TheRam
Coach
- Messages
- 13,816
That's not the point I was making. I was responding to an assertion that our defense had been horrid for most of BA's tenure. I was just presenting evidence that while it was far from competition leading, it was 'average' on average. Not horrid, in the main (thoug a couple of years were pretty bad).
As I said in the post, our lack of innovation in attack would be my larger criticism of the BA years. And that affects your defense, because it affects the circumstances and position in which your opponents get the ball.
Considering the quality of the squad for at least half of his tenure here the teams defence was very ordinary to say the least. Even beyond just the points against. What it doesn't show is the amount of endless overlaps and inability to shore up the middle(win the wrestle) or the inability to slide when necessary and stay connected as a high quality defensive unit does.
This then also stifles and limits what energy you have left in the tank and the type of creativity you can play with and all we ended up with was as the high risk champions of the offload. Even to this day I still don't think players like Moses and Brown are playing as well in attack as they should be due to the years of ineptitude from the coaching staff around them.
I reckon if they were playing for the Storm for example they both would be way better than they are right now and display so much more in calmness, creativity and game management. For example you wouldn't see so many wasted play the balls which Moses has no idea what to do next so just plays it under to a player coming through, in essence just a settler and wasted play just so he can reset and hopefully workout something on the next play.
Don't get me wrong, yes sometimes you want a settler and it makes sense, but he uses them way to often because it's an easy play and he can get his hand on the ball so it means he is contributing, but unless the defence makes a booboo then it just leads to nothing and we then hope that the defence has gotten out of shape a little on the next play and we can get some sort of positive result then. But we almost never do.
Watch how Bellamy has transformed Hughes from a lazy and fat, but with some talent fullback, but not as much as Moses who has also been playing in the halves all his life into probably the second best half in the game. Watch how Hughes is always trailing someone in attack and receives a pass or offload and make a break and then finds himself in space. He doesn't just wait or parks himself as much as Moses does. They are both runners of the ball and I believe talent wise Moses is ahead, but knowledge and education Hughes in my opinion is superior.
So yes I wouldn't give Potates a pass on our attack either and if you go back and read my many posts on that you will see that I am way past you on that too MOFO!
Keep up. This is serious business.