Blue Vain wrote:
Forget about what Paul Roos is doing. Ask yourself, has Denis Pagan performed as an elite coach?
Do our players appear to recognise opposition set ups and set plays and are ours of a comparable standard?
Do our players make the correct decisions whan they have control of the ball?
Do our players appear to understand our forward structure and what to do when our forwards have flooded back?
Do our players appear to understand our gamestyle and how to react when the opposition get on a roll?
I'm no football scholar, but I'd say on the whole no. We seem to be tactically inferior to most teams.
That said how often do you see a losing team and think "wow, great game plan. amazing strategies"? Almost never I'd say. When a lot of your team is being beaten one on one, it's pretty hard to make good decisions going forward. Players look indecisive, when in fact they just don't have anyone at all to kick to.
Blue Vain wrote:
Have we fostered leadership within the list?
I'd say we have a good group of young leaders emerging, but we have a distinct lack of senior, top line players with great leadership. But looking at our list I don't think any of our 25+ year old players really had potential to be the leader we need.
Blue Vain wrote:
Has Pagan managed our list and developed our players to your satisfaction?
Player development is very hard to judge. How much of it is governed by player ability and how much by the way they are trained is difficult. I'd say the majority of our youngsters have developed pretty well. There are probably as many success stories as failures, which would be par for the course.
List management is tricky. In hindsight it's been poor. Obviously too many retreads, not enough kids. But we've kept nearly all our high draft picks, and the retreads have come from the lower picks. How much value would we have gotten from those picks? Impossible to know.
Blue Vain wrote:
Does the coach have some responsibility in the failure of youngsters to perform or is it all the recruiters fault?
Both have a responsability.
Overall, if we had a side exhibiting a gameplan that held up under pressure, countered opposition strategies and functioned week in, week out we'd be playing finals. You can't consistently display those things and not win games. Teams don't win the tactical and strategical battles and get thumped. Those teams win more than they lose.
If all it took was a great coach to make the above happen, then we would be playing finals under a different coach. I doubt it. I don't think any coach would have taken our list to the finals the last two years. Too many weaknesses, not enough top line players.
In the end, I think we could have got more value out of a different coach. But I doubt that under another coach, we'd be answering a resounding yes to all your questions above.