It was a bout 6/7wks before RL had brought back in a lot of the poorer players and instructed everyone to head behind the ball.
Every year teams across the AFL start the year all guns blazing and scoring is up, then by the mid-point of the season it all regresses back towards tight contested footy. I'm not sure the reason for it. It could be players are the fittest at the start of the season. It could be the change to the surfaces and weather as we head towards winter. It could be that teams work on attacking systems and add new players over the summer, only for the better teams to figure them out after there are a few weeks of game tape.
One explanation is that coaches like Ross Lyon suddenly decide to instruct his players to get behind the ball. I don't put a lot of stock in that explanation.
My best guess is that good teams learn how to take away the attacking options of bad teams, and bad teams don't have the spread of talent to work their way through it. Think about our team last season. How hard would it be as an opposition coach to stop our rebound from the backline? It was basically 'make sure Johnson is accountable, and let any of those other crabs try to hit a target."
So what happens when you can't clear the ball from the backline? Every man and his dog ends up down there. Essendon found that out on Saturday, and spent most of the game with no-one in the forward line. Credit A Pearce for keeping Danniher goalless, but a huge part in that was that he wasn't in the forward 50 much. Most of Essendon's goals came from hurried kicks forward and random stuff leading to goals.
And I would argue very little of that can be explained by Worsfold instructing them to get behind the ball. Certainly that's not how they have played most of their other games. They were forced into that because we worked better and harder at the clearances, we moved the ball quickly from defence, and we either hit the scoreboard or locked it in if we didn't.
Teams are going to find it a lot harder to take our game away from us because we have a few better kicks in the team, and we have some young and exciting players who don't know how to pace themselves. But most young players fade a little during their first year, so I wouldn't be surprised if Lyon gave each of them a rest. I'd expect at that point we'd see some other young guys, but also some of the mid-level blokes everyone on here jumps up and down about. And we'll be worse for it, and we'll likely have stretches where everyone is beyond the ball.
My point, as always, is that people give coaches way too much credit when teams win, and way too much blame when they lose.
