Ross Lyon and the Illusion of Change

Ross Lyon and the Illusion of Change

GuyWhoLikesSport

Guys like Tony Soprano and Don Draper live in worlds that shift constantly, but they themselves remain mostly static.

When they do change, it’s usually temporary.

It’s a costume, not a transformation.

Take Don, who enters his marriage with Megan as a happy man who is even comfortable admonishing Pete for cheating on Trudy.

By the end, Don’s back to cheating with his friend’s wife and sabotaging his own life not out of passion, but because he is what he is.

Ross Lyon, this year, has done the same thing: threatened to change, even made tangible changes, but ultimately resorted back to his old ways.

Over the last 10 games of last season, the Saints made clear shifts in their game style.

Ross didn’t abandon his defensive principles, which meant having numbers behind the ball and a still top-5 defence.

That weight of numbers also meant that the Saints were still a solid back-half scoring team, sitting third in the competition for back half scoring and second at scoring off turnover over those last 10 games.

That’s classic Ross stuff.

Two things changed, however, that seemed to indicate that he was ready to change.

The first thing was the way St Kilda moved the ball over the last 10 games.

They kicked it more and upped their pace in the kicking game, trying to get some momentum in their own game rather than prioritising taking away the other team’s.

The second thing was their improvements in their front half game.

Across the season, the Saints were the worst team in footy for front half scoring.

Over the last 10 games, however, they kicked an extra goal per game from the front half and got to 13th.

That looked like growth and they came into the year looking to build on it.

They were going to have a genuine engine room behind the ball with Jack Sinclair and Nasaiah Wanganeen-Milera and remain a strong back half team, but they had a path to a forward line that should be able to apply genuine ball pressure regardless of Max King’s status.

Jack Higgins, Lance Collard, Liam Henry, Max Hall, and Dan Butler are all theoretically the kind of frenetic pressure players that you need in the modern game.

Add in the alleged key forwards that they had in Mitchito Owens, Cooper Sharman, and Mason Wood, and you see a small forward line that isn’t going to win a lot of aerial contests, but should be able to make life painful for rebounding defenders.

In the first part of this season, that was true as they stayed true to the tenets of their evolution.

In the first nine games of this season, the Saints had their seven best front half scoring games.

Against Fremantle in Round 8, for instance, their speedy forwards exposed a too-tall back line and completely neutered any Fremantle back half game.

The Saints held Freo to their third worst back half scoring game for the year.

Their two worst games were against the two most damaging front half teams in the AFL – Collingwood and Gold Coast.

So why was Bailey Dale and the Bulldogs allowed to waltz out of their back line all night on Thursday night against St Kilda on his way to 36 disposals and driving the Dogs to eight back half goals?

Ross is like Tony Soprano trying to stop himself from cheating on Carmela with Julianna Skiff.

He just can’t help himself.

Bailey Dale wasn’t touched on his way out of defence because he didn’t encounter a St Kilda player until he crossed halfway even with Hall, Higgins, and Butler all playing.

It’s been a common theme lately.

Even with personnel that should suit forward pressure, over the last five games the Saints are last in each of front-half scoring, time in forward half, and inside 50 differential.

They’re even last in stoppage scoring.

Part of that is not having Ed Richards types who can make something out of nothing, but another part of it is that they don’t force enough stoppages close to goal to score from any of them.

That is an impossible way to live.

In modern footy, unstoppable forces are moving once-immovable objects.

Ross, a pioneer of the front half/back half dichotomy that defines the modern game needs to understand that what worked in 2009 doesn’t work anymore.

You can’t just flood defence and kick intricate, slow goals.

Even with this month’s scoring downturn, footy is in a rock and roll era. He needs to move with the times, like he threatened to early in the season.

He would probably tell you that he’s at a talent deficit and he’s trying to limit the damage to keep the games close.

On the talent issue, he might be right overall even if I am higher on the list than others.

But, even if you hate the list, all the forwards, including their collection of undersized key forwards, are the kinds of players that should be able to make pests of themselves as pressure players for rebounding defenders.

On the issue of damage limitation, while only Essendon is less threatening with their ball use, and while the Saints flood their defence as a first resort, the Saints are giving up the third most points in footy over the last 5 weeks.

How’s that going?

Ross, do what David Chase and Matt Weiner think are impossible.

Change.

You did it once. Do it again.