Kissing Cousins: 2009 NAB round 2 review, 1 of 4

Thursday night’s game was an easy win to the Pies, but Tiger fans went home happy too.

I’ve already covered some of the news from the Thursday night game in the round 1 team projections v5.0 post, most notably the performance of Ben Cousins, so I won’t go over it all. One thing I didn’t mention was that Andrew Raines and Jordan McMahon both played in this game, something which fans of Raines would have been watching closely to see how their roles panned out when they were both on the field. In the first half it looked like Raines was the mop up man and McMahon was the designated kicker, judging from their kick:handball ratios, though that flattened out in the second half. With DT scores of 70 and 72 respectively, it’s not hard to build a case for only having one of them in the side, given that they can both play the same role. However, with SC scores of 64 on 77% disposal efficiency for McMahon with three clangers, and 85 for Raines with 91% efficiency and no clangers, the numbers suggest that Raines is a better user of the ball, something that is going to be highly valued this year versus the cluster.

Some things may change in the AFL, but some things stay the same. Inside midfielders tend to gun it against Collingwood due to their chronic lack of quality defensive-minded inside mids, thus Nathan Foley had a field day. Travis Cloke lifts his game against youngsters and blokes significantly skinnier and/or smaller than him, so when Dean Polo lined up on him at the start of Q3 you knew he was going to finish with big numbers. One surprise was Alan Didak spending a lot of time patrolling the half back line, though as with the half a dozen other senior players who have been posted there in the preseason, this must be taken with a grain of salt.