Rd 3: Carlton vs Gold Coast: Post Game Pain

[crashlander]

Game 3 of a rebuild and peeps want wins away from home, against a red hot team in slippery conditions.

Funny people follow this club.

I have to agree. We were diabolical last year and crippled with injury. We changed our list as best we could and managed to get a true start out of it, with 2 others looking promising. We are still ordinary, just not as ordinary as last year. We are very young and inexperienced and we have major technical issues.
We are going to take time.

However, there were things I did not like:
[1] Jamison and Rowe were ordinary to poor, giving us very little drive and not stopping the Sun's forwards getting the ball.
[2] Our fitness level seems to be poor. Come the last quarter and we run out of juice.
[3] Our skills under pressure leave considerable room for improvement.
[4] Our centre structure seems less effective than last year.
[5] Our senior players are not making the sort of contribution that we really need from them. Kreuzer, Murphy, Gibbs, Rowe, Jamison, even Simmo are far from their best.
[6] We leak more goals from turnovers than we kick ourselves.
[7] Our forward structure is really problematical. We lack a true crumbing forward, even though Wright has been a reasonable pickup; we lack marking power in the forward 50; we had only a couple of marks in the forward 50 for the whole night; our mid sized forwards are lacking form or fitness, last year we had Walker and Everitt making useful contributions even though their were and are still issues with them both; and when we get the ball into our forward 50 it comes straight out again.

I can see a lot of what Bolton is trying to get across, but we appear to have neither the strength, the skills nor the decision making yet to make it work.

I think we will be in for a long and frustrating year. I don't like it, but I see little alternative.