Assorted thoughts:
* I agree with lwjoyner - Cunningham had a great game. Really stepped up and took some responsibility as one of our most experienced players on the night.
* The crowd support was curiously and conspicuously much less than the week before, when it was so fantastic. It's understandable that the opposition had many more supporters there but why did we seem to have so many fewer?
* As to the critics of the game plan not being attacking enough: our Freo game plan was brought to you by the exact same people that have played direct, fast, corridor footy in other weeks recently that we all enjoyed so much. I don't think we just gave up on that plan after a great win last week. Rather, I think the opposition also has a say in the way we play. Maybe Freo saw what we had been doing and decided to shut it down and they executed well and we didn't respond well enough. Or possibly we made the erroneous choice that it was better to use a different game plan against Freo. I don't think that's so likely otherwise we would have reverted to our new Plan A when we could see Plan B clearly wasn't working.
* Melican has had a couple of good weeks. Glad we hadn't written him off or anything! Fingers crossed he can sustain it. He's still young and maturing, so I'm optimistic. (Or maybe I should say "and" I'm optimistic, rather than "so" - it seems these types of comments say much more about the poster than our team/player/coach.) It's good to know that Melican's best is good enough.
* Wicks was also good. He's in front of Foot at the moment.
Overall, I would repeat the footy truism that I trotted out last week too: it's never as good as it seems, it's never as bad as it seems.
(Nearly never anyway - and not this week.)
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I think the AFL Player ratings are based on Champion Data and stats that have been identified by the coaches as being relevant. I seem them as having much more credibility than the Fantasy/Dreamteam/Supercoach type stats which are pretty fluffy.
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