GuyWhoLikesSport’s three burning Questions for the Grand Final

GuyWhoLikesSport’s three burning Questions for the Grand Final

GuyWhoLikesSport

1. Can Brisbane handle it if Collingwood gets quick on them?

The problem with the second season of The Bear was that the first half of it tried to be something it wasn’t, and you could feel the show’s discomfort.

 

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Not this the Bear.

The Bear - Season 2 - Reviews

He means this The Bear. 

The first half of the second season tried to be this upbeat romantic comedy with a Danish twinge.

Marcus goes to Copenhagen and kills it.

Carmy appears to get more well-adjusted with his Nolan-style perfect brunette girlfriend with no defining character traits other than being the least busy doctor in the COVID-era and therefore constantly available to run errands with Carmy. It was just a big departure.

What made the first season of the show so good was how relentlessly dark it was. That made the moments of light shine through.

The opposite approach didn’t work.

It was a bit like The Sopranos when Vito is in New Hampshire munching on some Johnny Cakes.

The second half of the season got much better as the show returned to its dark, propulsive best with enough warm moments to make sure you didn’t have to turn it off after every episode.

Brisbane is going to have the same issue with the Pies.

If Brisbane can play their game, they will win.

If Collingwood can make the game fast and get their run-and-carry game going (the effectiveness of which has waned as the season has gone on – they’ve been more of a grinding team lately), it’ll be infinitely harder for the Lions.

You felt that in the first quarter of the Carlton game.

The frenetic speed at which the game was played sped Brisbane up and they couldn’t handle it.

Once Brisbane could get their chip-mark and forward half turnover game going, they settled in and their superior quality shone through.

Brisbane has been the second-highest-scoring team in footy this year, but they’ve also been the most damaging team at going backward to go forwards leading the competition by some margin in scoring from retained backward kicks.

They retain the ball until it’s time to go, but then they’re off and explosive.

It’s like the first half hour of The Equalizer where not much except character development happens and Denzel sitting in diners reading classics happens. Then for the rest of the movie, it’s Denzel killing folks.

At least by the time he starts killing, we know he has OCD and is basically a good guy.

If the Pies can get the game going fast, they won’t let Brisbane kill them on the intercept and they could speed Brisbane up to the point where Collingwood’s superior athleticism, pressure, and desperation could win the day.

(2) What does Collingwood do about Harris Andrews?

At the outset of the season, I likened the Dan McStay signing to Johnny Roast Beef rolling into the Christmas party with the pink Cadillac, which he put in his mother’s name, in Goodfellas.

Jimmy told them not to buy anything big, and he came in with a Cadillac.

I thought the Pies were lightning in a bottle last season and Dan McStay was a one-piece-away move by a team that was more than one piece away.

I figured they shouldn’t have bought anything big but instead should have tried to build internally and keep accumulating cap space and draft capital. Then Craig McRae walked in with a brand-new key forward, reportedly in his mother’s name.

Got that one wrong.

McStay was enormous against GWS, occupying Sam Taylor and kicking his obligatory two goals.

Even though Taylor was one of the best players on the ground, there’s no telling what sort of damage he might have done if McStay wasn’t annoying him.

Well, McStay won’t play this week and Brisbane has a player who is not overly dissimilar to Taylor – though perhaps no longer on Taylor’s level – in Harris Andrews.

Andrews kept Brisbane alive during Carlton’s onslaught in the first quarter, affecting a number of contests with timely fists and intercept marks to ensure his team didn’t lose the game before his teammates started playing.

If McStay was playing, he would obviously be the one to play a defensive forward role on Andrews and would probably kick his usual two goals while doing it.

Who does it now?

Cox and Cameron will both rotate forward but neither are anywhere near mobile enough for Andrews.

You could try Frampton as a forward instead of playing him as a defender, now that he has come in.

He’s a good athlete but, if we’re being realistic, not much else.

There isn’t a great option outside of that in my view. The other contenders to come in – Ginnivan, Noble, Kreuger – are either too young or not the players to fight Andrews.

Maybe they try Elliott on Andrews and hope that he can be effective enough in the air to at least bother Andrews occasionally while occupying Andrews with his movement, though I don’t love his chances.

If they do that, maybe they bring in someone like Noble to help speed up the game and make it easier for the forward against Andrews. Or maybe someone like Ginnivan and play around with Andrews?

There is no great answer for an intriguing, and possibly game-deciding matchup.

(3) Who wins in the battle of strength on strength?

Despite obvious differences in game style, both Brisbane and Collingwood excel at two things: scoring from clearance and scoring from clearance.

Brisbane was good for 0.86 chain points per clearance and 0.83 chain points per intercept.

The Pies were good for 0.88 chain points per clearance and 0.79 chain points per intercept, courtesy of the ABC.

For clarity, intercept chains are possession chains starting with an intercept, and clearance chains are possession chains beginning with clearances from center bounces, throw-ins and ball-ups.

That makes them the two most effective teams at scoring from intercept and two and three at scoring from clearance.

The two sides do it differently, but the same is DNA is at the core of their games. It’s like Mad Men and The Sopranos. The worlds that they live in are different, but they’re basically singing from the same hymn book.

The numbers above are season-long numbers and I wonder if the loss of Adams might affect Collingwood the most in this game, given Brisbane’s depth in the midfield and dominant forward line.

Based on the injuries and what I think the answers to the above questions are, I can’t help but tip Brisbane in a close one. I wrote earlier in the week that this Grand Final is a Battle of Very Good and I expect a tremendous game as a result. Nothing has changed on that front.

Lions by 4

P.S. Yep, I know about Brisbane’s MCG thing. I’m not sure what else there is to say about it. They tend to lose a lot there except in last year’s final against Melbourne.