Why would we want to go taller and slower? As I've said before, GWS has beaten us recently due to speed not height.
Why would we want to go taller and slower? As I've said before, GWS has beaten us recently due to speed not height.
Taller and slower don't necessarily go together. JPK is certainly slower than whoever he replaces, but no one will care about that. If Sinclair comes in, yes, we will be going taller and slower, but with Aliir it will be taller and faster. What has been helping the team lately is that some of our quicker players, like Rohan, Towers and KJ are getting more of the ball. It doesn't help if you're fast unless you actually have an opportunity to do something with the ball in your possession.
I usually don't worry about being done for height, but if it becomes too great a gap it is easy for the opposition to isolate players in a mismatch. All 3 of GWS's tall forwards are quality players. Cameron is having a great year and Patton has been in sizzling form lately.
This is as close to a must win as it gets. We are going in with close to our best 22, while the Giants have been in ordinary form, despite their good record. They're not blowing anyone away. So if we can't beat them this week, we are just premiership pretenders.
This game is going to be important in so many ways. Regardless of the ins and outs for both teams we are going to find out whether our form and players of the past few weeks can stand up against a team likely to be top two, which has had the wood over us the last few times we have met. I'm especially looking forward to seeing Hanners, Rohan, Reid, Lloyd, Towers and Hewett play with confidence and poise in an important high pressure game and it will be interesting to see how Melican and Newman go. We should be right if we play switched on team football for 4 quarters!! If we have 2 or 3 players either shut down, going missing for periods of the game or making multiple clangers we could be in trouble.
I would love to see Aliir get a game if we need another tall but how would he go being thrown in for such a tough match? While he was a real revelation when he came in last year, he seemed all at sea in his one game earlier this year. This may not be the match to upset the current balance of the team but winning every game is crucial to our being in the finals, and we do need to find a place for Aliir sometime before then.
Kennedy for Robinson
Alir for Floreant
Sinclair for Sammy
Alir gives us flexibility for defence and ruck
Sinclair better against mummy then sammy last time
Alir also a chop out for Rampe who struggles on Cameron
It's funny, when we watch a game of footy we get a bit confused how tall a player is. Josh, you wouldn't think, is tall, but you stand next to him (unless you are a tall person) and you will be surprised how tall he is. I have joked on here over the years about people saying this could bloke play tall or this one could play short when they are neither tall or short. I doubt Tom Papley could play tall, but Hewett could play short. Not that he can get any shorter but he could play on a short player. So I think you need to be able to match on key talls with taller players. Usually you have more shorter/mid size plays who can play on shorter players than talls who can play on tall players. While Ludwig continues his love affair with Allir, I think what he says makes sense, as Allir fits into that bracket that every club dreams of recruiting.
As an aside I was recently introduced to the ex North player Anthony Stevens, who now goes to the yoga studio I attend. What struck me was how tall he is. Yet on the field you would say he was an average size midfielder. He has to be 6'2". I would have said 5'10" at the most when he played. IIRC he mainly matched up on midfielder rather than as a role player. By the way, a really nice bloke.
Africans from some parts of Africa are only sprinters yet others from other parts are only stayers. My observation of Allir is that he appears to have the stamina to see out a game as well as these boys. He could be somewhere in the middle. I watched Majak on the weekend and came to the conclusion that he won't improve much on what he has achieved so far, whereas Allir has so much upside because of his speed. It might just be that once he gets back in the team you won't be able to get him out with a crow bar.
This is a good point. The game is likely to be very close, and it is who is likely to be still going and can hold
their nerve at the 25 minute mark of the last quarter after having absorbed 80 plus tackles that will win.
I expect this match will be brutal, and not unlike the Dogs-GWS prelim last year, and the winner will basically
fall over the line.
In: Kennedy
Out: Robinson
That's all that will happen barring injuries that we're not aware of, and fair enough too.
Today's a draft of your epitaph
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...nthony_Stevens he is 1.78m or 5 foot 8 inches.
Just saying
He had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.
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