The Hawks and the Saints both got wins against more-fancied opponents, but even the most dedicated Saints fans would’ve found their match against the Sun difficult to watch.
Two teams played higher ranked opponents. The two teams won with a deliberate plan for how they would do it. One team played bold football. The other one was St Kilda.
They deployed Marcus Windhager again as a tagger, and he shut down Touk Miller a week after he eclipsed wonder-brute Harley Reid. They flooded the Suns forward half of the ground and restricted them to just 45 inside-50s. The Saints had 56, as Lyon pointed out post-game after Damien Hardwick had his head in his hands in his press conference over the spectacle they had endured.
They were forced to be inventive after Ned Reeves went down. They used Josh Weddle in the ruck and forward, Conor Nash was used there at times as well.But what was more telling was that coach Sam Mitchell doubled down to his players at half-time that they were not to play boring football, and that their game is effort-based. Consequently, they had 19 tackles in the third quarter alone. Those tackles, that pressure, was the reason they could play the turnover game and kick a score.
Every week now it seems the discussion of the round’s games starts with a critical late decision by the umpire. And, of course, it’s true players make more mistakes than umpires and games are decided by many moments of play, but they are also decided by the critical judgment calls by officials. The free kick to King, which led to a goal and gave the Saints the winning margin, should have been called “play on”. Not for the first time this year, a decision was made that lacked the right feel for the game. The AFL admitted Sunday that while they understood why the free was paid, they would rather it hadn’t been.
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