I fear there has been an overreaction to yesterday's game. We were beaten by a goal in a contest which pre game I felt neither side would kick more than 10 goals. The conditions were genuinely a leveling influence.
The truth is straight kicking would have won the match for us.
The performance was pretty well consistent with all of our performances this year. We rely very heavily on a really committed effort and a disciplined defence. our forward thrusts are punctuated more by good fortune than by good management but we are not the only side without a genuine goal kicker or a structured forward line. I think there is no reason to criticize the efforts of anyone who played last night. The criticism of white everitt and jetta is all way over the top. True each of them made errors but they all buttered up again.
Lots of players Made errors during the game - LRT played on Tippett who took half as many contested marks as our whole team, tadgh turned the ball over, goodes missed handballs, rok made critical errors -the list goes on. There's no point overdoing it - it was not a night likely to lead to good footy.
Overall though the issue comes back in my mind to how we are going to kick 14 goals each game. And maybe this is the point. We all got a bit ahead of ourselves at the end of last season by running the dogs close. We could so easily have lost the week before and been out in week one.
And there was a period around the Richmond and Melbourne games where it was pretTy likely we weren't going to make the eight at all - and that was off a similar performance the previous year where we always around the mark but fell away at the end of the season.
Maybe we are about where we should be - in the middle of the pack with an all right list but nothing particularly special but a good culture at the club - one which doesn't lie down easily
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