Never thought the issue we had was a lack of effort in pre-season. When the attack has been clicking or at least good enough we’ve looked like one of the fitter and more committed clubs.
Continue to believe our issues had more to do with a head coach who was a bit too rigid, always years behind how the game was played, but more than anything else was this stress head who was either infecting the playing group with performance anxiety or lacking in any ability to remove the anxiety the players had. When your players are making breaks, then not being able to execute a simple catch and pass they’ve been doing all their lives till they hit first grade, if they’re in fact throwing 150kmph thunderbolts at their teammate’s heads instead, this to me reads like a symptom of severe performance anxiety and fear. When players are failing to defuse kicks because they’re where they expected the ball to be instead of watching where it’s going, and the ball is landing 15 metres away, that reads like a coach who doesn’t trust and empower players, one who wants robots.
It’s not about results per se, the #1 determinant of results is how good your players are IMO, the main thing the head coach usually does is allow them to be the best or at least a good version of themselves OR **** everything up. I don’t think the players are as bad as AOB has made them look.
Hey but maybe we’ll discover that actually we do just have a uniquely cacky-handed and stupid playing group, and AOB’s fascism was the one thing preventing total collapse all along.
