Training today was at a warmish Vic Park. The whole squad was present with Cotchin, Simmo, Polak, Kingy and Meyer in the rehab group with Collard joining them late on. I forgot to mention in the injury thread that Gus also has a slight niggle in the groin/upper right leg.
When I arrived the squad was doing some in close handball work on the wing. Next up was a drill similar to what they did last week designed to make players spread out and run hard into space and encourage longer forward handballs and to runners and to have the attacking team linking up properly with overlap and support. Once again you had about 12 mids (6-on-6) at CHB and the attacking team had to get to one of three forwards - Lids vs Newy, Hughes vs Thursty and Edwards vs Moore. This week it seemed the runners were running more at full tilt when receiving the footy. Only spotted one stuff up where the handball was a fraction too behind the player running at full pace.
The following drill was similar except Rawlings situated himself about 25-30m out from goal facing away from the goals and the long kick forward was deliberately batted down to work on crumbing. Initially the players attacking overran the ball getting too close to Rawlings allowing the defending team to clean up (Moore was excellent in one play). After about the 4th or 5th go the attackers started to get their hands on it better with Petts kicking about 3 goals and Tambo, Whitey, Edwards, Browny and McGuane kicking one a piece. Edwards set up McGuane's goal cleverly where he scooped the loose ball from Rawlings' bat down and with two defenders chasing him towards the pocket he did this classy look away handball straight to McGuane running past who didn't need to break stride and ran into an open goal
. Shane got a big cheer and high 5's from the rest of the group too.
Next up was footpassing circle work with a twist at the end. With the squad split into 5 groups spread around the ground the ball was passed from one group to the next until it got to the last group on the wing who had to pass to one of the assistant coaches who were randomly calling for the ball leading from different positions inside 50. It was cleanly done (as were all the drills today) so I watched Gourdis' kicking a fair bit during this drill. He's fine over short-mid distances with his kicking but his action looks a bit clumsy when he has to stretch for distance and he floats it up and under.
The session finished with the squad spilting up into smaller groups to work on specific skills. Gus, Putt and Cartledge were with Monkhurst doing ruck practice; Foley, Cogs, Sugar, Collins and Whitey were with Chocco practising ground-ball work bouncing off a bag. The rest were doing some run and carry and set shot goalkicking. Hughes was working on his marking on the lead.
While warming down the players mentioned they had group meetings (back, mid, forward) in the afternoon to go to.
