Hypen, that’s a point I’ve been inelegantly trying to make for a while. There is no doubt there are times that we don’t have people in the right place forward, or at times, no-one at all. I think this happens to us more than most other teams, but this isn’t a problem unique to Freo. My view is that we notice it more with Freo because that’s the team we watch more than any other. It’s a bit like when you decide that T-Bone Sheridan can’t kick. You notice every shank, and it confirms what you already know. What you don’t realise is that he’s only marginally worse (if that) than most other players who you aren’t focusing on. What we are seeing is bad version of what modern footy looks like, because we are a bad team.
The question of what causes our forward line woes is where I tend to diverge from most on Dockerland. A lot of people blame Lyon exclusively. I consider a fair amount of blame needs to sit on his shoulders – he’s the coach after all - but what I see is that when we can’t win the ball around the rest of the field we get all of our players back, and we struggle to get the balance right going forward. I would be more inclined to blame Lyon alone if that problem didn’t also present itself with every other team in the competition.
The difference between the good teams and the bad teams is that good teams win the ball. If you’re winning in the middle, you already have your guys forward. If you don’t often get camped in your defensive backline, then balance going forward becomes less of an issue.
Further, if good teams don’t win the ball in the first instance, when they do force a turnover (something good teams also do) their forwards are in the right spot to affect the contest – they don’t get sucked too far into the backline. Where the forwards are out of position, the rest of the good team manages to maintain possession for long enough to allow their forwards to get to the right spot; rather than do what bad teams like us do, and turn it right back over rushing the kick to the wrong contest (in our case Ballas/Matera forward).
Getting that connection right is really hard, and requires 18 people to have the stamina, nous and experience with each other to play in sequence. Expecting that with a team that has turned over half its list is unrealistic.
It’s Lyon’s job to get his players on the same page, but when you’ve talls like Cox and Apeness playing less than a few games together as a forward pairing, that’s not going to happen overnight. I thought there were some good signs when we finally got Tabs getting to the right spots.
A new coach would get the benefit of time to get this right. Lyon doesn’t because we’ve seen this before with him at the helm of Freo. But that doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s (all) his fault.
