Is our midfield too defensive

[Reggi]

With Crouch and Kirk in there are we a little bit too tagging oriented and possibly not focussed on winning the footy.

Did see one where Crouch ran past the ball to go to his man - very defensive mindset.

Not sure on this one.

[Jon]

Yeah...interesting. I think our team as a whole does go into its shell a bit to weather the "down" periods. Usually 5mins here, 5mins there is enough to blunt the oppositions momentum...then we've been very successful at attacking late in matches.

Unfortunately, when you have such sustained down periods as we've seen against Port, Kangas, Hawks and Freo we can come off looking a bit dour.

Kirk does have a lot of attacking footy in him. I don't think he's the negative tagger many have him labelled as...it's just that he can play that style of game especially well.

His kicking isn't a feature, and his main role in forward movements is usually by putting on pressure, then opening up play with some good handpasses to running players coming from halfback, or to supporting players from the midfield around him. In the wet...handpasses are too slow and inaccurate and turnovers happen more often.

Crouch is the same....when the team breaks the shackles, you often see him generating inside 50's, and even contributing the odd long running goal, or even mark and set shot inside the forward 50. In fact he managed to pop up in the forwardline on the weekend, but we just couldn't generate our mormal run that game.

Fact is, a wet weather arm wrestle like we saw yesterday isn't a fair example of how our midfield plays week in week out.