Yeti, my starting point with Lyon is that he likes being employed and he isn’t a complete idiot when it comes to football. We can park whether we think he’s a good coach for now, but he’s been coaching for a decade and has never been sacked, so it’s probably fair to say he knows at least a little about the game.
You seem to think Lyon’s game plan, dutifully executed by the players, is to bomb the ball long into the forward line. I see no evidence for that. If that were the case, Lyon and the match committee would probably select someone a bit a taller in the forward line to kick it to, or keep our best crumbing forwards at their feet. Neither of those things has happened.
If you take the last three games as a microcosm of the season, I thought against Geelong we played some really good football. We tried hard to move the ball quickly from defence, and used the corridor. We weren’t afraid to kick it long when there was space, and we tried to ‘get Geelong out the back’. For large patches it worked. The same was true for large patches of the game against North.
Against St Kilda’s very good (close to elite) pressure we were unable to do that. If you can’t win clean ball, and you don’t have players in space, then players have little choice but to kick it long to a contest. I don’t consider that part of the game plan, rather it’s the product of not being able to enforce our will and our desire to play a certain way against better opposition. As RR correctly states, there are two teams out there, and sometimes the opposition is better at closing down your options and dictating how the game is played. It’s what we used to do to other teams when we were good.
The third quarter against North was a case in point. We couldn’t get our hands on the ball, and when we did we didn’t have much space. At that point the only option left is to hoof it to a contest. I also think it’s strange that people think that for three quarters Lyon instructs Freo to play a certain way, and then instructs them to play very differently – and much worse - for a quarter. It just seems to strike me as nonsensical that Lyon, who seems pretty inflexible, says ‘hey guys, I know we’ve got a 3 goal lead playing this way, but how about for the next quarter you just start kicking it long to a forward line’, a forward line that anyone who understand football knows is likely to be consistently out-marked.
I think it’s far more likely the players are reacting to circumstances on the field. I personally think we need someone in the forward line who can at least present a target when the opposition forces us to kick it long to a contest, which is why I’d prefer to have Tabs in the team, but I don’t think ‘kicking it long’ is Plan A.
Further, our board has three very good former players and Bond was a Captain and B&F winner. They have a big say in deciding on Lyon’s coaching contracts. Your position seems to be predicated on basis that you can see that the idea that bombing the ball into a small forward line is a bad idea, but Lyon, the rest of the coaching department, the GM and the Board think it is a feasible way to win football games. I don’t doubt you know about footy Yeti, but I suspect that mob do too, and also know that is unlikely to lead to winning football.
Which is why it seems completely implausible that it’s actually our game plan.
