I haven't gone in on Tago much. I think the defensive issues are kinda overblown (although there are issues) and he's still a weapon with the ball and a beast physically. He's had a below par year, but I'm still very hopeful that he overcomes it, if not this season then next.
One thing that does worry me though is he's becoming a really dumb player. Although it wasn't the biggest error a Panther made last night, his escort penalty was an awful moment and took all the wind out of a team that habitually drags back games in their dying moments. It looked like he reacted a fraction late to the play (a common theme for him this year), and compounded that by making a bad decision to impede the runner despite not being in a position to do so. The two errors compounded each other but they both stemmed from a lack of foresight, both in the moment and the broader context of the match. I don't feel like he's always been like this, but he's certainly building some bad habits that aren't going away.
The thing is, while Tagos the most obvious culprit, the teams football IQ is way down across the board. Last night it was Tago, Smith and Fish coming up with poor moments in concentration, last week it was Tago, Turuva and Martin. Over the season, the spread of players having these awful moments is extremely wide, virtually the entire team has these moments in them, which again is an argument to why just dropping isnt the answer. We're not a straight up dumb footy team (a la the Elliott years) but we're not trending in the right direction.
If I had to guess, I'd say the psychology of the group is off a bit. Not drastically and not in a way that Ivan can necessarily just solve either. But maybe the pressure of being at the top for such and unbelievably (unprecedented) long time in a sport as gruelling as this, along with subtle changes in group dynamics have altered an underlying element of the group's capacity to focus when it matters. It's clearly not a massive thing, we still sit outright second and can turn on by far the best football in the comp when we click, but for that our heads need to be in the right place and they clearly weren't last night in the biggest game of the season so far.