How the Lions Tweaked Their Way Back

How the Lions Tweaked Their Way Back

GuyWhoLikesSport

Amid a steady stream of constant, but fair, criticism of Chris Fagan’s game day coaching chops it’s easy to forget what the Lions looked like before he took over in 2017.

They were a toxic club and had been for some time. They had lost genuine guns because of that toxicity (notably Sam Docherty and Elliot Yeo in 2013). In 2016, the year before Fagan, the Lions won just 3 games, but that does not tell the full story.

Despite Harris Andrews being making the 22 under 22 team that year, Brisbane conceded 79 more goals than any other team in the AFL in 2016. This year the worst defensive side was seven goals worse than second worst.

 

Mitch Robinson was second in their best and fairest.

It was awful.

Every year under Fagan they have improved, culminating in finally making and losing Grand Final last year.

All through their growth, basic tenets of Fagan’s teams have always been the same.

They are a control side who plays well with tempo, prioritising deliberate ball movement side out of the back half. They always have a lot of disposals and take a lot of marks as they try to stretch opposition zones with their kicking before finding their way into the corridor and exploding from there.

They have always prioritised the contest and have been a consistently good clearance and contested ball side.

Finally, while their pressure is not a true strong suit, especially this year, they’re excellent at locking the ball in their forward half and generating repeat entries based on intercepts. They score heavily from the forward half because of the way that they deploy Harris Andrews and how high they play their defenders.

That’s the Book of Fagan.

The knock on him, reasonably, has been that he hangs onto his system come hell or high water like he’s Kendall Roy yelling “I am the oldest boy”.

His sides have consistently lost finals because they have failed to adapt to new realities. Take last year’s Grand Final. Fagan always plays Harris Andrews on the other teams’ least dangerous tall forward so Andrews can zone off.

In that game, it was Billy Frampton.

Collingwood played Frampton in the goal square and Fagan left Andrews on him for three quarters, meaning he couldn’t impact the game in the way that a star like Andrews should have.

Over the last two weeks, however, things have changed slightly for Brisbane and those minor tweaks have them in a second consecutive Grand Final.

In the GWS game, I’ll focus on one little tweak Fagan made with Dayne Zorko.

Zorko is Brisbane’s engine from the back half, and he starts the kicking game. Usually, he is the one to take the kick into the corridor.

GWS sat James Peatling on him and nullified him for the first half, so Fagan, willing to depart from his system, swung him forward and figured the kicking game would get going anyway while trusting Zorko’s nous as a forward.

It worked. Zorko kicked two goals in the second half and Brisbane still managed to get nine shots from the back half.

In the Geelong game, Fagan made little tweaks again.

In the first half, Geelong consistently scored goals from exploding out of stoppage, and out the back in high mark situations.

While Geelong don’t have elite midfield talent, they were the highest scoring stoppage team in footy. Why?

They play gash or be gashed football.

Their half forwards get so high up to the contest and cheat forward when they think the ball is coming out, so Geelong always has numbers forward as they surge it out of stoppage situations at the expense of defensive cover. This works not only to get their surge running game going but also as an extra fleet of players running toward goal for crumbing purposes.

That’s obviously double edged as they leaked the third most points to opponents from stoppage.

It’s a risk Geelong is willing to take, and Brisbane were demolished out of those situations early in the game because they couldn’t keep up.

In the second quarter, Gryan Miers and Ollie Dempsey kicked three goals in a row effectively the same way.

In the second half, while it’s hard to tell from the TV broadcast, I think Brisbane devoted more numbers to the back of stoppages to stop Geelong’s run out of stoppage, knowing that they can’t run with Dempsey, Close and Miers.

That decision served three purposes.

The first was to stop Geelong’s high half-forwards and wings completely dominating the game with their run and creativity.

The second was to inhibit Geelong’s crumbing game as Brisbane had numbers to the fall of the ball, instead of seeing a sea of blue and white jumpers as soon as the ball hit the deck. Geelong were the number one ground ball team and number three crumb team in football this season, but in the second half Brisbane was able to neutralise it and won the ground ball battle by 5.

The third was to get Brisbane’s kicking game going. The more numbers behind the ball meant that Brisbane was able to spread when they got the ball back. They stretched Geelong’s zone significantly with their typically expansive kicking game, again led by the dominant Zorko, and were able to run aggressively when they got the ball in defence and effectively gave themselves unfettered corridor access.

They also left their forwards at home to give their backs and mids space to run into and players to kick to.

It was beautiful, but more than anything it was growth.

Brisbane was still excellent at scoring from the forward half, they won the clearance battle, they took 100 uncontested marks and had 70 more disposals than Geelong.

They stuck to their core tenets, but their little tweaks were impactful enough to get the win.

Keep tinkering Chris, maybe it will get you finally get you to the promised land.

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