What was with the lack of adventure?

[mjp]

I flew home last night and worked today - please excuse me not reading the match day thread.

What I am curious about is why we were so predicatable with the ball. We continually kicked Long to a contest down the ‘shady side’ wing (sorry - my sense of direction was senseless but the other side of the ground to where I was sitting) even when it clearly wasn’t working. Since when have we done that?

A little bit of Caleb Daniel “maybe i’ll Just kick it to another player wearing the same colour shirt as me” composure would have gone a long way.

Now, someone is going to tell me ‘that was the plan’. And that’s fine. But we regularly had players split wide to the fat side providing an option...so inform it was the plan it clearly wasn’t the ‘whole’ plan. My take is that we were getting beat so too often the ball carrier would just play it safe rather than risk a turnover....to which I would ask “exactly HOW is that working out”.

The Giants were too committed (and clean below their knees) for us yesterday. I was just disappointed that we didn’t try to spread the field, run and bounce, challenge them to not just ‘play’ on us but genuinely RUN with us...

[bornadog]

I think we played that side due to the wind but it didn’t work. I thought the pressure from GWS also stopped our run.

[comrade]

Felt like we never had enough clean ball on the outside, especially coming out of a stoppage and the only way forward was shovelling long and high. They set up so well at stoppages and we had no response.

[mjp]

Felt like we never had enough clean ball on the outside, especially coming out of a stoppage and the only way forward was shovelling long and high. They set up so well at stoppages and we had no response.

But we did it from kick-ins. So weird.

[comrade]

But we did it from kick-ins. So weird.

Yeah, that was weird. Don’t think we ever just hit up a short target from kick in. How many repeat inside 50s did they get just by winning back the long kick out after a behind?

[The bulldog tragician]

They kicked a lot of points so we had plenty of opportunities to constantly take this baffling approach. I can only think under intense pressure we retreated into timid footy. Our skills fell to pieces.

[Mofra]

They shut down the release handball very well, better than any team has played us since 2016.

Then all they had to do was attack the ball carrier, stick the elbow into the throat after the tackle, etc. It took us to the 'panic' days of early 2017 when we'd release the ball whether the recipient was in a better position or not.

Schache is not a get-out option, that much is clear. The pursuit of Josh Bruce makes perfect sense in that regard.

[Mantis]

They shut down the release handball very well, better than any team has played us since 2016.

Then all they had to do was attack the ball carrier, stick the elbow into the throat after the tackle, etc. It took us to the 'panic' days of early 2017 when we'd release the ball whether the recipient was in a better position or not.

Schache is not a get-out option, that much is clear. The pursuit of Josh Bruce makes perfect sense in that regard.

Our 'hot potato' play wasn't fun to watch... surely the quick release isn't that far in-grained into our play that we don't just hold onto the ball if we don't have a player free to give it to. Lachie Hunter in particular released the ball to no-one far too often on Saturday which wasn't acceptable from one of our leaders.