Devil's Advocacy In The Detail

As painful as it is to acknowledge, getting clawed by the Cats on the weekend shouldn't have been a great surprise. Despite some believing truth is subjective, only the review and dissection of a substantial body of work reveals reality, possibly a reality we’ve been desperately and deliberately ignorant of. The actual truth, we’re good, we’re on our way to being really good, we can produce snippets of really good, but overall, we’re just not quite that good yet.

There is a degree of fraud in our form. And I don’t mean that in a temper tantrum, throw the toys out of the cot, Harley Reid style negative sense. It's more of a surface aspect. Probably the better or fairer way to phrase it would be, there is a distortion of our form.

There is a cliché, or maybe a Lyonism, that says ‘you learn more from your losses than you do your wins.’ If that were the case, then over the last thirty years we’d have the highest per capita of Rhode Scholars in the world! However, while it is true you do learn plenty from your losses, on this occasion much of the knowledge of where we are, has been derived from our victories.

You can’t win twelve and a half of twenty-one games and be incompetent. But a deeper, albeit simplistic, dive into the twelve and a half victories can paint a picture of where your current competence level is at.

Let’s go all the way back to round one when we beat Brisbane. It was a solid win and it got the season off to a flyer. Brisbane were reigning grand finalists, 5 points away from being premiers. But if we’re being honest, and we need to be, this year the Lions were an early season struggler. They were in turmoil with the fall out of their Las Vegas trip, not exactly a Chad Fletchery type of Las Vegas trip but, like Chad, several of the Lions apparently ended up horizontal as well. Anyway, whether they admit it or not, it’s hard to suggest it wasn’t impacting their on-field form. They lost five of their first seven games with three of them at the Gabba.

We then moved on and over to Marvel Stadium and beat North Melbourne. Big deal… a West Coast Eagles team, dragging Andrew Gaff to a final round send-off game, beat them Saturday!

Maybe even mentioning it you could be charged with setting the bar absurdly low, but with two from two on the board it was our best start to a season since 2015! Armed with that achievement, it was then home to add a third victory, defeating Adelaide in round 3. Despite our pristine record to date, the Crows were 0 and 2 and 13th on the ladder at the time and they’re now 15th.

So having not started a season 3 and zip since 2015, it is understandable fan's expectations, which were fairly non-existent prior to the season and off the back of 2023, suddenly developed and rapidly grew legs.

While our form was highly pleasing, we lost both games on that horrendous Adelaide road trip, including Gather Round. We half butchered the game against Port Adelaide, but the Carlton loss was questionable... and by questionable I mean James Aish is still getting treatment for his shoulder. But then we returned home and were somehow trounced by West Coast. That was a telling moment and it should have tempered expectations, but instead we wrote it off as an anomaly.

Onto round seven and we got some travel grace as we put away the Western Bulldogs at Optus Stadium. At that point in time the dogs and us were both three wins and three losses and were separated by minimal percentage in 7th and 8th respectively. They had defeated Gold Coast, West Coast and St Kilda. But they weren't travelling well, there was apparent unrest in the camp and there was widespread talk of an impending removal of coach, Luke Beveridge. Back in round seven they were far from the Bulldogs they are now, despite losing to the Crows on Sunday.

The following round we travelled to Victoria to take on Richmond, in just the first of our two homer and away outings at the MCG for the year. An injury ravaged and depleted 15th placed Richmond were, as expected and I mean this in a non-arrogant manner, no match for us.

Our next win came two rounds later against St Kilda after losing to Sydney. St Kilda were 14th and struggling back then. Currently they’re 14th and still struggling now.

That absolutely horrendous, mind numbing, soul destroying draw with Collingwood at Optus Stadium that is still painful to recall, was our very next outing. The Pies were injury thrashed, depleted, they were decimated and they were absurdly inexperienced. This performance, or lack thereof, from Freo, on the back of the display against West Coast five weeks earlier, should have had alarm bells sounding. It should have at least forced a physical and/or mental, capabilities-based reassessment of form and a realtering of expectations by fans.

But quick as a flash the days seem to fly by and, in the blink of an eye, we were playing like actual billionaires up in the Northern Territory, dismantling a hapless Melbourne Demons to the tune of near on 100 points. Hindsight probably suggests it was more of an indication of where Melbourne was at. It was a great win and thoroughly enjoyable, but it was a win that came just too easy and, you have to ask the question, did it run cover for the previous week’s performance against Collingwood? Did it contribute to and strengthen the ‘it was another anomaly’ narrative?

Fast forward six days and we arrive at Marvel Stadium to take on the Dogs, the team we comfortably dispatched just six games prior. If a week is a long time in football… six weeks must be an eternity. Our own form and that of this suddenly ruthless, pressure applying and precise Western Bulldogs outfit were indistinguishable from six games ago. It was a horrific performance from us and it probably isn’t unfair to use the term insipid, in relation to our effort. There was no resolve, no resilience from us. We let through 8 goals straight in the last quarter to go down by near on 70 points.

Another outlier? Is it a baseball type adjudication where strikes and foul balls conflate to outliers and anomalies? You get to make x amount of each? The West Coast game, the Collingwood draw and now the Bulldogs debacle. There were red flags everywhere and we weren’t swimming between them!

Once again, a few days later we got over a plucky Gold Coast and it lulled us into that sense of security that we didn’t care to know if it was false or not. We had beaten a side that hadn’t won a game on the road. But they hadn’t lost a game at home, so did it create the impression the win was more meritorious than it probably was?

But any thoughts of potential fragility in our form, any mention about hedging our bets and possibly testing the eBay market for our already booked September bus seats, were judged ludicrous and crazy talk as we went to the SCG, came charging in from the Paddington end and bowled over the Swans by a single run… I mean a point. It was a monster win, an upgrade the bus seat to a first-class flight seat win, a victory that spawned a boom for Flagmantle tattoo artists! We’d just beaten the short price premiership favourites on their own Milo tin lid sized deck.

At the time it was difficult to suggest the win wasn’t all that. Even though it should have at least been a draw or a good chance of a loss when Logan McDonald lined up after the siren and missed the lot, we genuinely played good footy. You don’t beat the Swans if you don’t play goof footy! However, when you look back now, we see Sydney lost to us and then lost 4 of their next 5 games. They’d lost one game for the season prior to losing to us in round 15, then they lost to St Kilda the following week. If they didn’t fall over the line against Collingwood on Friday night, their only win in the last 7 games would be over North Melbourne.

Now I’m not trying to run us down here by denigrating opposition, but if we want answers for why we are where we are, we can’t cherry pick what we want to take into account. We still had to admirably perform, but looking back at Sydney’s last seven weeks, did we get the Swans at the absolute perfect time and did we get out of jail against them? Surely, we're not suggesting we broke the mighty Sydney Swans?

Whatever the case, understandably in that moment, that win single handedly eliminated any prospect of honest self-assessment. Fan's excitement hit fever-pitch and it took expectations and September hopes and dreams with it.

So, we took care of the league leaders and then, for the second time this year, put away a lowly placed Richmond Tigers the following week on our home deck in a methodical and professional manner. We had to turn up and get it done, but I can’t help but wonder if that win against Richmond potentially further shielded us from what appears has been, an underlying reality? With the winning excitement carnival rolling on, did it just further falsely validate our possibly misguided perceptions?

Our next win was back at Optus after an understandably unsuccessful trip to Tasmania. A 50-point victory over Melbourne was incredibly satisfying and it fertilised the thought we’re a side right in the zone. It was only six weeks back that we did a number on them at Traegar Park, and since then they’d had three wins over West Coast, Essendon and North Melbourne and two loses to Brisbane and Collingwood. Our victory over the Dees wasn’t seriously anything to write home about, but it wasn’t something to gloss over or be flippant about either. From a macro perspective though, the Dees were on the slide, evidenced by the fact they were clinging to 8th place by minimal percentage when we played them and they’re now in 13th with their season over.

The win over West Coast the following week seemed incredibly meritorious given the heat the Eagles threw at us. But a win over a side languishing near the wooden spoon territory, a side that has been in the wilderness for a few years and will probably remain so for a couple more, is very difficult to assess. Sure, they were ferocious but did they have the skills beyond that? Against that level of opponent, beyond taking cheap shots and ridiculing them, it’s probably dangerous doing anything other than ticking the win box, banking the four points and moving on. It’s not a positive form line you would rely upon to make an investment.

Sadly, that then leaves us with the horrendous loss to Essendon two weeks back. To be run down from four goals up in the final quarter by a team who was on banana peels having lost 6 of their previous 8 games, was unacceptable if you rate yourself anywhere near a genuine top eight side. Possibly that loss to the Bombers began to hit home for fans and the realisation started to set in that what we judged to be anomalies and outliers, were instead a disappointing trend and unfortunately still part of our makeup.

Recency bias may have us disappointed in the game against Geelong on Saturday but it shouldn’t be the target of our emotional frustrations. While the loss obviously hurt in more ways than one, our effort and performance were commendable and that game shouldn’t have had to carry so much importance and responsibility.  

The cold hard reality is that we really have only beaten one genuine top eight side at the time, this year. But having said that, in this topsy turvy year where we currently see Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon and Melbourne outside the top eight, defining a genuine top eight side is fraught with difficulty.

We’re potentially missing finals this year because of our inability to win at least a couple of the very winnable games we inexplicably let slip, particularly the West coast Eagles loss, the Collingwood draw and the defeat by Essendon. And, while we have a couple of chances to rectify it over the next two weeks, we have so far largely been unable to retrieve the much needed points against better credentialed teams.

While individual occurrences, they all form part of the assessable collective and play an important role in ascertaining where we actually are as a team and in our development.

However, while hopefully we still find ourselves inside the top eight at the completion of round 24, for numerous reasons it will be substantially more painful to deal with, should we come up short.

Firstly, it’ll feel like a genuine missed opportunity because of the abnormal season. While I’m sure the AFL suits will claim credit for their league equalization policies, it has actually been strangely even. It feels like this year, if you book a spot in the bottom of the eight, you possess a little bit more influence than potentially just making up the numbers. And that may well be through no fault of your own.

Secondly, missing finals will be soul destroying because we allowed our expectations to get well away from us. It means the emotional fall and the sense of loss is far greater. But we get it, we’re so invested and we’re so starved of any meaningful success, the mere thought we’re September bound has us beside ourselves. In these instances, reality is often excruciatingly unpleasant and difficult to accept. But, hey, where’s the enjoyment in a sensible journey?

The overriding and overbearing positive is that it is not as if this potentially missed opportunity was on the way down. The age and experience profile of our team, the high end existing young talent and our currency going into trade and draft weeks, really has us in a position where our premiership window has barely been cracked open yet. And lets not forget we're still number one in the league for defence. We're so close, but we're just out of reach.

If we can all revisit and readopt our 2024 predictions made at the end of 2023 and accept the reality that we are genuinely thereabouts but on the up, it will realign perspectives and, to some degree, soften the landing of the emotional fall we all hopefully won't, but may have to endure in a couple of weeks' time.

There will always be variations on positions, but at any given point, your form is your form. And with that in mind, more often than not, you are where you’re supposed to be.