Let Jack be Jack

Following a finals team was fun, wasn’t it? All 20 seconds of it.  Best we don’t complain though, plenty of people would kill to their team play one final each decade.

Note: I’m about to bollocks Richmond in a way that will come across as completely disrespectful to the Dogs. But nothing could be further from the truth - McCartney is not only a great coach; he’s a great teacher, they’ve managed to collect blue chip kids at the same time everyone was banging on about compromised drafts and they’ve never once complained, tanked, asked for priority picks or said it was all too hard.

They’re tough, quick and going places in a hurry. McCrae, Stringer, Liberatore and Hunter are all stars and based on what was on display yesterday, they are much closer to a flag than Richmond.

Still, we should have beaten them. The loss didn’t actually surprise me because the Dogs are alright and we had some key players out, but it was still disappointing.

It was the kind of loss that happens when you laugh off a horrible loss the week before and when Paul Broderick wore sneakers to a jumper presentation we should have known things were about to go drastically south.

The thing about injuries is that it’s not enough to call on blokes not in your best 22, you rely on the blokes ranked 11-22 to do more. And that just didn’t happen.

It was the game for:

• Titch to finally step up in an important game
• Newman to show that he is still has relevance
• King to prove that he brings more than ‘forward pressure’, whatever the hell that means.

What’s happened to Chaplin over summer? Last year he was a consistent beacon down back, this year he’s borderline liability. The turnovers are banking up, he’s misjudging contests and I don’t go to a happy place anymore whenever he has the ball.

There were others – none of Grigg, Vickery, Grimes, Houli or Petterd did enough either.

The playing group was very ordinary but this one is equally on Hardwick. We picked the wrong 22 for the Docklands, we looked slow last week and we looked even slower this week. Why wasn’t McDonough picked instead of King? What on earth has changed between round one, when he was in the team, and now when he isn’t? He wasn’t why we lost against Gold Coast.

For some reason, we continue to buck the trend of the rest of the competition and play without a genuine small forward. I’m not talking ‘cycle through the midfielders while they are resting’, I’m talking stay at home, stand at Vickery’s feet and shark the ball. How good was it when Gordon crumbed and ran into an open goal? We haven’t seen anything like that since early days Nahas.

So far this year, the ball has hit the turf and flown out of our forward line. And way too often yesterday it flew out right up the other end into the waiting arms of a leading forward. The complete lack of ground pressure up forward may not be such an issue if our strategy of going inside 50 weren’t as questionable as Hitler’s rendezvous into Russia. But I don't have deconstructing either of those things in me right now.

This was all true up until roughly the five-minute mark of the third quarter when someone remembered that Jack Riewoldt is arguably the best forward in the competition and decided to kick the ball to him.

Jack is many things, but brilliant is at the top of the list. The man has two Colemans at home, TWO. Yet for some reason we’ve seen fit to hang him out to dry both on and off the field. We embarrassed him for the first two and half games by not passing him the ball and we’ve let him down off the field by not sending someone senior into bat for him during ‘Jack Riewoldt hunting season’.

Jack could earn far more money at another club and, unless Richmond ceases treating him like the plague, he just might choose to exercise that option, I bet he would enjoy Jack McCrae kicking it to him.

And after all the rubbish we’ve put him through, he went on TV and played the team game. He would have been well within his rights to very publicly question why it took his team 300 minutes of football pass him the ball, and I almost wish he did.

On Jack’s back we clawed back and nearly pinched what would have been an entirely unjust victory, which would have made our ledger Hardwick:

• 183 we should have won but lost
• 1 we should have lost but won.

But alas, we haven’t learnt a single thing about how to play the last couple of minutes. We are four points up with seconds to go, how on earth does Brandon Ellis find himself one-on-one against one of the best medium sized forwards of the last decade?

It’s staggering, where was Chaplin? Newman? Grimes? Astbury? Stephenson? Cotchin?

Why did Vickery try and be the hero third over in the ruck instead of dropping a kick behind play? It’s just unbelievably dumb footy, and it’s happened enough now for this group to be unquestionably stamped mentally weak.

They should be great, but they aren’t, they’re feeble. Bordering ever so close on pathetic.

The really crappy thing is that Ellis is probably blaming himself for giving away a free when he should never have found himself in that situation. You know who would have been there to help him out? Vlastuin. Our most defensively responsible midfielders are aged 19 and 20 and it is absolutely disgusting.

Because Twitter is the best thing ever, the reactions after the game were priceless. It was a quick pivot from ‘we are useless’ at half time, ‘I can’t believe we are going to win this’, ‘it happened again’,  back to ‘we are useless’ and, finally, ‘it’s only round three, don’t stress’.

I’m not saying I didn’t go through the first four steps, but I’m not buying the fifth.

Winning today would only have papered over the cracks, I hope Hardwick smashed them after the game and I hope Hardwick has a senior mentor that smashes him when they caught up for a coffee. Because right now we are miles off where we need to be, and I have doubts that we are strong enough to rebound from 1-3 with the media, rightly, hounding us.

Votes

5: Jack Riewoldt

4: Trent Cotchin

3: Matt Thomas

2: Steven Morris

1: Orren Stephenson

Leaderboards

The Benny

9: Trent Cotchin

5: David Astbury, Jack Riewoldt, Steven Morris

4: Shaun Hampson, Ricky Petterd, Matt Thomas

3: Ty Vickery

2: Brett Deledio, Brandon Ellis

1: Ben Griffiths, Orren Stephenson

Blair Hartley Appreciation Award

4: Shaun Hampson, Ricky Petterd, Matt Thomas

Joel Bowden’s Golden Left Boot

N/A

Greg Tivendale Rookie Medal

4: Matt Thomas

1: Orren Stephenson

Championship belt

Incumbent	Winner	Streak	Wins
NA	Cotchin	1	1
Cotchin	Astbury	1	1
Astbury	Riewoldt	1	1