Pre-Match. Pies v. Blues. All comments.

[masoncox]

Tim English is ranked no. 5 in the league overall according to Champion Data.
Not bad for a hack.

[Pies4shaw]

^ Ranked 5th in the league at what? Hecertainly attends plenty of ruck contests, he just doesn't get hitouts and, when he does, they're rarely to adsvantage. He's the rucking equivalent of putting out a witch's hat at training.

Unfortunately for English, he remains one of the weakest ruckmen in the AFL. He has attended 774 ruck contests for just 292 hitouts (37.7% win rate). Of his 292 hitouts, just 88 have gone to advantage (30.1%). Personally, I think the better way of looking at the ruck stats is to see what proportion of ruck contests attended result in a hitout to advantage - in English's case, it's a little better than 1 in 10.

Of course, what masoncox conveniently forgets is that atthe time he made the ridiculous comparison between Grundy and English, I pointed out that English was actually more properly to be considered a poor man's Darcy Cameron. He still is. Cameron's stats are 45.3% and 35.4%. For another comparison, Witts has 80 hitouts to advantage from 539 ruck contests attended (48.4% won and 30.7% of those won are to advantage).

Grundy's are 48.4% and 33.6%. Consequently, although he's attended only 473 ruck contests this year, he's won 229 hitouts and, of those, 77 were to advantage. So, even though he's been to 301 fewer ruck contests than English, he has just 11 fewer hitouts to advantage. His rate of a hitout to advantage about 1 in every 6 ruck contests attended is around the same as Sean Darcy's (he has 117 hitouts to advantage from 731 ruck contests). As a benchmark, Pittonet's rate at present is the best in the AFL (about 1 in every 6 ruck contests results in him hitting out toadvantage), save for a few outliers (ie, players who've only attended 1 or 2 ruck contests but happened to hit out to advantage - eg, Bontempelli and Rohan, each 1 from 1).

The Club made a decision to move on from Grundy and the team is playing great football, which is what matters. If they were stupid enough to trade to bring in English for, say, Cameron or Cox, the team would likely fall away rapidly.

[Jezza]

Play like we did last week against GWS, we should comfortably beat Carlton.

History says these games are always close and after the hammering they've received from the media, I expect Carlton to give extra effort. Doesn't mean they'll win though.

I'd love to see us jump out of the blocks and hit them between the eyes early. Doing that means we can set the tone for the rest of the game and dictate terms, and it takes their crowd out of the game.

If we can nullify Curnow and McKay and match them in the aerial contest, then they'll struggle to contend with our run and carry style when the ball hits the deck.

I just want to extend our H2H lead against them which now sits at +2 after completing the double over them last year, and sinking their season further into crisis.