I didn't see or here the game on Saturday but going by what I am reading here I thought I would express my opinion. For years our backline has been good but that has been helped by our players up the ground applying a lot of pressure on the person with the ball not allowing them time to deliver the ball. If you look at the games that we have been beaten easily in recent years it's because our mids and forwards have been down and the ball has come into our defensive area far to easily and our defenders are slow and a bit undersized, so our players up the ground as the coaches often say have to play their role.
A lot of the scribes talk about how dangerous our forward line is but how many times do we hit a target when delivering the ball not often so a lot of the time it is just bomb forward or we kick it to Buddy even if he has three on him. We have won playing like this because our mids have controlled the game and we have had enough of the ball forward to kick 12-14 goals. Another thing that annoys me and nearly every team does it, is that when the ball is in our backline all our players are there so if we get the ball back and run we have nowhere to go this worked well when we played the sling shot footy in 2012 but we haven't played like that since then so we tend to kick it down the line which can result in a deliberate out of bounds if it goes out or to an out numbered forward, why not buck the system and leave a couple of forwards forward maybe a Tippet and a running forward so if it is not marked we have a player at ground level. We will still win our share of games this year but due to our lack of depth if our top players are a little down I think we will struggle against the other top teams.
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