I've been away for work the last few days so haven't posted and I'm glad I didn't.
I was ready to give the game away on Sunday. The contrived results we receive these days due to umpiring decisions is awful. People focus on the inside 50 deficit but this was pretty much accounted for in the first 7-8 mins of the game and the last 10 mins. In between that time period we were close enough. We started poorly, but the weight of momentum shifts to the Dees in the 2nd half, killed our ability and ultimately crushed us later on in the game.
I thought through the game, generally the midfield was pretty good, parts of the forward line worked but in general our talls more or less were poor all over the ground apart from Soldo who I thought was excellent. Miller was a witches hat, in the 4th we actually rucked Pickett whilst Miller was standing at CHF, he was having that poor of an impact. Young, Balta and Grimes probably had the collective worst performances of the season as a defensive unit. Broad was well beaten too. When their 3 main forwards kick 14.0 for the game, you know you've been well beaten and lets be clear, none of those 3 are in the legends of the game list. Petty is good, but we made him look like Plugger, JVR was similar and Melksham, generally an average player that again we made look like a gun.
Pretty demoralising defeat but even with our defence playing that poorly we were well in the game but ultimately had too many passengers from our side and add in we had the umpires to deal with from about halfway through the 2nd when they had a massive influence. The last 2 goals of the 2nd were umpiring assistance, the first a soft free out of the 2nd, and the 2nd we should have had a free. Rioli tries to take possession at the back of the stoppage with a Dee holding his arm behind him, funnily enough he can't take possession with 1 hand and they move it forward. I saw Jack having a word with that prick Nicholls (who I'm pretty sure paid us nothing for the game) as they went off at half time I suspect over these 2 incidents and then they came out in the 2nd half and simply refused to pay us a free kick. So many examples of frees they refused to pay. I don't understand in the wet, how a team can be nigh on perfect onfield but the best part of 70 mins of footy (as the quarters went for ageesss on Sunday). I actually had to leave the game early to get a flight as it hit 6 and we still had about 6-7 mins to play!!