Pre-Game Passion: AFL 2019 Rd 3: Carlton vs Sydney

[Thryleon]

Fasolo, Gibbons and Ed had some clear margin between them and the next worst option.

Ed I don't blame, poorly selected and coached in my opinion, we've taken a borderline A-Grade run with player and turned him into a C-Grade small forward. I can't see a place for him in the team in the current role they have him playing.

Gibbons is just not ready, looks lost and confused, needs time in the system it's that simple.

Fasolo I'm not sure what his problem is, he has all the experience in the world, but jogging behind play like an observer won't fix what is broken. He may well be fit having trained the house down, but he clearly has something going wrong!

A lot of fans lambaste Daisy, but fit or unfit, mentally focussed or not, he always has a crack! That is all we ask, have a genuine crack!

Playing devils advocate all 3 have the exact same problem.

They are all simply doing something a little bit alien to what they are used to.

1.  Fasolo.  Has just joined from the mortal enemy and may be doing what is asked of him but the way that we use the footy, and the actions of others could be contributing to making him look poor when he might be the only one in the right place at the wrong time, and hasn't played AFL footy for a while.  All we can ask for is an upward trend in performance.

2.  Gibbons is still trying to pick up the speed of AFL footy and is improving in this facet.  Using Kane Lambert as a basis for comparison (given size and type of player its a pretty good basis for comparison) we shouldn't expect a lot from him this season.  https://afltables.com/afl/stats/players/...mbert.html  His first year was playing a finals bound team surrounded by much more mature recruits, and Lambert didnt exactly set the world on fire from the get go.  In fact he didnt really hit his strides until his third year of AFL footy.

3.  Ed.  Learning a new role he is unsuited to.  Now we can point at that and state that its a bad idea, however, we don't see what that allows us to do up the field.  i.e. playing Ed forward might mean we get more midfield minutes into the likes of Dow, SPS, Setterfield, Fisher.  That is arguably better for the team in the long term, than playing Ed at the coal face and when they can do it for longer, Ed might become proficient (enough) forward to give us a couple of different looks to that resting midfielder.


We are still a work in progress, and are going to be for the next couple of seasons IMHO, and that will only be exacerbated by the retirement of elder statesmen who still make up the bulk of our better performers most weeks.  Until they become Jarrad McVeigh types who are contributers without being key to our teams fortunes, we arent going to be much better than we are now.