I'm going to take photos of the TV every time Talia does something that frustrates me. You can then judge whether I'm being overly harsh or not.
This is the first one:
High ball in, everyone does a great job of keeping their man away from the ball to give big Tom an uncontested mark. That is, until Michael flies in from the left to spoil him. I mean, seriously, you can't be that unaware of what's going on, can you? He did a better defensive forward role than the Melbourne players in this instance.
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Talia's game-smarts worry me too, but I think you've got a fair bit of confirmation bias going on here. Before you watch Talia, you've already decided that he is going to make errors. Then, you specifically search for his errors and not for the good things he does. Do this with any player and you'll severely underrate him.
Just for a bit of perspective, my old man isn't really a fan of your boy (and my boy- I love him) Jarrad Grant, because whenever he sees Grant, he looks for the errors in the same way you do with Talia- this originated from when grant was actually playing poor footy early in his career. At one stage today, Grant could've taken an easy uncontested mark on defensive 50 or left the ball for hamling behind him, but instead he knocked the ball down to a waiting melbourne player. My dad started going on about grant's decision making and awareness, and seemingly forgot about how good the vast majority of his game was today.
I think there's a certain poster on here who holds similar views about dickson and jong, and couldn't even rate dickson's 7 goal game against freo, because he only looks for the bad things in their games once he decides they are bad players. Try watching Talia as you would watch any other player, and you'll start seeing him as a better player than you currently see him.
I also think you're being very harsh on him in that contest against gawn. He was giving away about 15cm, and the ball was clearly to gawn's advantage. Gawn would've been able to jump for it if Talia hadn't infringed, and there was no way Talia (or any key-defender I can think of) could've outreached gawn for the ball. The only way he could stop gawn from marking was by making front-on contact with him (or just shirking the contest completely and hoping for gawn to drop it). In a game where a lot of free kicks went unpaid (see dunn running into redpath front-on in the first quarter in a similar fashion), Talia's actions were not unreasonable.