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I've been meaning to post something on our ruck situation for a long while and Boyd oh Boyd 's excellent post yesterday helped kick things along.
There are two timelines to consider in looking at our ruck strategy - (1) the 2021 season, and (2) 2022 and beyond, say to 2026 (anything further than that is even wilder speculation than usual.)
Early in 2020 I was fairly buoyant about Tim English as a ruck. Despite his modest performances against big bodied rucks (especially Grundy) his numbers were pretty comparable to the likes of Grundy, Goldstein and Gawn at a similar age.
However as the season progressed those parallels became a bit strained. Tim's obvious strengths are his around-the-ground efforts where his height, mobility, endurance and athleticism mean he can cover lots of ground and become an intercept marker in defence, a marking target in attack and a transition player in the midfield when we need someone to mark the kick up the line out of the D50.
His weaknesses however were his inexperience, lack of strength and maybe a consequential lack of confidence in the hit-outs, especially at stoppages. This was compounded by the lack of support given by Bevo/MC to Timmy. As the season progressed there was clearly an accumulation of fatigue, something I think he acknowledged himself recently. This just made the situation worse. The normally agile English could hardly run or jump at times.
I haven't rechecked this but I think someone said we have gone well over a season without winning the hitouts. That's probably some sort of unenviable record.
In fairness to Bevo (and Sam Power
) the lack of support for English was not a deliberate tactic, nor was it for want of trying. Apparently we had been scouting out options for ruck support for a season or two but without success. That has now changed with Stef Martin arriving at the kennel for what I assume will be a 1 or 2 year stint. Obviously we weren't prepared to accept any old ruck as evidenced by our unwillingness to give Jordon Sweet a game despite being named as emergency many times. Such is the pressure of the modern game that Bevo deemed it better to lose in the ruck and have an extra running player. This resulted in the ongoing farce of Dunkley and occasionally other midfielders doing stints there. The most effective (least ineffectual?) option seemed to be running Josh Bruce
through the ruck but that was surely sacrificing his supposed strengths and the reason we recruited him in the first place. Yes I appreciate Bruce had a poor season as a KPF but I don't think he arrived thinking he was going to be a ruckman. We need to get him back doing what he's been good at throughout his career - taking marks i50 and kicking goals.
2021
So I think we're now all feeling better about our ruck situation for 2021. Martin will share the load, maybe even be the starting ruck. He will also be doing some coaching / mentoring of Timmy and Sweet through the year.
That should be really valuable. It's the stuff of nightmares remembering how Timmy was contesting boundary throw-ins and ball-ups last year, looking at his opponent rather than the ball, anticipating he was going to get monstered. Now I've never played ruck but I reckon if you have reasonable body mass, excellent height and good athleticism you should be able to use that athleticism to win a reasonable share of hit outs. But when you're preoccupied with getting pushed aside you're not going to win too many.
The other good news for 2021 is that Timmy appears to have bulked up a bit more, but we've been saying that for the last three years so I'm not going to get too buoyant on that until I see how it affects the contest.
Of course if Martin is injured things may change and look a bit more like 2020 but that's a prospect all clubs face. A bulked up Tim English and a more developed Jordon Sweet are probably better options than we had in 2020. And there's always Josh Bruce
if things get dire.
What we don't know is how the reduced interchange cap will affect us (90 down to 75) and how Bevo will choose to respond. I'm pretty confident that Timmy can play 90%+ game time if he's spending a fair bit of time either as a forward target or hovering a kick behind the play in defence. Maybe the bench rotations will feature Martin more than English.
Boyd oh Boyd raised an interesting point about hitouts not being correlated with clearances and only a weak correlation with wins. I don't have a full response to that and would like to hear others' views on it.
My take is that we have such a strong midfield that we managed to win the clearances quite often in spite of losing the taps, so how much better would we be if we can start winning the taps overall? The same argument applies to the hit-outs to match wins weak positive correlation. Crikey if there's even a weak correlation and we haven't won the hitouts for maybe two years and yet still played finals both years how good will we be when we start winning the hit-outs consistently? The optimistic interpretation is that a slight shift in dominance in the hit-outs (even just squaring them) could have a very significant effect on our W-L ratio.
BoB's other point is his concern that a running player or perhaps a small forward will miss out by playing two rucks. It's a legitimate question and one that was pretty clearly behind Bevo's team structures in 2020. Maybe he was justified because the best option for a second ruck (Sweet) wasn't really ready. But surely things are different with Martin in the RW&B in 2021. If selecting these two gives us ruck and midfield dominance with abundant and swift delivery i50 then it's easily worth sacrificing a Cavarra, a Lipinski or a Hannan IMO. Not only that, but playing English as an occasional tall forward will perhaps deliver as many goals as that medium-small forward was going to score anyway (probably about 0.5-1.0 goal a game). Defensive forward pressure is another matter, but then for some players like Lipinski that hasn't been a strength anyway.
2022 and Beyond
This is really important and it does affect our 2021 strategy somewhat.
I'll come back to it a bit later. This post is already long enough.
There are two timelines to consider in looking at our ruck strategy - (1) the 2021 season, and (2) 2022 and beyond, say to 2026 (anything further than that is even wilder speculation than usual.)
Early in 2020 I was fairly buoyant about Tim English as a ruck. Despite his modest performances against big bodied rucks (especially Grundy) his numbers were pretty comparable to the likes of Grundy, Goldstein and Gawn at a similar age.
However as the season progressed those parallels became a bit strained. Tim's obvious strengths are his around-the-ground efforts where his height, mobility, endurance and athleticism mean he can cover lots of ground and become an intercept marker in defence, a marking target in attack and a transition player in the midfield when we need someone to mark the kick up the line out of the D50.
His weaknesses however were his inexperience, lack of strength and maybe a consequential lack of confidence in the hit-outs, especially at stoppages. This was compounded by the lack of support given by Bevo/MC to Timmy. As the season progressed there was clearly an accumulation of fatigue, something I think he acknowledged himself recently. This just made the situation worse. The normally agile English could hardly run or jump at times.
I haven't rechecked this but I think someone said we have gone well over a season without winning the hitouts. That's probably some sort of unenviable record.
In fairness to Bevo (and Sam Power
PLAYERCARDSTART
Sam Power
- Age
- 41
- Ht
- 190cm
- Wt
- 82kg
- Pos.
- Mid
Career
Season
Last 5
- D
- 14.7
- 4star
- K
- 7.8
- 3star
- HB
- 6.9
- 4star
- M
- 4.2
- 4star
- T
- 2.0
- 4star
No current season stats available
- D
- 7.8
- 2star
- K
- 3.8
- 2star
- HB
- 4.0
- 3star
- M
- 1.8
- 2star
- T
- 1.6
- 4star
PLAYERCARDEND
PLAYERCARDSTART
17
Josh Bruce
- Age
- 31
- Ht
- 198cm
- Wt
- 97kg
- Pos.
- D/F
Career
Season
Last 5
- D
- 11.2
- 3star
- K
- 6.6
- 3star
- HB
- 4.6
- 3star
- M
- 4.5
- 4star
- T
- 2.1
- 4star
- MG
- 90.4
- 1star
- D
- 8.9
- 2star
- K
- 3.5
- 1star
- HB
- 5.4
- 3star
- M
- 2.5
- 3star
- T
- 1.3
- 2star
- MG
- 90.4
- 2star
- D
- 11.2
- 3star
- K
- 5.6
- 3star
- HB
- 5.6
- 4star
- M
- 3.6
- 4star
- T
- 0.8
- 3star
PLAYERCARDEND
2021
So I think we're now all feeling better about our ruck situation for 2021. Martin will share the load, maybe even be the starting ruck. He will also be doing some coaching / mentoring of Timmy and Sweet through the year.
That should be really valuable. It's the stuff of nightmares remembering how Timmy was contesting boundary throw-ins and ball-ups last year, looking at his opponent rather than the ball, anticipating he was going to get monstered. Now I've never played ruck but I reckon if you have reasonable body mass, excellent height and good athleticism you should be able to use that athleticism to win a reasonable share of hit outs. But when you're preoccupied with getting pushed aside you're not going to win too many.
The other good news for 2021 is that Timmy appears to have bulked up a bit more, but we've been saying that for the last three years so I'm not going to get too buoyant on that until I see how it affects the contest.
Of course if Martin is injured things may change and look a bit more like 2020 but that's a prospect all clubs face. A bulked up Tim English and a more developed Jordon Sweet are probably better options than we had in 2020. And there's always Josh Bruce
PLAYERCARDSTART
17
Josh Bruce
- Age
- 31
- Ht
- 198cm
- Wt
- 97kg
- Pos.
- D/F
Career
Season
Last 5
- D
- 11.2
- 3star
- K
- 6.6
- 3star
- HB
- 4.6
- 3star
- M
- 4.5
- 4star
- T
- 2.1
- 4star
- MG
- 90.4
- 1star
- D
- 8.9
- 2star
- K
- 3.5
- 1star
- HB
- 5.4
- 3star
- M
- 2.5
- 3star
- T
- 1.3
- 2star
- MG
- 90.4
- 2star
- D
- 11.2
- 3star
- K
- 5.6
- 3star
- HB
- 5.6
- 4star
- M
- 3.6
- 4star
- T
- 0.8
- 3star
PLAYERCARDEND
What we don't know is how the reduced interchange cap will affect us (90 down to 75) and how Bevo will choose to respond. I'm pretty confident that Timmy can play 90%+ game time if he's spending a fair bit of time either as a forward target or hovering a kick behind the play in defence. Maybe the bench rotations will feature Martin more than English.
Boyd oh Boyd raised an interesting point about hitouts not being correlated with clearances and only a weak correlation with wins. I don't have a full response to that and would like to hear others' views on it.
My take is that we have such a strong midfield that we managed to win the clearances quite often in spite of losing the taps, so how much better would we be if we can start winning the taps overall? The same argument applies to the hit-outs to match wins weak positive correlation. Crikey if there's even a weak correlation and we haven't won the hitouts for maybe two years and yet still played finals both years how good will we be when we start winning the hit-outs consistently? The optimistic interpretation is that a slight shift in dominance in the hit-outs (even just squaring them) could have a very significant effect on our W-L ratio.
BoB's other point is his concern that a running player or perhaps a small forward will miss out by playing two rucks. It's a legitimate question and one that was pretty clearly behind Bevo's team structures in 2020. Maybe he was justified because the best option for a second ruck (Sweet) wasn't really ready. But surely things are different with Martin in the RW&B in 2021. If selecting these two gives us ruck and midfield dominance with abundant and swift delivery i50 then it's easily worth sacrificing a Cavarra, a Lipinski or a Hannan IMO. Not only that, but playing English as an occasional tall forward will perhaps deliver as many goals as that medium-small forward was going to score anyway (probably about 0.5-1.0 goal a game). Defensive forward pressure is another matter, but then for some players like Lipinski that hasn't been a strength anyway.
2022 and Beyond
This is really important and it does affect our 2021 strategy somewhat.
I'll come back to it a bit later. This post is already long enough.
Last edited: