I think back to earlier this decade when Geelong were finding their way with a young talented but fragmented and perhaps selfish group of players and I remember a young Mark Thompson almost driven to insanity by the continual lapses in application which held the team back from achieving the ultimate success.

The Cats were on the cusp.

All they needed was a final realization that to consistently succeed in winning games required leadership by their senior players in implementing the four words above.

What I witnessed last night by a few Carlton senior players was embarrassing but more so extremely deflating.

The first two rounds of this season I thought I saw a united and purpose filled unit that showed those words… Discipline. Composure. Control. Respect.

Last night, the bad old days of individualism and selfishness reigned supreme. We ‘fell off the wagon’, so to speak.

One had to wonder whether the Carlton influence in Essendons coaching box may have targeted certain fragile senior individuals as a strategy to break concentration and pressure us back to our old ways of selfishness. If so, it worked a treat.

If we’re going to rise in the next few seasons, our senior players must be honest with themselves and their younger team mates on a consistant basis by showing………. Discipline. Composure. Control. Respect.

I’m hoping our skipper has a long ‘chat’ with our one or two or three fragile senior players this week, and the group as a whole, and last nights performance was the end of individualism.

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There's so much I could say...

Can you give some examples to illustrate what you mean budzy?

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"The ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent." Qui-Gon Jinn 15-05-2005

"there’s more chance of me becoming the full forward for the [Western Bulldogs] than there is of any change in the Labor Party." Julia Gillard 18-05-2010

Was always going to happen. Being a young side, a team that has been starved of success for so many years was going to get ahead of its self. You'll find that last nights result won't be the only time this happens again.

Call me pessimistic or negative but am i the only person on this website who seems to think we have along way to go? I still see so many flaws in our side and believe that unless we get the support act right we will struggle.

The Blues are to blame for this. I wonder how the membership department fell about the 'THEY KNOW WE'RE COMING' campaign now..... how look the fools after having our pants pulled down?

Our second tier players let us down last night. It hurts to say this but i honestly believe the Bombers have wider spread of good players than us. Yeah we got the makings of some champs and you add Hurley, Gumbleton, Mcveigh, Welshe and Prismal to that side and they look promising. Sydney was a champion team not a team of champions

As silky as Houla is he like Brad Fisher is becoming another liability with his lack of pace. Pace has been a major concern for us and i think Browne, Armfield and Yarran could add some much needed dash to this team but who do they make room for?

We need to get some run off half back. A link player that breaks the line and last night we looked like Carlton 2008. The Hawks, Geelong, Bulldogs and now the Saints have a lot of drive off half back..... we have zilch. Kade Simpson and Nick Stevens need to bust there arses running to space when he are rebounding out of the defense like a chance Bateman does for the Hawks

If we were playing the Hawks, Saints, Geelong we would have been smashed off the park. It was a reality check for us all, we still got a long way to go!

Will Carlton look more promising if we add Yarran, Walker, Hampson, Browne, Jamison, Austin and Warnock to our 22?

I guess the Blues have no upside with Grigg underdone and a better player than we saw last night.

Kreuzer has more upside and potential than any second year player on Essendon* list.

Kreuzer is holding his own in the ruck against Hille in his second year and coming back for more after getting bashed around.

Kreuzer is a machine, but needs some respite from Warnock and Hampson who will do more around the ground than Jacobs.

Ratten stated than he hasn't pushed Kreuzer forward yet...

If you think positively, you might think about Hampson and Warnock rucking with Kreuzer spending more time forward in games.

:NO NAMES!!!!:




Nope. I think we're on the cusp. I think we just have to be more mentally disciplined when tested by the opposition and maintain concentration on the job at hand. It's a mental strength barrier we must overcome.

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There's so much I could say...

Yep, different situation obviously though.

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"The ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent." Qui-Gon Jinn 15-05-2005

"there’s more chance of me becoming the full forward for the [Western Bulldogs] than there is of any change in the Labor Party." Julia Gillard 18-05-2010

one word ... consistency ... until we achieve that, no point dreaming about a flag.

Hopefully the players will learn from this and be better for it .... hopefully.

i am biting leather to stop from commenting about giving away stupid free kicks etc (and also the simply bad reporting in today's papers - eg Martin Boulton in the age using the word "lloyd" and "mark" in the same phrase in relation to thornton's punch of the ball in the 3rd qtr). however, i was sitting in the opposite fwd pocket (the one where all the points were kicked from), and what disappointed me most was:

1. how easily Essendon* ran the footy out of half back in the 3rd qtr
2. how little pressure thornton put on davey running into goal in the 2nd qtr - thornton was between goal and davey and instead of corralling davey towards the boundary line and keeping hiim off his left foot, he stood still for 4 or 5 Davey steps (in which time davey straightened up onto his left) and only then decided to move to cut off his angle - too little too late.
3. the inability of players other than judd to stand up and take the load for others who were clearly down on the night. We looked flat as a pancake across the ground, after qtr time.

Ok we might have won if we had kicked straight and the umps (and our backline) didn't brain fade a few times in front of goal, but the feeling at ground level was that bombers were on top of us for 3 qtrs, and there was no doubt that they were going to win.

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"You're my boy(s), Bluuuee(s)..."

'we' Melvey???

I hardly think we had our pants pulled down.... we lost by 4 points. You were just itching for our first loss so you could come on here and scream "you see you see.... 'They know we're coming' was always going to embarrass us. look at us now. we lost!!"

You're hysterical Maybe people would listen to your points a little more if you didn't come across as just living for us to have a loss. You do this every time we lose. pessimistic? negative? you think you're a realist..

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Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

BUT YOU KNOW WE'RE COMING don't you? so thats all that matters. Don't listen to me or take out your frustration with the lose out on me. I didn't turn the ball over, i didn't give away silly free kicks, im not the run who didn't run hard enough and miss tackles.

Harsh reality hurts my dear friend. The thing about football is there is always next week....... so move on bruva

We had more kicks, handballs, marks, hitouts, tackles and frees.
The area where we let ourselves down was capitalising on our opportunities.
Players like fev and Wiggo missed blatant sitters and Simmo showed an inability again to put the ball between the posts.

Basically, footy is about taking your opportunities and capitalising when you are dictating play. We did it beautifully last week and failed to take our chances last night.
It happens to all teams. Especially young sides.

If you want to see a composed, controlled and disciplined side, come back in a couple of years. With 11 players still under 50 games, we've still got a fair way to go.
And understandably so.
Nothing worthwhile comes easy.

Relax and enjoy the ride.
We'll be enjoying a flag well before those black and red scumbags.

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Looking forward to seeing our potential realised.

Still mighty Peeved about last nites effort and even if we had won by 4 points i would have been still feeling peeved.

The Game plan we had in place first 2 rounds evaporated last night with lack of intensity and effort. Talent alone we out class the Bombers and if we had brought intensity and Effort we would have had similar results to the first 2 rounds.
I commented many times while at the game we mucked around and lost our free flowing style and reverted to slowed movement allowed the Bombers to pressure and harrass us rather than doing what we did successfully in the first 2 rounds.
Rather than being out coached i reckon a lot of the players stopped following the game plan that Ratten has put in place.

Quite simple what Budzy said and you can add effort, Intensity and Enthusiasm and with that mix we can trouble most sides on the day... Fail to bring that and as Ratts said in his press conference you drop the ball and fall back into the pack.

We have to be careful through this year that we dont stop doing the hard things and go in expecting to win against the lower end sides ... well i expected us to win easily but talent alone wont do that .... pressure / tackling / chase / Intesity added to talent would have made winning easy.

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CFC TAC Squad everyone over 25 must be traded sounds like Loguns Run

Neither did the marketing department.

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#DonTheStash

melvey really, take notice of your own points. Its the the marketing department's fault that players didn;t chase, missed targets, didn;t tackle etc.

We are coming. We are clearly better, we are receiving recognition but
we will still lose games of football.

Clearly you got ahead of yourself

waiting for that loss to arrive

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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!

anyway getting back to budzy's post......... exactly right.

i was trying to say that last night but it sort of came out like 'blame thornton'

hey ck should have read your post first

as to the game itself.

I love cliche's and here is one

Scoreboard pressure

we [REDACTED] that one up big time

but we lost by four points in a fast game of football where we gave them the corridor and some of our best players were beaten

not bad for a side coming!

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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!

Melvey, We didn't lose because of our 2009 slogan.

Its doesn't mean anything..........its just a slogan.

I hope this helps you find peace.

Melvey...I was a little uncertain but now I am absolutely convinced. You have never played the game annd you know practically nothing about team sport or team spirit.

Yes it is true.....everyone has the right to an opinion. But the thing is about opinions is, you don't need to know anything to have one. That is you to a tee

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Go BLues

when the teams were announced i thought to myself that we were loading up in midfield in order to put in a place a hawthorn style structure to nullify their pace and prevent them getting clean F50 entries to an out of form lloyd / lucas combo. i thought that ratts would be using the loss of jamo to effect a serious match-day trial of the full zone that we had been working on during the pre-season. of course i may be horribly wrong about ratts intention, but that's how i read it.

hawks won a flag with croad / gilham / brown as KPPs. i saw with my own eyes how pox croad and gilham were when exposed to a 1 on 1 contest, but the hawks have perfected the ability to prevent the opposition from having clean, effective F50 entries. i don't really believe that gilham and croad are elite, A-level defenders. to me they're roughly on a par with thornton et al, perhaps a bit more composed etc but mainly as a result of circumstance.

so what happened with us last night? well, obviously first and foremost there was the debilitating effects of a marketing slogan gone horribly wrong which has sunk many a team in my 40 odd years of following the blues. those marketing slogans are like a formidable CHF, impossible to stop. i'm sure the footy dept will look to cut it's losses at year's end and trade our slogan to norf for 2 top 10 picks and a couple of tix to their next chook raffle. but we can't do anything about this pesky slogan for now, so i may look at other aspects of our game that we can change ...

as stated above, to me ratts wanted to kill their run with a hawthorn like zonal setup (again i emphasize that i may be horribly wrong here). that kind of system would've worked very well against their chip / run and carry game. BUT it needs the right personnel to pull it off. this zone can be as much canon fodder as pagans paddock if it's implementation is haphazard.

we lost the game last night in the midfield. by that i don't mean winning stoppages etc, cos i think we actually won those. we lost it cos our mids were either unprepared or incapable of imposing a structure which would restrict / nullify their pattern of play when they HAD the ball.

the use of stevens as a qtr back is the most ill-considered structural element by our MC. why? cos stevo spends all of his time WITHOUT the ball just ball watching. in today's zonal game what you do when you haven't got the ball is almost as important as what you do when you have it.

i actually, and masochistically, tuned into the fox replay into the 3rd and heard walls lament the clean run at the mark that lloyd was allowed all night. that mark lloyd took in the 3rd with 3 scum players in the pack was a total indictment on our back 6. sure, ryder may well have taken that mark. and if he's gonna jump 2 feet above everyone else then fair play to him. BUT, how lloyd was able to get an unimpeded run at that contest in UNFORGIVABLE in this day!! this is where the hawks excel. as i've seen so often, even a spud like guerra will play a role for the team and create some kind of speed hump for a gun like fev, thereby denying him that clean run / jump to the ball. then hodge would just come in from the side and effect a perfect spoil without a mclaren flower to turn it into a 17 goal play without a centre bounce.

i reckon ratts was setting up to crowd their midfield and F50 so that lloyd / lucas wouldn't have clean footy delievered to them. he was banking on an out of form lloyd becoming even more despondent and that his sooky body language deflating the rest of them. perhaps the 1st qtr was too easy for a profligate carlton, but after that they just cut through our half-assed attempts at playing zone football.

we simply had too many guys running ahead of the ball and got carved up on the rebound as a result of our lack of clean hands. i watched that goal kicked by grigg and noticed that at the moment he kicked the ball he had 3 other mids running ahead of the ball screaming for the easy take. if grigg had missed we were wide open to a coast to coast rebound from FB line. if grigg had missed our structure was hopelessly out of whack.

this zonal game requires personnel with a tremendous structural and tactical discipline. sadly, i don't think guys like stevo, scotto, carrots, houla have that in them. they are classic players who chase the footy and stats. not saying that's a bad thing, but you need guys who do not ball watch, who do not act as passengers when they don't have the ball. you need guys with mongrel who will chop and block and make life extremely hard for opposition forwards. if a stevo or a johnson put some kind of block on lloyd then we can hope that the ball goes to ground and a turnover is effected. this is effectively what Essendon* did in the 2nd half having fletcher double team fev and allowind dempsey to mop up.

ratts needs to decide that if he's to play a zonal game then he needs to put the right personnel down back / midfield and play stevo as a wing / HF etc interchanging with houla. our midfield was embarrassing last night within the context of the modern game, ie discipline (incl structural) and the other attributes contained within the subject line of this thread

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... an eagle flew out of the night. he was something to observe, came in close i heard a voice, bending stretching every nerve, had to listen had no choice ...

..don't get on Melvos case.. ..he's right, we did have our pants pulled down.. ..sure, we lost by only four points but it's not the margin, but the way we let them play us.. ....as another said, we's essenbum's biatches, pure and simple.. ..they're gettin' the wood on us, even when they shouldn't.. ..pants down, around zee ankles.. ..pitiful blues last night.. ..everyone bar Judd should get twenty lashes..

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..if you can't be good, be good at it..