you sound, as the coach of said club, coming out and saying that twenty-odd consecutive games played no role whatsoever in your losing most of them? Once you admit this, all that remains is a smooth gradient between a season like this, and a season in which every team gets the perfect amount of time off every week. (which is logistically impossible, but for the purpose of the argument, humour me) Our last few weeks sit somewhere lower than the optimal position on this gradient.
My personal thought is that coaches know this completely, but abstain from talking about it in the media for fear of "making excuses."
But without a shadow of a doubt, the last few weeks played a definite role in the smashing tonight. This is exactly why we REWARD teams with the week off for winning a qualifying final. Because HAVING A WEEK OFF IS A HUGE ADVANTAGE. Does it account for a 110-point thumping? Not completely. But it certainly contributes.
Our youth. Tonight was tough, and made worse by the absence of Lonergan and Enright. Normally I wouldn't worry too much about Lonergan, unless we were playing a side with Buddy in it. That was just hugely unlucky and we paid for it dearly. After the game I checked out the stats sheet. Organised by disposals, this is the bottom ten on our team:
Smedts, Simpson, Sheringham, Murdoch, Bews, Hawkins, Stringer, Motlop, Rivers, Varcoe.
Our number one ruckman got more touches than eleven of our other players. Of the eleven bottom ball-winners, the average disposal efficiency was 62%. We simply will not win games with such a large portion of the team doing so little. This needs to be the focus over the next few weeks. It absolutely needs to be. Tonight we saw what happens when half your team doesn't turn up, and the other half are strangled to death from the resulting pressure of trying to play out-numbered. The younger players coming through need to be prepared to do what is required. What scares me is that despite the lack of down time to recover from previous games, it is still our older players who carried the torch. (unfortunately they seemed to be carrying it towards Sydney's goal all night.)
Lonergan and Enright. I honestly feel like they wouldn't have made any difference at all. Everything was won in the midfield tonight. The fact that we dominated the hit-outs and got smashed in the clearances tells me all I need to know. This "we can lose the clearances and still mop up games with work around the stoppages" garbage is being figured out and countered by quality opposition teams. If the coaches think this style of game is going to continually work without adapting - if they continue to tout the worn out assertion that we will win if we play our best and we don't need to worry about anything else - then they are under a serious misapprehension and the club will pay dearly for it. We are no longer the ring-leaders of the AFL. Teams have emulated our style, adapted, and are now improving upon it.
The rest of our season. It's crunch time for the Cats, now. Our season hangs upon the next two months of games. Carlton, St Kilda, Gold Coast, Essendon, Western Bulldogs, Melbourne, GWS, North Melbourne. There is no room for flippancy. There is no room for poor form or laziness or bad coaching. Drop 2-3 of these games and 2014 is finished. I still think we can be a force in September. We need some luck, but it's still a possibility. We need to stop bleeding talent from small injuries. The team has been so unsettled all year through small, annoying injuries. We have lost to Port, Sydney and Fremantle, who were all playing at full strength (Freo are partially exempt from this) on home soil. We need Bundy back. We need Caddy at CHF. We need some decent breaks between games. Here are the breaks (in days) we have over the next two months: 8, 9, 6, 6, 9, 6, 7, 7. We have a chance now to build some form (especially in the younger players who lack confidence) during a string of games we should win.
Sorry for the long post.
Sydney are not 110 points better than us. Hopefully we get another chance to show that this year.
Go Cats.
The first thing I would like to get out of the way is the fixture.
One thing that seems to be a consistent trend across the entire competition is the unwillingness of coaches to acknowledge the role the fixture plays in a team's ability to win or lose games.
We hear phrases like "We have known about the fixture for months and have planned accordingly." Here is why I think this response is stupid and bereft of logic:
When we are dealing with fitness and fatigue, we are talking about the physical limitations of human endurance. The body has limits. The mind, as part of the body, has limits. When you approach or surpass these limits, the effectiveness of the body and the mind drops substantially.
No amount of 'planning' can lessen the amount of stress and fatigue put on a human body that is being constantly exerted. Tissue needs time to regenerate. The cardiovascular system needs time to recover from intense strain. You can 'plan' training regimes to focus on recuperation, but you can't defy physics and biology.
What this boils down to is, in my opinion, the following reality:
If you lessen the recovery time an athlete has over an extended period of time, the physical effectiveness of that athlete will drop accordingly. If you subscribe to the theory "planning for the short breaks can mitigate the effects of fatigue," I have a small challenge for you to entertain:
Imagine a team which had to play a game of AFL football every single day for three weeks. And that was their season. Do you think any team could completely deal with this kind of exertion through any means of planning? Do you think they would continually win without any physical downfall? Of course not. How stupid would you sound, as the coach of said club, coming out and saying that twenty-odd consecutive games played no role whatsoever in your losing most of them? Once you admit this, all that remains is a smooth gradient between a season like this, and a season in which every team gets the perfect amount of time off every week. (which is logistically impossible, but for the purpose of the argument, humour me) Our last few weeks sit somewhere lower than the optimal position on this gradient.
My personal thought is that coaches know this completely, but abstain from talking about it in the media for fear of "making excuses."
But without a shadow of a doubt, the last few weeks played a definite role in the smashing tonight. This is exactly why we REWARD teams with the week off for winning a qualifying final. Because HAVING A WEEK OFF IS A HUGE ADVANTAGE. Does it account for a 110-point thumping? Not completely. But it certainly contributes.
Our youth. Tonight was tough, and made worse by the absence of Lonergan and Enright. Normally I wouldn't worry too much about Lonergan, unless we were playing a side with Buddy in it. That was just hugely unlucky and we paid for it dearly. After the game I checked out the stats sheet. Organised by disposals, this is the bottom ten on our team:
Smedts, Simpson, Sheringham, Murdoch, Bews, Hawkins, Stringer, Motlop, Rivers, Varcoe.
Our number one ruckman got more touches than eleven of our other players. Of the eleven bottom ball-winners, the average disposal efficiency was 62%. We simply will not win games with such a large portion of the team doing so little. This needs to be the focus over the next few weeks. It absolutely needs to be. Tonight we saw what happens when half your team doesn't turn up, and the other half are strangled to death from the resulting pressure of trying to play out-numbered. The younger players coming through need to be prepared to do what is required. What scares me is that despite the lack of down time to recover from previous games, it is still our older players who carried the torch. (unfortunately they seemed to be carrying it towards Sydney's goal all night.)
Lonergan and Enright. I honestly feel like they wouldn't have made any difference at all. Everything was won in the midfield tonight. The fact that we dominated the hit-outs and got smashed in the clearances tells me all I need to know. This "we can lose the clearances and still mop up games with work around the stoppages" garbage is being figured out and countered by quality opposition teams. If the coaches think this style of game is going to continually work without adapting - if they continue to tout the worn out assertion that we will win if we play our best and we don't need to worry about anything else - then they are under a serious misapprehension and the club will pay dearly for it. We are no longer the ring-leaders of the AFL. Teams have emulated our style, adapted, and are now improving upon it.
The rest of our season. It's crunch time for the Cats, now. Our season hangs upon the next two months of games. Carlton, St Kilda, Gold Coast, Essendon, Western Bulldogs, Melbourne, GWS, North Melbourne. There is no room for flippancy. There is no room for poor form or laziness or bad coaching. Drop 2-3 of these games and 2014 is finished. I still think we can be a force in September. We need some luck, but it's still a possibility. We need to stop bleeding talent from small injuries. The team has been so unsettled all year through small, annoying injuries. We have lost to Port, Sydney and Fremantle, who were all playing at full strength (Freo are partially exempt from this) on home soil. We need Bundy back. We need Caddy at CHF. We need some decent breaks between games. Here are the breaks (in days) we have over the next two months: 8, 9, 6, 6, 9, 6, 7, 7. We have a chance now to build some form (especially in the younger players who lack confidence) during a string of games we should win.
Sorry for the long post.
Sydney are not 110 points better than us. Hopefully we get another chance to show that this year.
Go Cats.


