Now let's be entirely honest....

[On-Baller]

It wasn't 2003 he won a Brownlow playing in the ruck that season

Ah yes i stand corrected,it of course was 2004 after he did a knee injury in the ruck against WCE early in the season and it was feared he had done his posterior or anterior knee ligament.

That was the injury that prompted Roos to say Goodes would never play ruck ever again.

[Rob-bloods]

I have been watching from the sidelines and would hardly say your comments are brutally honest. Brutal honesty is telling someone the truth that they dont want to see. All you have done so far is push the point that somehow we are better off not being in the eight and that playing finals is not somehow good for player development. I believe that a majority of people would disagree with these two points.

Brutal honesty might be more apt if you were saying that we are not a top eight side and that our current position on the ladder flatters but I think you would be struggling to back this up with any hard evidence considering that we havent lost to anyone except for adelaide below us on the ladder.

Brutal honesty might be stating that we dont seem to have many a graders compared to top four teams and we need to develop them to really contend for a premiership and the only way to get a whole group of a graders might be to drop out for a few years to the tale of the ladder and hope that we pick the right draftees. But considering that this hasnt yet provided the panacea to a premiership , you could argue that this is not brutal honesty but mere opinion.

IMO the brutal honesty this year is that Collingwood and Geelong are that far above everyone else at this point in time that it would be difficult to see anyone else winning the premiership. Is it worth bottoming out as a result? I hardly see the value when GWS will get the pick of the draft for the next two years and unless you bottom right out its hardly better value finishing 9th or 10th rather than in the bottom of the eight - so what you get picks 15 or 16 rather than 12 or 13. Is that really worth missing finals for?

My main point was not missing the eight at all, I was musing that missing the eight would afford us to realise where we really sit in the scheme of things, but seeing as you wish to be brutally honest are you saying we are travelling flash? How about the fact we have fallen in, in most of our games that we won, indeed against the teams below us, 1 point vs North, a lucky draw in the end vs Melbourne after we let it slip, Richmond again, and Port we took an hour to get on top against a rabble then kicked away! Brisbane a brilliant half and a lack lustre one. West Coast and Dons probably our best wins.

My comments were geared mainly to structures and selection I see serious issues with both.

[BSA5]

For some reason I always remember the Goodes knee injury as a Rd 1 game against Hawthorn. I know this is completely incorrect (Rd 1 wasn't even against the Hawks that year), but I just can't help but think of the incident in that context. I really need to go back and watch some footage to reset my memory of it.

[Bloody Hell]

My main point was not missing the eight at all, I was musing that missing the eight would afford us to realise where we really sit in the scheme of things, but seeing as you wish to be brutally honest are you saying we are travelling flash? How about the fact we have fallen in, in most of our games that we won, indeed against the teams below us, 1 point vs North, a lucky draw in the end vs Melbourne after we let it slip, Richmond again, and Port we took an hour to get on top against a rabble then kicked away! Brisbane a brilliant half and a lack lustre one. West Coast and Dons probably our best wins.

My comments were geared mainly to structures and selection I see serious issues with both.

I don't think the "brutally honest" comment was directed at you. See post #9.

[Mr Magoo]

I don't think the "brutally honest" comment was directed at you. See post #9.

You are correct.

As for not travelling that flash . Simply put - we are travelling okay but for one issue - our ability to convert goals. Do that and we win against adelaide and melbourne, and we kill the teams you mention and who would have known what would have happenned in the carlton games and the hawthorn game etc where in the periods where we dominated we just didnt put the result on the board. Not saying we definitely would have won those games but pressure and momentum are wonderful things in football and if a team is 30 points down rather than 13 points in a period where we have dominated in the game the comeback is never as easy.

Im not trying to put my head in the sand and pretend that we have the greatest team in the league but we probably deserve to be where we sit on the ladder. We wont challenge the front runners IMO because :
1.Structurally our forward line doesnt seem to be quite "clicking".
2. Our centre half forward for all his promise is yet to really hurt anyone where it matters on the scoreboard.
3. Goodes will never be the dominant full forward type and doesnt hurt teams as much playing up front and is better rotated through the midfield where he can hurt teams.
4. We have no one at the moment that you want to have the ball in their hands in front of goals. Every team needs a player (or two ) that whenever they take the ball inside fifty you can virtually pencil in a goal.
4. For all its culture, our team does not yet truly believe it is a contender. Deep down against the best teams they dont seem to have that overriding condfidence that they have the goods to beat the top teams.
5. Our top tier midfielders are not consistent enough across four quarters of every game.
6. We still seem to look to not lose ruck contests rather than win them.

How do we fix our forward problems - if I knew that I wouldnt be sitting in my office writing this. At the moment most of our key position forwards are very young and inexperienced (white , everitt, reid, tdl). Some arent performing as was hoped, some are performing but still not dominating where it matters, some musnt be performing to how the coaches want them to and some are clearly not cut out for key position roles. That leaves us with a quandry in the forward line that i can only imagine horse and his coaches are constantly trying to find a solution to.
As for the midfield , well they just need to perfrom consistently and this is either a fitness issue or a mind issue or both. They can do it, they have shown it at times in games but they also have shown terrible lapses when we seem to lose clearance after clearance for a period of time or even a whole quarter. That IMO is just mental attitude and belief.
Are any of the reserves players the answer - I doubt it. None of them have come in apart from reid and really shown a propensity to dominate at senior level. Maybe this is a maturity thing and maybe its a confidence thing but these guys need to look at how reid , johnson ,hannebery (and even smith before that ) go about it. All have looked to be confident and valuable contributors from the moment they entered senior football.

[wolftone57]

I think one of our major problems is the negitive game plan. The attacking footy we played for most of last year seems to have disappeared only to be replaced with the Rodney Eade/Grant Thomas style of negaty (keep the ball in packs and scramble it). Our new players are not suited to this style & what's more it is so outdated & easily overcome. There is an attacking plan that comes out occassionally but not often enough. There is no comprehensive plan for wet weather from what I have seen this year. "We handballed too much in the first half & then kicked too much in the second" said John Longmire, that tells me there was no comprehensive structural plan developed for wet weather games. John Kennedy had a most comprehensive approach to wet weather "Kick the bloody thing, kick it off the ground, kick it in the air but keep it low, do not bomb it under any circumstance"

I think players like Reid, AJ, Hannas. Smithie, Parker etc are coming along nicely. There are several others in the resies such as Sumner, LJ, Murphy (for next years draft), Nipper, McNiel etc all developing nicely & before being injured Lamb & Harren. These are exciting times so don't despair the cattle are there but you are right about this year we p have come back to reality with a thud. We don't handle the wet & that is really bad as quite a few matches from now on will probably be played in the wet in Melb.

I am not so sure of our coaching panel though. Too slow to make important decissions like moving players when they are being killed. Negative game plan! Nothing new! Haven't developed anything exciting even though the list is capable of excitement as we saw in the preseason & late last year. The goal kicking coach must be a dud, please get Davis to come back & teach them how to do it. The forward Coach ditto!

[Kanga]

It is ironic that poor kicking from Collingwood keeps the Swans in the game one week and the next Swans poor kicking keeps the Crows in the game.

[On-Baller]

Our skills is what loses us games,last night on One week at a time they showed a stat that puts us 16th in goalkicking and 16th in kicking in the midfield.

So a group of kids up in the gold coast have better skills than our side,absolute disgrace,these guys get payed to kick a ball,its not rocket science,if any of us were so hap hazard at our own jobs we'd be sacked.

[liz]

4. For all its culture, our team does not yet truly believe it is a contender. Deep down against the best teams they dont seem to have that overriding condfidence that they have the goods to beat the top teams.

A very pertinent comment IMO. Once a team reaches a certain standard, confidence becomes an ingredient that creates a cycle of further improvement. Maybe the team doesn't yet have that confidence because it isn't quite good enough yet. But just a small increase in actual ability can lead to a marked increase in actual performance once that confidence kicks in. West Coast and Carlton are great illustrations of that in 2011.

Are any of the reserves players the answer - I doubt it. None of them have come in apart from reid and really shown a propensity to dominate at senior level. Maybe this is a maturity thing and maybe its a confidence thing but these guys need to look at how reid , johnson ,hannebery (and even smith before that ) go about it. All have looked to be confident and valuable contributors from the moment they entered senior football.

It varies from player to player. Smith and Jack probably both looked out of their depth in their first couple of senior games. But by the start of the following season they had pretty much established themselves as senior players. Johnson and Hanners seemed to settle in almost immediately. Reid is a harder one to assess because he did have a full pre-season after his first game.

We just need to hope that the likes of Sumner, Johnston, Nipper and Parker use their senior exposure this year to launch their careers from 2012 onwards. It would be nice to see them each get another couple of senior games this season to give them more idea of what to work on over the summer.

[Matimbo]

Our skills is what loses us games,last night on One week at a time they showed a stat that puts us 16th in goalkicking and 16th in kicking in the midfield.

Spot on.

While I do agree with various calls to move Goodes back to midfield and drop Jetta and some other options, the plain fact is our goal-kicking inaccuracy lost us the Crows game. We also kicked 11.18 against Demons for a draw in Rd 1 (so did they). These are the 2 games we absolutely should have won and would have had us on 36 points now, level with Weagles and one game outside the top 4. We also kicked poorly in a couple of other games but still won them ... Bulldogs in Manuka (10.13 vs. their 10.5) and Tigers at SCG (9.21 v.s their 9.11).

However, if you look at the other 5 games we've lost this season, they were all against the top 4 ... Carlton twice, Cats, Pies, Hawks = 5 losses. In all of these, IMO it was our poor disposal under pressure that was the key reason we can't match it with these teams. If you look at the games scores for each, even with better goal-kicking accuracy we still would not have won most of them. In at least 3 of them, our opponent also were poor in front of goal. The solution is better midfield/halfback line disposal in the short term (skills focus NOW) plus more speed in the midfield longer term (recruiting focus).

[Mr Magoo]

Here was the AFL Ladder after rnd 14 last year :

AFL Ladder: After 2010 Round 14
Position Team M W D L For Agst %age Points
1 Geelong 14 11 0 3 1639 1095 149.68% 44
2 St Kilda 14 11 0 3 1224 952 128.57% 44
3 Collingwood 14 10 1 3 1494 1127 132.56% 42
4 Fremantle 14 10 0 4 1481 1212 122.19% 40
5 Wstn Bulldogs 14 8 0 6 1366 1075 127.07% 32
6 Carlton 14 8 0 6 1380 1208 114.24% 32
7 Hawthorn 14 8 0 6 1235 1199 103.00% 32
8 Sydney 14 7 0 7 1239 1163 106.53% 28
9 Nth Melbourne 14 7 0 7 1172 1424 82.30% 28
10 Adelaide 14 5 0 9 1150 1275 90.20% 20
11 Brisbane 14 5 0 9 1209 1417 85.32% 20
12 Essendon 14 5 0 9 1214 1441 84.25% 20
13 Port Adelaide 14 5 0 9 1091 1376 79.29% 20
14 Melbourne 14 4 1 9 1081 1249 86.55% 18
15 Richmond 14 4 0 10 1063 1455 73.06% 16
16 West Coast 14 3 0 11 1091 1461 74.67% 12

In our seven losses we had lost to Saints, Geelong, Dogs, freo, hawks, pies and richmond (in a shocker).

Purely on that basis we are half a game better off than this time last year with plenty of up side if we improve our kicking and forward structure.

We also have a better run home on paper with only Geelong and freo above us on the ladder and freo is at home with them sufferring from a terrible run of injuries.

Glass is half full.

(I still reserve my right to throw things at the tv when we get insipid results like the adelaide game)

[Bloody Hell]

Our skills is what loses us games,last night on One week at a time they showed a stat that puts us 16th in goalkicking and 16th in kicking in the midfield.

I can explain this...somewhat anyway.

Swans play a stoppage heavy style. In seasons past from a stoppage we would use quick hand passes to find someone on the outside moving forward to TRY and hit a target while moving in the clear.

This year it seems this has changed. Now players pick the ball up in the middle of traffic and heave the ball forward - kicking high across the body. Very low percentage. O'Keefe, Kennedy and Mattner are all major offenders. No doubt the game plan has changed (and it may be due to the tightening of the HTB rule), but it stops us controlling the ball - leading to more and more pressure situations.

[On-Baller]

I can explain this...somewhat anyway.

Swans play a stoppage heavy style. In seasons past from a stoppage we would use quick hand passes to find someone on the outside moving forward to TRY and hit a target while moving in the clear.

This year it seems this has changed. Now players pick the ball up in the middle of traffic and heave the ball forward - kicking high across the body. Very low percentage. O'Keefe, Kennedy and Mattner are all major offenders. No doubt the game plan has changed (and it may be due to the tightening of the HTB rule), but it stops us controlling the ball - leading to more and more pressure situations.

Yeah your spot on,but even when we do manage to get it to an outside guy they 9 times out of ten butcher the ball.

It staggers me guys can be payed to do a job of kicking a bit of leather but somehow complicate it so much.

As i said earlier if people in other fields did their job so haphazardly they'd get the boot or at least be re-trained or given a good bollocking and told to fix the problem quick smart.

By the time you reach AFL you really shouldnt need to be taught how to execute simple skills.With the exception being the rugby or overseas convert's.

Id have more faith in Karmichael Hunt or Pykey running into an open goal than i would in White or LRT.

[jono2707]

By the time you reach AFL you really shouldnt need to be taught how to execute simple skills.With the exception being the rugby or overseas convert's.

Id have more faith in Karmichael Hunt or Pykey running into an open goal than i would in White or LRT.

Just a minor point but Karmichael is a rugby league convert...

[Triple B]

Just a minor point but Karmichael is a rugby league convert...

.....who had a season of Rugby in France immediately before coming to the Suns.