Pretty well , while melb quickly adopted the advantage of stand rule and used their kickers, we complained about it , teams also loaded up behind the ball to negate our chaos brand , never know how that took so long tbh . And yep our assets began to tire so the mix was never quite right in producing a winning score
Actually, teams started loading up behind the ball in 2020.
I think our demolition of GWS in the GF had teams basically clueless. Clueless teams then flood back as a last resort. Round 2 v Collingwood was almost a nil all draw, i think 5.6.36 a piece. Nathan Buckley bacame so clueless, that flooding became his stock game plan. Then there was the famous or infamous press conference after the Sydney game when Hardwick was getting frustrated with the flooding tactics. In the end, we started using the ball a bit better on our entry, also got players back from injury, and the flloding result was that the ball lived in our forward line the whole game.
And that was precisely the beauty of our game style. If you flooded against us, then our forward pressure meant that conceding the entry by flooding had the ball live almost the whole game in our forward half. We basically killed the flood off.
Then Steve Hocking comes along with he most putrid rule in football, the rule you create when like flooding teams, you are clueless as to how to stop the tigers. Now because it's so much easier to exit a teams forward line, the flood can pay off. Just look at ther way Collingwood get back now!
Having said that, Kent Kingsley has GWS playing a brand of foot ball which is as close to our own that i have seen since 2020, in fact far closer than our own version of it. In fact, IMO, far from us sticking to the same game plan too long, we have strayed from our own DNA which was to out number to get the ball forward by whatever means, and then hold the thing in the forward line with extreme pressure.
Of recent years, we certainly have not out numbered at the contest, either because we were placing players differently in an effort to stop being scored against or we just lost too many players with running power.
Watchnig GWS in the last half of last year was literally like watching the Tigers in our heyday.
For 3 years, we've had a real scarcity of decent small forwards, while in the premiership years they were in excess.