AFL: Leigh Montagna joins the AFl 360 panel and breaks down the Brisbane Lions' clutch struggles after fumbling a huge lead against Carlton.
CARLTON v RICHMOND: From 6:30pm on Channel 504 with Sarah Jones, Jason Dunstall, Jack Riewoldt, David King, Brad Johnson and Jon RalphHas the importance of Zac Williams’ availability ever been higher?
Williams had a fine start with 19 touches, including a team-high 17 kicks, last week against Brisbane but had a patch averaging nearly 30 disposals early in the 2022 campaign. Getting back to those heights will help his Blues a lot.Tigers’ burning question: Will they toughen up after a soft showing against the Suns?
Now, Richmond comes up against a Carlton side that just overcame a grim 46-point first-half deficit to beat the Brisbane Lions, who didn’t lose a single one of the 13 home games they played last year. “I saw evidence of it with Robbie Fox — who’d played as a defender for the last couple of years — against Jake Lever. Now, in this instance, Fox is trying to take Lever high and wide at stoppage. His main aim is to bring the ball to ground, knowing that Lever is elite in the air.
Ben Hobbs and Archie Perkins are hoping to stake claims to permanent spots but it’s different body types, like Sam Durham and Will Setterfield, who can help make the group more dynamic. But more often we saw the bad version - also known as the very young version - which lost by 10 goals in consecutive weeks to Gold Coast and a then-sliding Carlton, and allowed Fremantle to blow them away twice. There’s a reason they were 7-16, after all.
The Giants made just 36 tackles for the match - with just ONE of those inside 50. Remarkably the side made just 13 tackles to the main break.“It is one of the things we addressed,” he admitted of the tackle count.“But the most pleasing part was against the best defence last year, we were able to post 114 points. Offensively we were really quite strong.”
“We’re really confident with ‘Northball’. Our offence was really strong,” young Kangaroos star George Wardlaw told reporters after that game. So if they nearly made finals in a season where so much went wrong - from injuries, to players sliding back from their best 2022 form - surely a longer summer to prepare and a bit of good fortune can get them back into the top eight in 2024?
It’s fitting that they start the season against Geelong; the team they beat late last year to ensure they’d be playing finals, at a time when people were still doubting whether they were good enough. But the Suns showed maturity by steadying in the last and ensuring they finished the round on top of the ladder for the first time ever; now, in a perfect step up, they get another winnable but trickier game against Adelaide.
But the Big Tex tweaked his back picking up one of his children at home, with the club adamant they won’t risk the veteran in a lengthy season. And so while we’ve seen him get beaten up by the opposition before and bounce back, it was worrying to see him get knocked around by the Swans and then be beaten by Grundy in the one-on-one battle last week.“The playing group are on notice ... he handles it well, there are occasions where it gets on top of him,” Lyon said on On the Couch.
It’s perhaps the Dogs who have it the worst because the Demons have been given a huge break, starting their season on a Thursday night and getting until Sunday afternoon to prepare for their second clash. You could argue the advantage of being used to the speed of a game for points would be negated by exhaustion if the break wasn’t so long, but here we are.
They only beat the Eagles by 40 points when they met in Adelaide last year; it was West Coast’s fourth-best away performance of the year, behind their win over the Bulldogs and the two narrow Docklands defeats to Essendon and North Melbourne. Former Eagle Will Schofield labelled the media attention on Reid as “absolutely ridiculous” and said he hoped the teen was just focused on debuting this weekend.- they had him on the back page lying on the ground. He copped one in the nether regions which is just absolutely ridiculous but that’s what we’re seeing over here in the west at the moment,” he told Fox Footy.
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