Toast Who would have thought....

[gbear]

Ha, fair enough. Look it's a great start, and we've done well with the things we can control. Enjoy the ride. I've liked the development of some of the younger players, the continued renaissance of Travis Boak, the forward line structure. But there's enough evidence for me to not get too excited just yet.

What would a pass mark be for you this year?

Winning at least on final would be a pass mark IMO.

 

[Capital Power]

Richmond depleted resulted in a horrendous game last year

I think the attitude is different this year. We'll find out soon enough

 

[Willsy10]

We've given ourselves a very good chance to finish top 4 now. I thought the Carlton game was critical for that but even the worst of "what happen powa" might struggle to derail our top 4 chances if we beat the Saints next weekend.

I think the like of Collingwood, Richmond, Brisbane and West Coast are our biggest challengers against finishing top 4 but we've got a good head start on them.

Cautiously optimistic because we all know what happened in 2018. We may argue that we are much better than what we were in 2018 but there were many supporters saying the same thing last year even though our results and ladder positioning begged to differ. Personally i thought 2017 and the early parts of 2018 were much better than anything we saw last year but this year so far is probably more like 2013-2014.

 

[yepits2020]

I believe we can but there's one team in our way that we match up terribly against. Brisbane.

At the GABBA in particular. On bigger grounds we are in with a fighting chance.

 

[Turiyasangitananda]

Winning at least on final would be a pass mark IMO.

I think we need a premiership. After sticking fat with Ken and the age of the playing group, we've got to make the last 8 years count for something.

 

[OneGreatClub]

Port vs Teams the media are drooling over for fimals or more.

Brisbane fail

West Coast tick
GCS tick
GWS tick
Carlton tick

Collingwood tbc
Richmond tbc
Geelong tbc
Essendon tbc

 

[TeeKray]

I feel like we might have a let down at AO as I believe it will be hard for the players to be switched on this week as its very easy to fall into a "were home for a bit now" mentality and mentally take the foot off the pedal slightly.

The good news is that I don't think we will be home for a bit, I think we'll be going home/away/home/away for the rest of the season.

Now that all of the Victorian teams have lost their home games, there won't be any respect given to 'evening up the ledger'. Our home games against West Coast and GWS will still count as home games, they just weren't played in Adelaide. The Showdown in R2 was a home game. So if we went home/away/home/away for the rest of the season, we'd end up with an 8-9 split, which is exactly what we were expecting.

Incidentally, West Coast should be favourites for the premiership - they will end up having 12 of 17 games at Optus because of the WA border restrictions and the fact that the AFL are bending over backwards to make sure they're looked after.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

I don't think people should so easily dismiss how well we were playing at 11-4. The real problem that year was that our game was ultra defensive and based on suffocating opposition teams, which kept them in the game and required only a little bit of fortune on their end or misfortune on our end to lead to disaster. And that's exactly what happened - in the space of a few weeks Freo ground us down after we lost Ryder and Gray, we bottled a lead against the Crows after Jenkins hit the post but was given a goal, Dixon, Ryder and Houston went down like dominoes against the Eagles and we lost after the siren.

The difference this year is we have actual ball movement and attacking weapons. We are scored against easier but we give ourselves a chance up front. My feeling is that it's going to get harder and harder for us as the year goes on and teams start to go to work on shutting us down. The response when this happens will be the key in terms of whether we can maintain our position towards the top or if we'll slide back down towards the middle rungs.

Yeah people remember the last half of 2018 season when we went 1-6 more than the first half.

We didn't kill off teams and left the door open as you said TK, the Brisbane game at AO was a good example and still aren't regularly doing it. We tried to play corridor footy in 2018, but second half of year we were over protective of field postioning and slow chippying it around.

2020 is a better, more interesting style of play, but I doubt the stats show we are significantly more efficient in 2020 than the first 7 to 10 games of 2018.

We played well up to the China game and were 6-3. After that we got some ugly wins and Melbourne dominated us and did a Port at AO and somehow didn't win.

 

[gbear]

13-3 and top 2 secured. A finals in is the next goal, but wow what a turnaround from the last 2 horrible seasons.