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Joined August 2021
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“We didn’t handle the contest well. We fumbled. Their pressure was a lot better than ours but I thought the way we used the ball invited their pressure. We tried to handball over, and once we started to drive our legs and take the game on and force them to actually stick good tackles the game opened up for us.” (Justin Longmuir press conference)
AFL Finals Focus: Dockers' comeback for the ages completes the best weekend of finals EVER
That first quarter was horrendous. The Bulldogs were all over us. And we fumbled, over-possessed and kicked poorly. No overstatement. Just the facts.
AFL Finals Focus: Dockers' comeback for the ages completes the best weekend of finals EVER
To Carlton supporters, here’s my take on life with Ross as your club’s coach. If Ross takes over expect Carlton to move up the rankings. There will be a much greater emphasis on standards and professionalism and especially “effort”. And your team will look like a new outfit. You’ll have experienced players at the club praise Ross for his level of professionalism and the level of professionalism he demands of the team. You will have a two or three year run at a flag with your best chance coming in years two and three when the players are fully on-board with Ross’s “strangle-the-opposition” game plan, and still have the energy required to give the “great effort” required for it to succeed. But, there will probably be four or five less skilled players in the team (Ross calls them “cobblers”) who consistently cough the ball up and cost you in big games. You just wish there was more emphasis on skills! From there, you will start to see the players looking jaded. Ross’s emphasis on “effort” starts falling on deaf ears, with the players seemingly unwilling or incapable of raising the effort needed to win on a consistent basis. And before you know it, your club seems to have fallen off a cliff and you start to attend games knowing you’ve got no chance, and what’s worse, no hope. Young players leave the club. Club champions leave the club. Dual club champions leave the club. And all the while, Ross says “no, we don’t have cultural issues”. And you’re thinking, “No we’ve got Ross issues”. The players would rather play elsewhere in lesser performing clubs (Lachie Weller to Gold Coast who finished 17th in 2017, Lachie Neale to Brisbane who finished 15th in 2018, Brad Hill to St Kilda who finished 14th in 2019 and Ed Langdon to Melbourne who finished 17th in 2019) than under Ross Lyon. Carlton could do a lot worse than sign Ross on a short-term 3 year deal. As soon as the team starts looking jaded however, you need to learn from Freo’s mistake and move Ross on. Otherwise, the hangover from a Ross led team will keep you in the abyss for years to come.
Carlton sack coach David Teague after 'confronting' review of 2021 failures
A great article Tim. Congratulations. You pretty much captured how I feel this year about my team. One thing I’ve been thinking about since the game is how tired and slow our midfield looked in the last quarter. And I wondered why we never see any of our forwards such as Walters, Banfield or Shultz have a run in the midfield – especially when they’re not touching the ball much up front. I think it’s worth seeing what Brayshaw or Serong would do in the forward pocket while they have a rest and get the forwards around the ball; so that when they swapped back, our best midfielders would be rested and the forwards hopefully would have more confidence. A lot of people forget that Banfield regularly racked up 25 or 30 as a midfielder for Claremont and in his first year in the AFL, he did a pretty serviceable job as a tagging midfielder. Yes, Ross the Boss lost a bit of confidence in him to do the job after a while. But I think you’d find he’s a much better player around the ball at 25 than he was at 19 or 20. Why not give him a run in the middle with his improved forward skills? He’s a big body. Why not say go mind “the Bont”? And as for Walters, he struggled up forward last night. A run on the ball would have given him the touch that gets him going and characterises his play. Thinking even more outside the square, the other player I think might benefit from this type of approach is Josh Treacy. He has had so few chances under Longmuir. And to me, he’s a player who has very good eye-hand skills for a player of his size, who again gets stuck for the entire game in an under-performing forward line, and loses whatever confidence he had as a result. Everyone was talking about Jackson pinch-hitting as an extra mid-fielder. But I’d love to see Treacy get a go in there every now and then. For me, we seem like one trick ponies this year – especially on game day. Our midfield bats to a certain depth and unless the coach can find three or four others who can relieve those guys, what happened last night is going to be repeated whenever we play teams with bigger bodies, more bodies or worse still – both.
Footy Fix: Boring, brainless and utterly broken - it's time for Freo to find Plan B