Everyone can agree Freo played embarrassingly bad football yesterday, and people for the most part will attribute blame according to their preconceived ideas about who at a footy club they consider is ultimately responsible for success or failure. For most, the buck stops with the coach.
As a case study, McCarthy played like a total spud yesterday. Does the blame for that lie with him forgetting how to take marks, with the coach for not organising the team better, with Bond for recruiting him or not giving him better teammates, with the conditioning team, with GWS for making him miss a year? All of the above? Same goes for Tabs. He took a few decent marks yesterday in perfect conditions, but botched two kickable goals when we had momentum and the opportunity to apply scoreboard pressure. Is that his fault, Lyon’s for not picking him earlier and ruining his confidence, the skills coaches, Bond for not providing a better forward option etc. All of the above? You can go down the line.
When your team loses consecutive games by 100+ points, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
I had reasonably low expectations coming into the season. If for a number of consecutive years your first pick in the draft is closer to 20 than 1, you are going to struggle to get A-grade young talent into the squad. More so if you whiff on a few of those speculative late first-rounders (Simpson, Apeness). Still, if we could get our theoretical best team on the park and playing at their peak I reckon we could have finished in the finals; but nothing ever goes perfectly for any team, and we didn’t have the depth to cover glaring deficiencies in the team once a few guys fell away or didn’t come up.
So, until this week I thought this season was a step in the right direction. Lyon gave the old-stagers due respect and a chance to show they were still up for it, most weren’t up to it, he pivoted towards playing the kids and we were largely competitive and won more games than the previous season. To me that’s a successful transition period, and set up a decent base for next season when there would be further renewal, and the team would hopefully be knocking on the door to the finals.
Yet if you asked me whether Freo should sack Lyon yesterday, I probably would have said yes.
Bond and the Board favour stability – and why not, it’s a very self-serving position to take – but I can see the merit in insulating the coach from opinions like mine that can turn on 3 hours of football. Fans (and Board) sentiment can change week to week, but you don’t want a rebuilding coach to be coaching week-to-week, or even year-to-year, so I can see the merit in a longer contract. But 5 years was always way too long. A coach needs to have some skin in the game.
I bumped into Polly on that funereal train yesterday, and while bumping into Polly is a rare pleasure, the best I could do yesterday was mumble a few words about the last time I was this disappointed, being Neesham’s last game in 1998. I was a Freo fan because of Neesham, and hoped the players would send him off in style. They didn’t. We got belted by Port, and a few weeks later Drum was appointed.
That didn’t go very well. It’s worth remembering that.
