RSS: Swans just not playing well: Roos

[ScottH]

Sydney Swans coach says the reason for his side?s form slump is simple

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(This post was automatically generated from news items on www.sydneyswans.com.au )

[ROK Lobster]

Success is not about individuals, even Brownlows are not about individuals, but 3 and 4 (2 of the 3 yet to win a game) is about individuals. Is there a game plan for the coaching staff, because I don't think anyone up there has taken on board the notion of accountability. The club - and I do not mean Roos solely, I mean the media machine that rolls out the fluff pieces each week - maintains that any success the club has had has had everything to do with a very even, cortina, blue collar, drab, poorly skilled unit, playing accountable, hard, committed, honest and disciplined football, and while it has often been acknowledged that for the Swans to achieve they all have to be at their best, best has always been in terms of the gameplan, of fulfilling their role in the team - not about skill levels or really even form. So when Roos says that the Swans are playing badly because a number of individuals are in form slumps what does he mean? Is winning now much more about the skill levels of players, and how they are playing as individuals, or does it mean that they are not doing the team thing? If they are not doing the team thing what is the leadership group doing about it, or are we talking about the leadership group? If Goodes' Brownlow can be attributed, as Roos (and no doubt the club propaganda machine) would have us believe, to doing the team thing and carrying out a part of the plan, what do we attribute his poor form to this year?

It is also plain that Roos got smashed last night, as he did against Laidley. I am not calling for his head, I'm calling for some accountability, and acknowledgement, that perhaps our coaching staff are in a bit of a slump too.

[NMWBloods]

"While conceding the Swans? form wasn?t anywhere near their best, Roos had faith that the results would turn around if the players stuck to structures and habits that have served them so well in the past."

Players' fault if we continue to slump.

Roos' credit if we improve.

?Look, the group has been so good to the club, to the footy club and to each other over a long period of time.

?At some point you've got to back that group and you've got to make sure we give them the same opportunity that they've given the footy club in terms of winning premierships and playing in a grand final.? What does this mean? All the group have premiership credits still and he's not going to change it until they're all old and frail?

[Nico]

Sounds like a coach in denial.

Read "we are playing poorly and I don't know what to do. I will stick with boys because they have done it before and they are my mates, and besides I don't know how to develop young footballers and I would rather look after my mates than do what I am paid to do. I am certainly more comfortable chatting with the in crowd than I am developing the minds and maturity of any emerging talent".

Wonder how Andy Ireland is travelling right now. Jumped ship at Brisbane when they started to slide and has taken a fair bit of credit for our rise to the top. Think the old legs will be getting a bit nervy right now.

[ROK Lobster]

Sounds like a coach in denial.

Read "we are playing poorly and I don't know what to do. I will stick with boys because they have done it before and they are my mates, and besides I don't know how to develop young footballers and I would rather look after my mates than do what I am paid to do. I am certainly more comfortable chatting with the in crowd than I am developing the minds and maturity of any emerging talent".

Don't tell me you have changed your perspective on Roos (a little bit).

[Ludwig]

The Swans are at a crossroads regarding the how to adjust the team philosophy with the realities of the current game.

I think Paul Roos has had a good strategy for getting the most out of the group. Giving the players partial ownership for team development is usually successful in getting the most out of the players. Even if some players are clearly past their best, loyalty to those who have served the team well over a long period should be rewarded. And I think this is a part of the Swans culture that will have a positive effect over the long term. Even the younger players would like to see that one day, after years of service, they too will be given a chance to work their way out of a form slump.

But this can be taken too far. I figure that a team must find 3 new long-term seniors per year. This will ensure that the team has around 30 players capable of playing 200+ games over a career. Successful teams often have problems accomplishing this when they are successful over several years and need to rebuild every so often just to get back to their best. This is best illustrated by fall and rise of Port and Brisbane.

The reason the WCE are so good is that despite having the best current team in the AFL they have also managed to bring on some young players that look destined to be top notch 200 game footballers over the past 2 years. I am talking about the likes of Beau Waters, Sam Butler, Armstrong, Hurn, Rosa and Priddis, with Mitch Morton, McKenzie and Brown waiting in the wings. Now they have such a deep squad that Cousins, Nicoski, Butler, Embley and Fletcher (a midfield the Swans could only dream about) have been out for most of all of the year.

I figure that by comparison the Swans have added Buchanan, Dempster, Richards, and Malceski as 200+ game prospects over the same period. (I've included Ablett and Schneider in the 2004 group). I would have had McVeigh in this group, but there is more than a bit of uncertainty about his long-term prospects.

The Swans are digging themselves into a real deep hole by not developing their younger players. Liz has rightfully pointed out that the end of the season looms as one where many hard decisions will need to be made as to who will go and who will stay. The Swans have too many prospects of uncertain quality because they simply have not been adequately tested.

I would think that Schmidt and Moore have shown enough to be given a real chance to establish themselves. And Laidlaw too should be given a run in the seniors. Kieran Jack will probably have to go back to the reserves when LRT returns, but looks almost certain for elevation to the senior list for next year, when he too should be given a solid run in the seniors.

All credit to Bevan for his efforts, but just lacks the class to make it.

The game has just gone past Benny Mathews and it's hard to see him playing senior footy next year.

And as everyone has noticed (except Roos perhaps) that McVeigh is just so badly out of form that he needs to go back to reserves to get back on track. He is just costing the team too much at the moment to persist with him. I am sure that Roos didn't want to break his confidence by sending him down, but playing him is just not working.

Crouch and JB are also on the brink, but I doubt that we can afford to drop them at the moment, but would not rule it out if they didn't improve by the mid-year break.

Ted Richards has been under a bit too much pressure with so many backmen out at the moment. He's that good a defender, and is best when given a weaker player so he can help out in defence or add some drive out the back line. May be worth a try up forward once Kennelly and Dempster return.

Malceski should go into the midfield, which is in a desperate state at the moment. I'd put Goodes at HBF until Kennelly returns, although a match-up with Chad Cornes may be on order for next week's game. That's a match-up the Swans will need to breakeven on for the Swans to beat Port. Adam's not doing enough as a rover and a good defensive assignment could well give him something definitive to build a base on. Without a return of form for Goodes, the Swans have little hope for this season.

[Zlatorog]

Very good assessment of the state of things, Ludwig. I'm just hoping that the players don't count on the miracle again in second half of the H&A season and get them into the top 4 again. 2006 might not happened again this year.

[hammo]

There is an admission there from Roos that no premiership players will be dropped. Last year he cut some big names: Mathews, Richards to send a message.

Surely we've reached that point now. Get some youngsters in to show the old guard how its done. I'm talking about Schmidt, Moore, Laidlaw in particular. A Grundy or Vogels up forward would also be useful with MOL not offering much right now.

Our injury situation may not make changes easy to accomodate, but its generally accepted here that the midfield is what needs some new blood - McVeigh, B1, Mathews all line up in the centre square at various times and offer us nothing, whereas Schmidt and Moore I feel would.

[swansrock4eva]

Except Mathews wasn't so much as dropped as not uninjured enough to play. Ludwig is pretty much on the money imo. I just hope we're not going to see the same mistakes Eade made in refusing to allow youngsters to develop and having been figured out with no backup plan to switch to... Alarm bells aren't blasting full on just yet but things need to start picking up pretty quicksmart!

[bloodboy]

We need a ball magnet with good skills in the midfield. Anyone know Juddy's number?

[liz]

We need a ball magnet with good skills in the midfield. Anyone know Juddy's number?

Three.

[liz]

Great post Ludwig - articulate and insightful.

A few random ponderings of my own...(warning - this is very long, even by my standards )

One of the Swans' greatest assets over the past couple of seasons has been how well drilled they are. It is how they've managed to contain midfields with far more flair and be consistently one of the best defensive units despite having a midget backline. And you see it in the reserves too - just incredibly disciplined and well drilled.

But often a great strength can become a weakness too, and it looks that way at the moment. Roos' coaching philosphy isn't about swinging the tactical / match-up changes on game day, moving the pieces around the chess board like Eade did. It is about instilling structure and accountability in the players. People here are calling for him to make those changes when things aren't working, but it would be incredibly hard for the team to suddenly start doing things differently when they have been relentlessly drilled to do the same things week in week out.

Every team would love to be able to operate in multiple ways but I wonder if there are any that truly do. And there are pros and cons of different approaches. Eade was a marvellously inventive match day coach for Sydney but by the end he was controlling the moves to such an extent that the players possibly felt they had little control over how things panned out, at which point accountability for performance and morale seemed to take a big hit.

Worsfold appears to give his players a similar level of responsibility to Roos but it manifests itself differently, with his brilliant ball winners instructed to go out there and win ball and back themselves without really giving a thought to an opponent, and the rest of the team feeds off them. It works marvellously well when you have Cousins, Judd and Kerr fit and running rampant, but when those ball winners aren't having a day out, things look far less impressive because the team doesn't have an alternative approach to fall back on. Just look at West Coast today against Geelong. I know it is just one loss and they still look impressive but with Cousins not there and Ling doing a superb shut down job on Kerr, it was left largely to Judd to spark the team through the middle and that was too much even for him.

Smart coaches - ie the ones who are successful - choose their approach to fit what they have available. We have no idea whether Roos or Worsfold could go about things in a radically different way because neither has been coaching long enough or with different enough groups of players. But we can all say pretty safely that Worsfold's approach wouldn't work if he was coach of the Tigers rather than the Eagles.

Eade is one who has shown some adaptability. Watching the Dogs play now it isn't apparent that they are his puppets in the same way that the Swans sometimes appeared to be, especially late in his stint. But then the team he inherited at the Bulldogs was a very different group of players to those he had at the Swans.

I am not saying that it is beyond Roos power to tweak a few things - nor that he shouldn't try. But I don't think we can expect to see a radical change in approach. And to be fair to all, nor should we expect it given that if you go back 8 games, the result was a one point failure to defend a premiership.

And a final comment on this topic - ultimately football is about winning the ball, passing it to team mates and kicking goals. If the group of players you send out for any game don't want to tackle or to get their head down over the ball and win the thing, or if they can't hit a team mate with their passes, or if they kick behinds from straightforward scoring shots (the one thing that mercifully seems to have turned around, at least for now), you aren't going to win many games of football regardless of your coaching philosophies, structures or tactics.

Which brings me onto my second theme - player selection.

Sydney's amazing run with injuries has also been both a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is obvious - teams rarely win premierships if they can't get their best players out on the ground. Just ask Cornflakes.

But the ludicrously low level means that today there would have been barely 25 games of senior experience running around in Canberra (unless Dempster played). Roos doesn't have half a dozen players with 20 or so games that he can swing in and reasonably expect to hold their own. Obviously everyone has to play their first few games at some stage and many absolute novices play blinders.

But putting too many in at the same time is a very risky strategy as most will have more quiet games in their first couple of dozen than good games. It looks to be working for Collingwood at the moment, certainly, but there are very few external expectations on that club and if they lose a few games with this young side no-one would blink an eyelid. And I suspect even internally their expectations are reasonably modest - I doubt they see themselves as a real premiership contender this season, despite their excellent start to the year. It is far easier to perform with no pressure on.

Yet another double edged sword for Roos is the fact that this team has played some appalling football at times in each of the past two seasons. Yet by the end of the year, the same players he has retained faith in have delivered almost to the maximum possible extent. So who can blame him for sticking with the same players again, knowing that they have justified his faith in them in the past.

Would any of us be brave enough to radically change something which has worked so well so recently?

And remember this is Roos first coaching assignment. He doesn't have the experience of past ups and downs of teams to draw on, to help him notice when the tyres really are worn and need replacement or whether it is just a minor realignment required.

And its worth pointing out how hard it is to tell when the turning point really comes. A year ago, would anyone have picked Hadyn to be the leading run scorer in the Cricket World Cup? Or six months ago that McGrath would be the leading wicket taker?

Having said all that, a dispassionate look at the current team does indicate the odd problem. There isn't really much wrong individually with Kirk, Mathews, Bolton, Ablett, Buchanan etc. They are all pretty consistently performed players with their attributes. But as a group they lack speed.

There have been three significant retirements over the past three years - Ball, Williams and Maxfield. We can argue that Ball's loss has at least been partially addressed but it is not evident that Williams and Maxfield have. I realise Maxfield had little impact in the premiership season and Williams not much last year, but the cumulative effect starts to build up. It makes the team especially vulnerable to the loss of Kennelly and is compounded by Crouch's recent struggles.

They tried Phillips but it is pretty apparently that he doesn't yet have the body size or strength to impact at senior level. At the moment they're giving Jack a go but its too early to tell whether he yet has the confidence or composure to add anything tangible. When Jack's term comes to an end (as it apparently must in a few weeks, if not before), Laidlaw might be the one to make a difference. Or in the longer term (ie probably not this year) DOK might provide some of the answer (though having watched him a little he looks more like he might be Nick Davis speed at best, not Leon Davis or even Paul Williams).

[bandwagon]

A very interesting thread.

Re. Roos' alternative gameplan. Well, in 2003 and for most of 2004 we played a completely different brand of football. However the instigator of the "run & handpass up the corridor" style was most often Kennelly. Can we turn back the clock for even part of a match without him?

[ROK Lobster]

And its worth pointing out how hard it is to tell when the turning point really comes. A year ago, would anyone have picked Hadyn to be the leading run scorer in the Cricket World Cup? Or six months ago that McGrath would be the leading wicket taker?

Excellent example, but... Consider Slater, at the time he ws dropped he had a better record than Hayden. If he had been afforded the same chances (which was about 12 more tests) as the Queenslander he may well have resurrected his career. That said, Langer would not have resurrected his - we will never know if Slater and hayden would have gone on to the success that Langer and Hayden did but it is likely that they would not. So sometimes, dropping an old favourite is good for the team. Simialrly, I think it needs to be kept in mind that largely Hayden was at the World Cup by default. Hayden had been dropped from the one day side and found his way back in by default. Katich and Watson were both tested in the opening spot, and also Michael Clarke. Give Haydos his dues, he had a fantastic World Cup, but had Katick, Watson or Clarke made a better fist of it at the top of the order, he'd have been watching it on the tele with Simon, Mark and Ian. With the exception, perhaps, of Benny, that sort of thing does not happen at Sydney. Blokes like Schmidt and Moore are not being given the chance to show what they can offer. Give them 5 - 8 weeks with decent game time, and if they are not starting to look as though they belong, bring an old favourite back. I am not calling for wholesale changes, but some of our blokes are playing very ordinary footy at the moment, and a couple have been since 2005.

[Nico]

Just not sure that I agree on the point about it being Roos's first gig as a coach cuts too much water with me.

He finished in 1997, had a year in the media analysing the game then went onto a coaching role, has coached in his own right since 2004 and played over 330 games, many with a side that had some very low but some very high points also. Played in a GF and coached a premiership. Also kept an extensive diary note of every game he played in.

I reckon on that form he would have formed some sort of understanding of flexibilty in coaching game plans and styles. I suspect he is a stubborn soul who thinks it's his way or the highway.