Allowing a few days for the disbelief and
to subside, it's actually not a great surprise that at some point this year we produced a monumental cock-up like Saturday. Young sides are notorious for having days out like we did against Hawthorn and Sydney and then just when you think they've past the developing stage and are on their way to greater things, they can't sustain it and degenerate back to producing garbage that we've seen over the past month with the loss to the Suns topping it right off
. I think a few of us said at the start of the year that 2012 would likely be very frustrating even if we show improvement. It's the nature of where our list is at. We needed everything to go right to have any chance of making the top 8 and for the first half of the season it did with hardly any injuries and us being able to play our best 22 or close enough each week. The problem is the AFL season is a marathon 22 weeks and injuries creep up as you go along and once we lost a few key players and had to rely again on the spuds we had pushed down to Coburg we were always going to crash back to being a bottom 8 side.
Actually looking on paper the Suns actually had their best side for the year in with all their senior players back (Harbrow, Brown, Swallow, Rischitelli, etc) whereas we had half our best 22 out and as I said all our duds who are barely VFL standard in. The game had loss written all over it. The worst thing the club did was in the week leading up to Saturday we dismissed last year's loss and made up a whole lot of weak excuses for it (ie. lack of preparation, the strong breeze) when the conditions were the same for Gold Coast. It was as if we were in denial over what happened last year. You don't dismiss and disrespect your opposition who were better on the day last time and they proved it again on Saturday. There's a lot of focus on the last 5 minutes; we should not ignore either the fact we were 6 goals down and were being given a bath in the first half. We didn't deserve to win due to our attitude towards the game and how poorly we played during it. A lesson for the whole club next year.
