by Archer Fri Oct 21, 2016 8:50 pm
Woah, Page 50.... I was just about to continue the actual footy discussion as well....
Oh well, why not. Just on Ricky, I've really enjoyed his game plan for us this year. I mean its not completely revolutionary, but a lot of discussion revolved around how limited interchange might change what coaches did, though I didn't see all that much.
Ricky however did find a pretty potent strategy out of it, when he started leaving hodgo out there as a third playmaker when bringing Baptiste on. He also adjusted his Pack in a way I didnt expect. Rather than having Vaughany in the squad and Pairing a big monster with him like Paulo/Boyd while leaving the other on the bench, He started both of them and then had a much smaller, more agile bench in Preist, Bateman, Tapine, Soli etc and it seemed pretty effective.
Sure, some of the time it looked like the momentum swung against us when those two went off and we had trouble regaining it but I think more often than not we saw a positive outcome from the strategy. I mean we struggled a lot with our defence in previous years and everyone always blamed our edges, but as Ricky himself pointed out on more than one occasion, it was actually stemming from the blokes in the middle getting found out. Whenever an opposition would get a quick play the ball, the inside men were too slow to get across and cover, which left the edges staying in field a little too long and opened up gaps. This seemed to happen far less when we brought on the smaller blokes right around the time defences usually tire and as a result our edges conceded far less points (still was far from perfect).
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