Practice Match: Blues v Pies, Fri 24 Feb

[kruddler]

Nathan Buckley was on SEN the other morning talking about the Super Bowl and how well the NFL teams control the clock. They train it to perfection and everyone knows their role in those scenarios. He went to say they we can't control the clock as well in AFL because our game is all about transition. When you take a mark, you have seconds before you need to move it on, you get a free, same thing seconds and you need to move it on.
I think we were extremely poor last year in those games where we lost it in the end during the final minutes. It was as if we never trained it, even basics, around what we would do in the final minutes to hold a slender lead or pinch a game that was in the balance. In fact, we even repeated the same mistakes of the weeks before. I truly hope we have learnt from that and have worked on some basic scenario train because to have repeat of what happened in the last two games of 2022 would be absolutely gut wrenching.

Why are YOU talking about the yanks game?

Everytime i mention it there are a few on here that get 'triggered' and tune out.

Its true though, and its not just the superbowl, its every game. They have names for it too.
2-minute offense.
4-minute offense.

If you have the ball, and you are in front, 4 minutes remaining, you can get away with running just 3 actual plays to win the game (with a bit of luck). With less luck, you would have to run double that (with 2 minute warning and 3 opposition timeouts). If you are behind though, you can run as many plays as you need to go the length of the field, twice over if required - potentially up to 20 plays. Such is the time management of that game.

The NFL is a lot more structured, and these things can be drilled to perfection, and while we can't do it to the same extent in our game, we can definitely do it better than we do. Pies doing it got a lot of attention because they won the close games. However, every team does something similar. Maybe its not to the same extent, maybe it is, but unless it works, nobody cares....or talks about it at least.

Its not new. You see the signs on the boundary with numbers, colours and symbols representing basically the same thing we are talking about.
Back in the day the 'hold the ball up in the air' signal was used to tell everyone its time to play for time.

[Blue Moon]

Collingwood played out each minute of each quarter last season. They didn't think of half time or the quarter breaks or that the game was over. This is something Carlton should learn. Other teams should be ready for Collingwood this year so I am not sure about their depth. We had players out and we had five more scoring shots so we probably should have won by more. Their seconds got a pasting. There are plenty of people who pump up Collingwood in the media, I am not so sure.