Friday, August 31, 2012

Bulked up Hird a poor performer

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One year during his stellar playing career, Bomber coach James Hird appeared after pre-season looking like Charles Atlas. The lad had put in some serious gym time and had arms like The Hulk.

 

That year Hird was a shadow of the game-changing superstar we were used to.

 

Fast forward to 2012 and the arrival of Dean “The Weapon” Robinson at Essendon. The Bombers had an electric start to the season and had clearly put on some size. With injury and the intensity of four months of intense football, the Bombers’ bodies have given up and not allowed the players to do what they did for the first ten weeks.

 

The year after Hird’s Schwarzenegger impersonation, he fined back down to something more like his previous playing weight. Guess what? The game-changing superstar reappeared.

 

AussieRulesBlog is pretty optimistic about the Bombers’ chances in the next few years.

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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Second year blues for Suns?

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We happened to catch a bit of footy radio a couple of nights ago. The Gold Coast Suns were being discussed and graded a D minus (A to F possible) for their 2012 season. The reason? They hadn’t met expectations to improve on their debut season.

 

We think that’s a pretty harsh call for a club that boasts more second-year AFL players than any other club.

 

It’s far from unusual for players to have a down year after an impressive debut year. So much so that the industry calls it second year blues.

 

The Suns have had a year where the assumptions the young players developed in their first year have been challenged. They can no longer expect to fly under the radar. The other clubs know they’re a danger. Next year the Suns will know that they have to work even harder just to maintain their position in the AFL hierarchy — and one suspects they have far greater ambitions than just maintenance.

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Saturday, August 25, 2012

Dons bombed — for 2012

No comments:

It’s not often that AussieRulesBlog comments on matters Essendonian. We prefer to keep this blog about the big picture normally, but the plight of our beloved team moves us to exceptional action.

 

One of the more notable trends of 2012 when historians pore over the statistics will be the exponential speed of the Bombers’ fall out of the top eight. In the last five weeks a slide has become free fall. Predictably, questions are being asked and those who would cut down tall poppies are readying their scythes to take a shot at James Hird.

 

Watching the Bombers every week as we do, we’ve noticed a distinct change in the way they play the game that, we think, gives a substantial clue to what is going on. Early on, when Essendon were a surprising entry in the top four and seemingly embarked on a trip to the Grand Final, their zone setup around goal-kicking and kickouts from behinds was sharp, crisp, precise, enthusiastic and ruthlessly effective in denying opposition easy exit out of their backlines. Pressure begets turnovers and turnovers beget goals!

 

Contrast that with the end of the season. Now those zone setups for goal kicking and kickouts are listless, loose, decidedly unenthusiastic and almost totally ineffective in corralling oppositions inside the Bombers’ forward 50 metre arc. There’s no lack of effort, most of the time, at the contest or at the ball carrier, but there’s not much happening, teamwise, off the ball, and that’s where we think the problem lies. Injury, training load, mental tiredness in the face of mounting losses? We’re not sure of the cause, but it’s off-the-ball work rate that is the problem for the Bombers at present.

 

The Cats have won three of the last five Premierships and played in four of the past five Grand Finals. There would seem to be some aspect of the Cats that could be studied and emulated. The Bombers took advantage of Mark Thompson’s ‘burnout’ — we’ve commented often that the smell of smoke hangs around those events — and secured one of the brains behind the Cats’ amazing run of high performance as a means of obtaining the intellectual property involved.

 

A significant feature of the high-flying Cats under Thompson was their ability to escape from trouble and turn it into attack. To a large extent, that success was founded on unrewarded running: workrate. When a Geelong player was in trouble, there were often two or three players loose behind him offering get-out options from where precision disposal created attacking moves.

 

It’s hardly a shock to note that the Bombers displayed some of this style during their heady start to 2012, and the setup at goal kicking and kickouts is a signifier of the effort being put into unrewarded running. It takes an effort to quickly make that ground to create the pressure of an effective zone.

 

It’s also worth noting that the 2006 Cats finished 10th with only 10 wins for the season, having won about 40% of their games, and a percentage of 99%. A year later they finished on top with 18 wins and 152%, three games clear, and were runaway winners of the Grand Final.

 

Will history repeat itself with the Bombers emulating the 2007 Cats in 2013? Only time will tell, but it’s certainly too early, given the Dons’ sparkling early season, to throw out the baby with the bathwater as we’ve heard many Bombers fans mooting.

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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Suckers

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Hey folks! We’ve got this harebrained scheme to sell ‘purified’ air to punters. We’ll just fill plastic bags with plain old air and seal them and we need someone to put up the capital. That’s it! We’ll tell the AFL Tribunal about it! They’ll believe anything!

 

Bulldog Will Minson, an apparently intelligent gent, we’re told, but with a burgeoning history of poor decisions, told the AFL Tribunal that he was trying to step over Swan Kieren Jack on Sunday. And the suckers believed him and downgraded his charge from intentional to reckless.

 

There’s a wonderful scene in Mel Brooks’ classic comedy, Blazing Saddles, where Cleavon Little pulls his own gun on himself and takes himself hostage to escape a lynch mob.

 

blazing-saddles-665[1]

 

We suspect that the AFL Tribunal has been drawn from the townsfolk of Rock Ridge.

 

Check out a video of the Minson-Jack incident here.

 

Simply breathtaking.

Read More

Monday, August 20, 2012

It’s the (in)consistency, stupid!

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The only consistent aspect of the Match Review Panel is, paradoxically, its inconsistency. Jack Ziebell accidentally hits an opponent in the head whilst competing for the ball and cops a four-week holiday, courtesy of the MRP. Lenny Hayes does, essentially, the same thing and is free to ply his trade!

 

This system was supposed to reduce uncertainty and deliver consistency, but is increasingly delivering exactly the opposite.

 

AussieRulesBlog freely acknowledges that Aussie Rules is an incredibly difficult game to officiate. Those very difficulties, that we’ve acknowledged again recently, mean that there are no ‘templates’ for judging incidents like the Ziebell and Hayes cases. Nevertheless, the Ziebell ruling called into question one of the central tenets of the game and the Hayes decision makes a complete mockery of the Ziebell decision.

 

This open sore cannot be allowed to continue.

Read More

Monday, August 13, 2012

Gieschen misses the point

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AFL Umpires boss Jeff Gieschen says that eight out of the nine deliberate out of bounds decisions last Friday night were correct and that he did not instruct the umpires to change their interpretation.

 

Missing the point a little bit, Jeff?

 

Deliberate out of bounds decisions have been a relative rarity in 2012, and then there are nine in one game and there’s not a problem? If these eight correct decisions were all so clear cut, we’re sure we see those same scenarios many times a game and they’re not penalised. So, does that mean the umpires have been making eight glaring mistakes per game?

 

This is the sort of denialist spin we expect from politicians. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes again. Everyone but the AFL can see that there’s a problem here.

 

The solution? Release the Giesch!

Read More

Sunday, August 12, 2012

A ‘feel’ for the game

3 comments:

Australian rules football is a complex sport. Its speed, free-flowing 360° nature, physicality and eccentric ball all combine to give a unique character to the wonderful game we love. Paradoxically, those same aspects make it one of the most difficult sports to officiate.

 

AussieRulesBlog thinks most will agree that a key criterion for on-field officials is an indefinable ‘feel’ for the game.

 

‘Feel’ is that mysterious quality of understanding that was missing on Friday night when deciding deliberate out of bounds decisions. It’s the quality missing when umpires officiate the game strictly, literally, ‘by the book’.

 

Some umpires have a feel for the game, organically. Peter Cameron and Glen James are two that come to mind from the past. Some others clearly don’t. Of the current crop, Steve McBurney, Dean Margetts, Justin Schmidt and Michael Jennings are those who we think don’t have a feel for the game. Match Review Panel chairman Mark Fraser, previously both an AFL player and senior umpire, seems not to have that feel in his current role.

 

It’s obviously difficult to recruit umpires. It’s a key element of supporters’ self-appointed role to provide vociferous advice to umpires on the job, even at under-age levels. At the top level, umpires are not professional and only those with flexible employment arrangements can contemplate taking the job on.

 

It is past time the game had fully-professional field umpires who could devote themselves to the task more fully. Not least of the benefits we might perceive could be a greater consistency of interpretation, but perhaps the AFL Umpiring department could do more to develop and encourage a ‘feel’ for the game as its umpires develop.

 

There was a sign held up by a spectator as the umpires exited the field on Friday night. It was obviously not a spur of the moment production, but it was curiously appropriate on a night when the interpretation of deliberate out of bounds had been turned on its head. “Umpire: All we want is consistency!” the sign stridently demanded. Ditto!

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Deliberate deliberations

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Friday night’s Round 20 WCE-Geelong game was remarkable for the glut of decisions penalising players for putting the ball out of bounds deliberately.

 

This rule has always been a bone of contention, relying as it does on the umpire’s ability to discern the player’s intent.

 

15.6 Free kicks — relating to out of bounds
15.6.1 When awarded
A free kick shall be awarded against a player who:
(c)  intentionally kicks, handballs or forces the football over the boundary line without the football being touched by another player;

 

So, the problem here is the umpire’s divination of intent. And the problem on Friday night related to some new, parallel universe version of intent that appeared mysteriously without regular precedent.

 

AussieRulesBlog is currently on leave, enjoying balmy sunshine in the Aussie Rules virtual media blackout that is south-east Queensland, so we’ve only seen snippets of the Suns and Lions games since the Friday night debacle. The mysterious interpretations of deliberate out of bounds don’t appear to have escaped the rabbit-proof fence as far as we can discern.

 

We have long championed the notion that the interpretation of the laws of the game should be the same in the first minute of pre-season as in the last minute of the Grand Final. Now, let’s add an extra demand: interpretations should be the same in every State in which the game is played.

 

Release The Giesch!

Read More

Friday, August 10, 2012

Where is the line on unacceptable language?

No comments:

‘Saint’ Stephen Milne is fined $3000 by his club after a report from umpire Dean Margetts that he called Magpie Harry O’Brien a “f------ homo c---”, as reported in The Age.

 

The story goes on to quote AFL Operations boss Adrian Anderson labelling Milne’s comments “simply not acceptable … for AFL players to use homophobic insults on the football field”.

 

Aren’t you being a bit selective, Adrian? What about the other word? Around 50% of the population would find it at least as objectionable as the homophobic portion of the comment, but your reported comments make no mention of it.

 

More to the point, we’re in serious danger of a vain attempt at trying to turn the AFL field into a sledge-free, swear-free environment. How sanitised can we realistically make a physical contest between grown men?

 

Standards do change, as we’ve seen with the AFL’s much-applauded stance against racial abuse, but AussieRulesBlog wonders where we draw the line when we start to sanction “unacceptable language”. The first question to answer? Unacceptable to whom?

Read More

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Let he who has not sinned…

No comments:

It’s inevitable that there’ll be widespread condemnation of Tom Liberatore after what today’s Age calls “his disastrous night out”.

 

But AussieRulesBlog advises caution. We’ll reluctantly admit to our sixth decade and we could never have been labelled a hellraiser, yet we can recall too many instances of similarly ill-considered behaviour. Fortunately for us, at least in the this respect, we weren’t listed by an AFL club and there wasn’t a 24-hour news monster that demanded fresh blood every day like some grubby vampire.

 

Lest anyone be tempted to moralise, we encourage them to quickly review the tape of their own lives and decide whether they’re in a position to comment.

 

For those of our loyal readers still muddling their way through their second or third decade, believe us: you’ll do something stupid one day. It might not be drink, it might not be drugs, but it will be stupid.

 

Does AussieRulesBlog condone what happened? Hell, no! Can we understand how otherwise sober and responsible people can cross a line? Hell, yes!

Read More

Bulked up Hird a poor performer

One year during his stellar playing career, Bomber coach James Hird appeared after pre-season looking like Charles Atlas. The lad had put in some serious gym time and had arms like The Hulk.

 

That year Hird was a shadow of the game-changing superstar we were used to.

 

Fast forward to 2012 and the arrival of Dean “The Weapon” Robinson at Essendon. The Bombers had an electric start to the season and had clearly put on some size. With injury and the intensity of four months of intense football, the Bombers’ bodies have given up and not allowed the players to do what they did for the first ten weeks.

 

The year after Hird’s Schwarzenegger impersonation, he fined back down to something more like his previous playing weight. Guess what? The game-changing superstar reappeared.

 

AussieRulesBlog is pretty optimistic about the Bombers’ chances in the next few years.

Second year blues for Suns?

We happened to catch a bit of footy radio a couple of nights ago. The Gold Coast Suns were being discussed and graded a D minus (A to F possible) for their 2012 season. The reason? They hadn’t met expectations to improve on their debut season.

 

We think that’s a pretty harsh call for a club that boasts more second-year AFL players than any other club.

 

It’s far from unusual for players to have a down year after an impressive debut year. So much so that the industry calls it second year blues.

 

The Suns have had a year where the assumptions the young players developed in their first year have been challenged. They can no longer expect to fly under the radar. The other clubs know they’re a danger. Next year the Suns will know that they have to work even harder just to maintain their position in the AFL hierarchy — and one suspects they have far greater ambitions than just maintenance.

Dons bombed — for 2012

It’s not often that AussieRulesBlog comments on matters Essendonian. We prefer to keep this blog about the big picture normally, but the plight of our beloved team moves us to exceptional action.

 

One of the more notable trends of 2012 when historians pore over the statistics will be the exponential speed of the Bombers’ fall out of the top eight. In the last five weeks a slide has become free fall. Predictably, questions are being asked and those who would cut down tall poppies are readying their scythes to take a shot at James Hird.

 

Watching the Bombers every week as we do, we’ve noticed a distinct change in the way they play the game that, we think, gives a substantial clue to what is going on. Early on, when Essendon were a surprising entry in the top four and seemingly embarked on a trip to the Grand Final, their zone setup around goal-kicking and kickouts from behinds was sharp, crisp, precise, enthusiastic and ruthlessly effective in denying opposition easy exit out of their backlines. Pressure begets turnovers and turnovers beget goals!

 

Contrast that with the end of the season. Now those zone setups for goal kicking and kickouts are listless, loose, decidedly unenthusiastic and almost totally ineffective in corralling oppositions inside the Bombers’ forward 50 metre arc. There’s no lack of effort, most of the time, at the contest or at the ball carrier, but there’s not much happening, teamwise, off the ball, and that’s where we think the problem lies. Injury, training load, mental tiredness in the face of mounting losses? We’re not sure of the cause, but it’s off-the-ball work rate that is the problem for the Bombers at present.

 

The Cats have won three of the last five Premierships and played in four of the past five Grand Finals. There would seem to be some aspect of the Cats that could be studied and emulated. The Bombers took advantage of Mark Thompson’s ‘burnout’ — we’ve commented often that the smell of smoke hangs around those events — and secured one of the brains behind the Cats’ amazing run of high performance as a means of obtaining the intellectual property involved.

 

A significant feature of the high-flying Cats under Thompson was their ability to escape from trouble and turn it into attack. To a large extent, that success was founded on unrewarded running: workrate. When a Geelong player was in trouble, there were often two or three players loose behind him offering get-out options from where precision disposal created attacking moves.

 

It’s hardly a shock to note that the Bombers displayed some of this style during their heady start to 2012, and the setup at goal kicking and kickouts is a signifier of the effort being put into unrewarded running. It takes an effort to quickly make that ground to create the pressure of an effective zone.

 

It’s also worth noting that the 2006 Cats finished 10th with only 10 wins for the season, having won about 40% of their games, and a percentage of 99%. A year later they finished on top with 18 wins and 152%, three games clear, and were runaway winners of the Grand Final.

 

Will history repeat itself with the Bombers emulating the 2007 Cats in 2013? Only time will tell, but it’s certainly too early, given the Dons’ sparkling early season, to throw out the baby with the bathwater as we’ve heard many Bombers fans mooting.

Suckers

Hey folks! We’ve got this harebrained scheme to sell ‘purified’ air to punters. We’ll just fill plastic bags with plain old air and seal them and we need someone to put up the capital. That’s it! We’ll tell the AFL Tribunal about it! They’ll believe anything!

 

Bulldog Will Minson, an apparently intelligent gent, we’re told, but with a burgeoning history of poor decisions, told the AFL Tribunal that he was trying to step over Swan Kieren Jack on Sunday. And the suckers believed him and downgraded his charge from intentional to reckless.

 

There’s a wonderful scene in Mel Brooks’ classic comedy, Blazing Saddles, where Cleavon Little pulls his own gun on himself and takes himself hostage to escape a lynch mob.

 

blazing-saddles-665[1]

 

We suspect that the AFL Tribunal has been drawn from the townsfolk of Rock Ridge.

 

Check out a video of the Minson-Jack incident here.

 

Simply breathtaking.

It’s the (in)consistency, stupid!

The only consistent aspect of the Match Review Panel is, paradoxically, its inconsistency. Jack Ziebell accidentally hits an opponent in the head whilst competing for the ball and cops a four-week holiday, courtesy of the MRP. Lenny Hayes does, essentially, the same thing and is free to ply his trade!

 

This system was supposed to reduce uncertainty and deliver consistency, but is increasingly delivering exactly the opposite.

 

AussieRulesBlog freely acknowledges that Aussie Rules is an incredibly difficult game to officiate. Those very difficulties, that we’ve acknowledged again recently, mean that there are no ‘templates’ for judging incidents like the Ziebell and Hayes cases. Nevertheless, the Ziebell ruling called into question one of the central tenets of the game and the Hayes decision makes a complete mockery of the Ziebell decision.

 

This open sore cannot be allowed to continue.

Gieschen misses the point

AFL Umpires boss Jeff Gieschen says that eight out of the nine deliberate out of bounds decisions last Friday night were correct and that he did not instruct the umpires to change their interpretation.

 

Missing the point a little bit, Jeff?

 

Deliberate out of bounds decisions have been a relative rarity in 2012, and then there are nine in one game and there’s not a problem? If these eight correct decisions were all so clear cut, we’re sure we see those same scenarios many times a game and they’re not penalised. So, does that mean the umpires have been making eight glaring mistakes per game?

 

This is the sort of denialist spin we expect from politicians. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes again. Everyone but the AFL can see that there’s a problem here.

 

The solution? Release the Giesch!

A ‘feel’ for the game

Australian rules football is a complex sport. Its speed, free-flowing 360° nature, physicality and eccentric ball all combine to give a unique character to the wonderful game we love. Paradoxically, those same aspects make it one of the most difficult sports to officiate.

 

AussieRulesBlog thinks most will agree that a key criterion for on-field officials is an indefinable ‘feel’ for the game.

 

‘Feel’ is that mysterious quality of understanding that was missing on Friday night when deciding deliberate out of bounds decisions. It’s the quality missing when umpires officiate the game strictly, literally, ‘by the book’.

 

Some umpires have a feel for the game, organically. Peter Cameron and Glen James are two that come to mind from the past. Some others clearly don’t. Of the current crop, Steve McBurney, Dean Margetts, Justin Schmidt and Michael Jennings are those who we think don’t have a feel for the game. Match Review Panel chairman Mark Fraser, previously both an AFL player and senior umpire, seems not to have that feel in his current role.

 

It’s obviously difficult to recruit umpires. It’s a key element of supporters’ self-appointed role to provide vociferous advice to umpires on the job, even at under-age levels. At the top level, umpires are not professional and only those with flexible employment arrangements can contemplate taking the job on.

 

It is past time the game had fully-professional field umpires who could devote themselves to the task more fully. Not least of the benefits we might perceive could be a greater consistency of interpretation, but perhaps the AFL Umpiring department could do more to develop and encourage a ‘feel’ for the game as its umpires develop.

 

There was a sign held up by a spectator as the umpires exited the field on Friday night. It was obviously not a spur of the moment production, but it was curiously appropriate on a night when the interpretation of deliberate out of bounds had been turned on its head. “Umpire: All we want is consistency!” the sign stridently demanded. Ditto!

Deliberate deliberations

Friday night’s Round 20 WCE-Geelong game was remarkable for the glut of decisions penalising players for putting the ball out of bounds deliberately.

 

This rule has always been a bone of contention, relying as it does on the umpire’s ability to discern the player’s intent.

 

15.6 Free kicks — relating to out of bounds
15.6.1 When awarded
A free kick shall be awarded against a player who:
(c)  intentionally kicks, handballs or forces the football over the boundary line without the football being touched by another player;

 

So, the problem here is the umpire’s divination of intent. And the problem on Friday night related to some new, parallel universe version of intent that appeared mysteriously without regular precedent.

 

AussieRulesBlog is currently on leave, enjoying balmy sunshine in the Aussie Rules virtual media blackout that is south-east Queensland, so we’ve only seen snippets of the Suns and Lions games since the Friday night debacle. The mysterious interpretations of deliberate out of bounds don’t appear to have escaped the rabbit-proof fence as far as we can discern.

 

We have long championed the notion that the interpretation of the laws of the game should be the same in the first minute of pre-season as in the last minute of the Grand Final. Now, let’s add an extra demand: interpretations should be the same in every State in which the game is played.

 

Release The Giesch!

Where is the line on unacceptable language?

‘Saint’ Stephen Milne is fined $3000 by his club after a report from umpire Dean Margetts that he called Magpie Harry O’Brien a “f------ homo c---”, as reported in The Age.

 

The story goes on to quote AFL Operations boss Adrian Anderson labelling Milne’s comments “simply not acceptable … for AFL players to use homophobic insults on the football field”.

 

Aren’t you being a bit selective, Adrian? What about the other word? Around 50% of the population would find it at least as objectionable as the homophobic portion of the comment, but your reported comments make no mention of it.

 

More to the point, we’re in serious danger of a vain attempt at trying to turn the AFL field into a sledge-free, swear-free environment. How sanitised can we realistically make a physical contest between grown men?

 

Standards do change, as we’ve seen with the AFL’s much-applauded stance against racial abuse, but AussieRulesBlog wonders where we draw the line when we start to sanction “unacceptable language”. The first question to answer? Unacceptable to whom?

Let he who has not sinned…

It’s inevitable that there’ll be widespread condemnation of Tom Liberatore after what today’s Age calls “his disastrous night out”.

 

But AussieRulesBlog advises caution. We’ll reluctantly admit to our sixth decade and we could never have been labelled a hellraiser, yet we can recall too many instances of similarly ill-considered behaviour. Fortunately for us, at least in the this respect, we weren’t listed by an AFL club and there wasn’t a 24-hour news monster that demanded fresh blood every day like some grubby vampire.

 

Lest anyone be tempted to moralise, we encourage them to quickly review the tape of their own lives and decide whether they’re in a position to comment.

 

For those of our loyal readers still muddling their way through their second or third decade, believe us: you’ll do something stupid one day. It might not be drink, it might not be drugs, but it will be stupid.

 

Does AussieRulesBlog condone what happened? Hell, no! Can we understand how otherwise sober and responsible people can cross a line? Hell, yes!