It is enough to make you puke really.Originally Posted by 09183305
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It is enough to make you puke really.
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Making finals is great. The Swans have maintained that standard for 20 years or more under several coaches. A truly golden era. One premiership with Roos and one with Longmule, 5 years ago. We have a premiership talented list and I reckon it's fair enough to question his role as much as anyone's to get that little extra to WIN a GF again soon. A fresh view might bring quick results from an acknowledged and well drilled group.It may backfire but some dramatic out of the box input after the roos/longmule transition era might be just what we need.
I agree. The team that played last night contains the same talent that whipped Essendon last week. Longmire is certainly not to blame. I didn't like the fact that Sydney players were not on their man last night, not like they have been playing the last how ever many weeks. There was a glimps of what we expected them to do in the early parts of the third quarter but was not sustained. It looked very much like a game from rounds 2, 3 and 4. There can sometimes by a fine line between awesome and ordinary and we were on the wrong side of the line. Buddy was being tied down be Geelong and the long bombs they got away with last week should have been abandoned earlier for kicking to a free man.
More Cheer cheering next year. It's been a great ride this year from 0-6!
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I do wish people would stop saying there is no plan b c or d. Tonight there were a lot of moves made but they all highlighted some problems.
They basically tried to play Sinclair in the ruck for large parts of the game and took him out of the forward line. Of course this meant towers only rucked for two minutes and we got a goal out of that. Instead we then had two useless rucks as neither Sinclair nor Naismith could influence the game.
Plan c was tried from the mid point of the second quarter when we threw Reid down back and McVeigh forward. This was a problem because McVeigh hadn't been able to impact the long kick to Dangerfield for height or speed reasons. He had also specialised in lateral kicks rather than the creative kicks we needed from a loose. So putting Reid back was supposed to stop the long kick - but this failed as well because Reid failed to mark the ball spilling those that he had the chance to mark and getting sucked into pushing contests instead of just attacking the ball. Plus it robbed us forward of the ball as we had also given up on Sinclair as a forward option.
Plan d was to put Rohan spare instead of Reid.
Nothing worked because we got clobbered at the coal face and our kicking forwards was deplorable and our key defenders were getting thrashed. Grundy was playing exclusively on Hawkins to the extent of following him off in the second quarter - so when Devon smith then shifts forward we have Hannebery playing on hiim and grundy sitting on the pine. Grundy couldn't stay with Hawkins on the lead as it was and but for Hawkins inability to mark on the lead he would have had an absolute bag kicked on him.
Rampe was unable to stay with Dangerfield and McVeigh positioned himself poorly to help there. Having said that when Mengelola marked uncontested in the first you knew something was up. I watched that from the other end and he and another cat just rolled back towards the centre and both were completely unmarked. To be so completely broken apart was just terrible.
I'm not particularly shocked by the result or performance - it was obvious ten minutes into the second quarter that we were gone, and it had a very similar feel to 2014 as you just knew we weren't able to compete for whatever reason. But I do worry about the inability to play with any fluency. Too often I've seen us play the kick and hope when experience ought to have shown us by now that unless things are set up right that this is a bad option.unfortunately it felt like they were always outnumbering us everywhere and we had no other options.
I guess it had to happen some time. The Cats first win over the Swans at the MCG in 120 years. Pity it was last night & in that manner
States the problems well.
I was worried from the moment I realised that we had gone in with one - just one! - tall defender. We'll never know whether Melican might have made a difference but removing Reid from the forwards certainly did.
Why on earth did we largely omit Towers from rucking and move Sinclair back in, especially after what we saw last week? And Rohan is a forward, not a back. I can understand that the coaches might try desperate measures, but our back structures weren't working either.
But the worst problem was that as usually happens the game was won and lost in the middle where we didn't return the pressure. And Hail Marys belong in church, not on the football field. Our links weren't working and we blindly bombed to targets who weren't there.
It was just one of those nights, but unfortunately it was a final. Here's hoping for more consistency next year!
He reminds him of the guys, close-set, slow, and never rattled, who were play-makers on the team. (John Updike, seeing Josh Kennedy in a crystal ball)
Sorry Wolfie, that's simplistic.
Getting knocked out of the finals is always disappointing - but the manner in which we were knocked out is the gut-wrenching part.
The team were just so collectively 'off' that recriminations seem pointless - and answers impossible to find or comprehend. It felt a lot like 2014, except that we have already had 2014 - and the pain of 2016. The ruthless resolve that we expected after those disappointments was absent last night.
You imagine that everyone at the club would be waking up today and wondering, 'what the hell happened?'. The output of last night beggars belief, and yet that is the reality we have to deal with.
The evenness of the season also screams out in a reverberating echo that it was wasted opportunity for ultimate success. It is very difficult to quantify underperformance in an 18-team competition, but if feels like we are a premiership short of where we should be - and that sucks nuts.
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Yes. The structural imbalance was totally unnecessary. We had a formula which worked, why move away from it? To fit in Harry Cunningham?! The cost-benefit seemed obviously skewed. Perhaps complacency after we smashed Essendon at home. We didn't adapt. The team looked a mess. Disorganised. Unprepared.
After turning the season around with combative, physical play it was a humbling end. Wilted in a final again. Getting a reputation. Kind of mortifying.
Geelong we simply too fast for us. They ran hard from contest to contest to hassle us and too often we didn't have players running to support each other. It did seem one of those games where one side got the lucky bounces and spills but they smothered our hand passes so many times until the ball came out to their advantage. Geelong made their own luck and had so many players free.
Agree with Nico. I watched with one of my non-footy following sons (he plays rugby). His analysis was that the Cats were too fit, too hard and too committed for the Swans. He made a similar comment to Nico - the Cats got the lucky bounces because there was always someone there for it to luckilly bounce to. Sydney are no good when they get behind early. As much as they love a close one (or we like to imagine they do) they do not seem to be able to claw back a 4 or 5 goal defecit. And as much as it pains me to say it, we have a lot of "Mr July" and "Mr August" types, but there are some players who go missing, all on the same day/night, in September.
Not writing them off but not expecting much from them for next year. They're still kids and long way to go to compete regularly.
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