The Defence

[kruddler]

I watched the replay last night and paused it after the very first bounce. I could not believe it. Pittonet taps fwd not down. SO if he wins the very first tap fwd you would expect we would set up to have at least 1 CFC player in that area. NO!! Bulldogs had 2 there! Alone! And one was Bont. Sorry don't care if its Barker or Teague setting that up. You wouldn't set up like that in under 12's. Pretty sure they killed us in first 10 minutes. And this was the first bounce. You have to see it to believe it.
My disappointment is in the thinking behind this. Pitt is against there 3rd ruck man. You should expect to win the tap. He hits fwd. Not back or sideways. Beggars Belief

Just on this, and i explained it to numbnuts (his word), I've just had a scan of centre bounce hitouts and the bulldogs clearly won the 'setup' battle at them. Funnily enough, when Sweet got hands on the ball first (usually at bounces that should've been recalled mind you) we got the clearance. When Pittonet got it, our players were slow to react and/or fumbled.

There was a couple of times where Pittonet grabbed it out of the ruck himself. Usually because the way the ball was bounced meant he couldn't hit it to where our players was, so he took it upon himself to get the clearance.
On a couple of other occassions he belted the ball forward.
- One almost reached the corner of the centre square before the dogs flankers/wings got to the loose ball first.
- One was headed towards the wing/hff where cottrell just followed his man to the ball (Cottrell looked stuffed) and they got the clearance as a result.

What i saw was a frustrated ruck who was winning the hitouts but his teammates were being beaten in the centre bounce setups, and the players on the square were too slow to react. Cripps not being able to bend down properly resulted in at least 3 dogs clearances.....and he was off the ground for the first 5 minutes of game time in the 3rd. Casboult took a lot of ruckwork during this time too.