Swans go all soft

[ugg]

Swans go all soft
By Jeff Wells
March 29, 2004

SO the Swans have discovered their feminine side during the off-season.

And as a well-rounded person - ask any machinegun-toting sports feminist - I can only applaud. For two or three seconds.

That's how long I could cop Sydney's gameplan away to Brisbane on Saturday night. With Big Bad etc Barry Hall rumoured to have returned from Paris with a gorgeous new Vuitton handbag the Swans had adopted a modified form of netball.

Only not as rough.

Oh to be at Aussie Stadium where you can throw haymakers and rip up seats - no cucumber sandwiches and polite applause for 10-metre passes. It was the greatest endorsement yet for banning the backward kick.

And if the NRL can put a clock on its kickers, so can the AFL.

The Swans were standing around hugging the ball like new lord mayor Clover Moore hugging a tree. True latte-sipping eastern suburbanites.

That's Clover's platform. No hitting anybody. Everybody to wear designer boots bought on Oxford Street.

Beautiful Bazza and Adam "Gucci" Goodes both had sexy white numbers. Jared Crouch - who had to compete with the style-guru facial trim of Jason Akermanis - had a sweet little pair of duck-egg blue loafers. Memo to Sydney: no team which featured fancy boots won a game at the soccer World Cup.

It was "no moving after you get the ball". Wait for the referee's whistle. Mental note: next weekend I'll get out to the vigaro.

Yet if it hadn't been for a shank from Jason Ball, from 35m straight in front with only about a minute on the clock, Sydney would have won.

It was worse than anything you would see off the tee at Moore Park - even on ladies' day, when they really take a big cut.

A tragedy for Ball, whose loss at the end of last season was too much for the Swans to bear. Now he cost them a dream start, even as commentators continued to predict a slide.

But the supporters may slide. Bring on Super 12. Chipping the footy around like it's as precious as a Faberge egg while the opposition floods the backline is anathema to the free-running attack that won so many hearts last year - or even when Rodney Eade had them playing like berserkers.

It was like watching one of those fights when the pretender, with the tassels on his trunks and boots in Macho Camacho style, perambulates around throwing love taps and back-foot jabs and piling up the points against the power-punching champ.

And even without key forwards Alastair Lynch and Jonathan Brown this was Brisbane. Coached by Leigh Matthews, the toughest man ever to pull on a regular boot. The greatest post-war side since Melbourne won three straight in 1955-57, maybe the greatest ever.

With a salary cap and draft no team is supposed to do that. Yet they are favoured to equal Collingwood's all-time record of four straight championships set back in 1927-30, in the days when they didn't have boots but hammered studs into the soles of their feet -- and still kicked long.

Even as the tactic worked and Sydney kept their noses in front, you sensed that it would eventually come undone. That the champs would finally set themselves and land the big combinations. That class would somehow prevail - like it did in last year's preliminary final.

And that's how it happened. Brisbane 11.14 (80) d. Sydney 11.12 (78) after Nick Davis had kicked four first-half goals for Sydney, then limped off, and Brisbane trailed by 19 points.

The Swans had racked up a hallucinatory 61 marks to 30 and 167 disposals to 118.

Coach Paul Roos has long praised Brisbane as the benchmark. Early last season he wouldn't hear of anybody else winning the flag. So he denied Brisbane the ball. Denied the champ a punch.

Brisbane didn't hit the lead until near the end of the third quarter, after Keating (a big bloke who looks as if he has fallen out of a tumble dryer) and

Akermanis (whose legs move as fast as his mouth) had slammed two quick goals to open that term.

By then Matthews had solved the Handbag Hall problem by putting Mal Michael on him. Johnny Lewis may reckon that Bazza could be the next Australian heavyweight champion but Mal looks like he already holds the title.

The Swans were doing it with discipline all over the ground. That included new boys Jarrad McVeigh (who has put on some muscle) and Paul Bevan, who both had impressive debuts. But in the end old bald Martin Pike went forward to kill us off like he did last year.

And when Bazza finally threw away the handbag and decided that he wanted to rumble with Big Mal and Michael Voss and most of Queensland, and the footy was momentarily forgotten, Blake Caracella slipped away for the winning goal. Sucked in.

But how can you bag such a great effort by Sydney? Only by begging for a new gameplan against Fremantle at home next week.

[email protected]

[dendol]

If it wins us the game, i dont care how boring it is. But alas, it didnt work, so back to the free running attacking style then!

[liz]

Originally posted by dendol
If it wins us the game, i dont care how boring it is. But alas, it didnt work, so back to the free running attacking style then!

Don't totally agree. I loved the style of footy the Swans played last year almost as much as I liked the results it generated. I'd prefer to see us play our game rather than one designed to stop the opposition.

That said, when you travel to the home ground of the reigning three-peaters at the very start of the season when several of your players are rusty, a couple of key players are out injured, and your team contains 6 players with a total of less than 30 games experience between them, I have no problem with the coaches taking a different approach.

[CureTheSane]

nah, you do what it takes to get the 4 points, so long as it doesn't set you in a bad rut, a-la Eade.

Surprising the opposition is great, but do it every week and you become predictable, which is our biggest worry.

Teams have learnt how the Swans will play under Roos, and if Roos changes things around a bit, and we ull the rug out from under a few teams, great

[ScottH]

Win at all costs, is the name of the game.

Looking back on '96, we won a lot of games but they wern't always entertaining and exciting matches with the flooding tactics, but it was effective and surprised most opponents(as CureTheSane pointed out).

All the master coaches pull out surprises to try and upset the opponents game plan!!

And the more you "Hug" the ball the more likely you are to score, or stop the other team scoring!!

[floppinab]

I've been trying to think of a better way to counter the flood compared to what we did on Sat. night.

When we get stuck between centre and half forward we seem to pull just one or two out of the forward line to chip the ball across centre and then look for someone leading out from the forward line.

Easier said than done of course but seeings we have a couple now that can put them through from 50m (another nice one from Jude in the last q) why wouldn't we pull a few more out of the forward line and have six to eight lining up across the centre to try and then run it through for a shot at the 50. I don't know if it's any more risky than what we are doing but it might be better than trying to pinpoint a footpass to a leading man in a stack of traffic.

Any other ideas??

[undy]

Well, what happened a bit in similar situations last year, was that we chip it around a bit and eventually the ball would find its way to Schneiderman who would have a ping. I quite liked that approach.

[dendol]

yeah that approach sounds workable. You can have a few guys shepherd the ball carrier so he has more time to line up the shot from out there.

[Doctor J.]

Not that you can pick up that much watching the game on TV, but I think we can't underestimate how much the loss of Davis was to our forward line structure. That combined with the lack of an elusive crumbing forward ala Schneider was a major reason for our inability to get the ball in quickly.

The Brians shut us down and clogged the forward line, leaving us with no option but to pass the ball around in the hope that we could find a scoring option somewhere in the forward 50.

[timthefish]

jeff wells

that is the WORST article i have ever read on the topic of football from the football journalist i admire least.

absolutely no analysis whatsoever, constructive or otherwise. just a bunch of pissandwind namecalling from a chronic boor.

at least patrick smith hits the mark between meaningless waffle and metaphor occasionally. mike sheehan actually talks about the game. wells is a tired old joke and i couldn't care less about his opinion.

tim

[Triple B]

You've missed the point Tim.

You may take issue with what he writes, that's fine, but Wells doesn't analyse the games, this is his gig, taking the pi55 and writing articles that entertain.

It might not entertain you, or indeed a lot of posters here because you/they are passionate about their team and don't like to see them being criticised, but it will entertain those with just a passing interest in the game, or no interest at all.

To Wells' credit, in the dark days of almost zero media coverage of the Swans, Wells did still push the AFL barrow as good as he could, restricted by editors of course.

I like his work, but as I said, I don't look to it as an indepth analysis of footy or gameplans, more the stuff on the periphery.

[swan_song]

Re: jeff wells

Originally posted by timthefish
that is the WORST article i have ever read on the topic of football from the football journalist i admire least.

even lower than Caro?

[Wardy]

And if memory serves me correctly he is actually a Swans Supporter!

[BAM_BAM]

Wells, does this. He comments on the vive at the time. Last week, it was a good article, this week not so much in our favour.

I think most of the qualified commentators (sheehan, Walls etc) have mentioned the stats racked up by chipping and not really going anywhere. At times it may have been frustrating, but I'd prefer the boys to chip it around and hold possesion, waiting for a certain play, than bomb it in, hope for a mark, only to find it back again in Brisbane hands with them lining up for a shot on goal.

It may not always be pretty and entertaining in a flashy sense but it's a smart way to play.

I'd happily sit through it time and again, if it meant we won the flag.

I remember commentators saying a few years ago that the Bulldogs played good posession footy when they did this (and yes, this was when they were regulars in the 8 and not during their recent performances).

each team is different, and as well as playing to our strengths, we need to take into account the oppositions. In the third quarter we strayed away from this style of play and didn't kick a goal, where Brisbane caught us up by kicking 3. Perhaps this says a lot about Roos' game plan.