The thing which really impressed me about Holbrook's presser after the Dogs game, some might disagree, is the way he talked about how they expected the Dogs to come back at them in the second half and he didn't think 16-0 was going to become 32-0.
You just know that under AOB, if we were travelling well and won this one, he would frame it as, we let them back into it, we did this wrong, we did that wrong. Whether he's correct or incorrect about that, he doesn't have the roster to chase 80 minutes of low error field position dominance, and it's like he refused to even consider that let alone acknowledge it.
Players aren't dumb. Well, footy players ARE dumb, but they're not going to be blind to the fact that the Dogs are one of the top teams for dominating field position & in yardage, and one which finished 3rd last year, and that we finished last and usually were on the wrong side of the yardage/territory battle.
Feels like everything Holbrook says to the team he frames it as, this is what *we specifically* are good at and this is what *we specifically* need to do to win. The game is going to go back and forth and we won't have it all our own way. What we have over them is more strike power, more ways to score points, if we take our chances, and we have more guys who have the ability to cause the momentum to swing back our way after we ride out a tough period of defence. And every player plays like they know what their role is within the team to make the win happen. Pasami Saulo knew that his role of bringing physicality and work rate, emptying the tank in that first 25 minutes, has flow on effects for his teammates. There is a link between him making almost a tackle a minute and Jacob Saifiti being able to swing around to a short side and put a momentum-altering hit on Lachie Galvin, and between those two things and Dominic Young's late game intercept (in attack, for long periods of the game, their ball movement was tentative and way too sideways; partly that's AOB of course, but playmakers being scared of wearing a shot is also part of it).
We don't win without Dom Young, but we also don't win without Pasami Saulo and Mat Croker either. Even though the Dogs technically had a +360 metres advantage in yardage over the 80 minutes. You could call that "losing the arm wrestle", but I see it as the right mix of bending but not breaking in D when the Dogs were up & putting the foot down when we got the ascendancy back.
