I find it almost impossible to discern positioning and tactical changes watching games on TV – even pre-COVID 19 game day directors loved close-ups at the expense of longer shots where you could see players up the ground – so I’m looking forward to seeing the team play in person on Sunday to see how different we look to previous years.
As expected we were all-over-the-shop early in the season, but in the parts of the more recent games where we are playing even or winning, to my eye there are a few trends emerging compared to the last few years.
i. We look content to go very short and slowly from deep in defence, with players coming up to meet the ball, and we don’t seem to be switching the play as often from deep in defence. This is a bit different to the last few years where it looked like we were trying to play-on faster and go longer from defence and slingshot to our running outlet players in B Hill and Landgon on the open side (with mixed results).
ii. Once we get it about 70m from our defensive goal, we then seem to look inside a little more for short kicks, and if there is nothing on we seem a lot more content to kick to a contest on or just forward of the wing.
iii. We don’t look to be running through the middle more often, but to my eye we seem to be placing our kicks about 20m inwards from the boundary line rather than hugging the line. I think this is important as we get closer to the kick into the forward 50m.
iv. In our kicks into the 50m we seem to be more content to kick to players (often Tabs) hard up against the boundary line. Aish and Hogan in particular seem to be finding Tabs a lot in the pockets.
A few things I’ll be looking for on Sunday:
i. How we have organised the backline. It doesn’t look like we have too many numbers back, but we’ve managed to contain teams reasonably well despite being short a number of KPPs. I’d be keen to know how we’ve been pulling this off; is it just guys like Ryan and Hughes playing above their height, or are we giving them some support from our mids?
ii. Assuming Hodor plays, I’d be keen to see how Lobb and Tabs organise themselves. It looks to me that Tabs is mostly playing as a deep forward, and Hogan was more likely than the other key forwards to push up towards the wing, but I haven’t quite figured out what Lobb is doing (in part because he’s been filling in in the ruck).
iii. How much the players are pushing up and down the ground. I thought we did a better job in the last year or two of having tall players forward (when they were fit), but we still pushed hard up and down the ground and the lack of connection between the faster ball movement in defence and the forwards being in the wrong spot was telling. I’m curious whether players are actually staying closer to goal when the other team has the ball, or whether the slower ball movement from defence has just allowed the forwards more time to get back into position forward.
iv. Where our midfielders are playing. For example, Aish seems to be playing on the wing, but was deep in defence last week a lot, and in other games has been a kicking the ball into the forward 50. Is he actually changing positions, or just going where needed? Do players like Tucker, Cerra, Bewley and Brayshaw have free reign, or are they playing more structured roles albeit in the midfield.
Is everyone else seeing the same things, or am I just reading too much into a small sample size? Have I missed anything obvious?
