If finals weren’t already out of reach, they are now. Carlton used the pressure application blueprint for beating Freo and shattered us all. Time to clean up the purple shards of broken glass and Restump Podcast yesterday’s damage. 

You want to believe and you want to have hope. But we’re one and a half wins and percentage out of the eight, we’ve got five teams between us and that position and we’ve got three teams in the top four and a further one in the top eight in our remaining seven games. 

Again, we don’t want to be glass half empty folk but we were just taken to the cleaners by a team that was three rungs below us on the ladder. Even in our wildest overly-optimistic dreams, we’re not Lazarus.

Where did it all go wrong yesterday? You could spin the wheel of reasons and you’d be on the money whatever it landed on. 

The Blues simply applied relentless overwhelming pressure on us from the very first bounce and it has seemingly become the blueprint for teams playing us. Carlton’s midfield was too big, too strong, too experienced and we were unable to deal with their pressure, or go with them, despite our ruck dominance. 

Every possession was under pressure or perceive pressure and was rushed and, while our skills aren’t exactly dynamite at the best of times, we struggle further under duress.

We got beaten up by two former teammates in Blake Acres and Adam Cerra. The former was electric in all facets and he’s become the player we all knew we were losing. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we’re feeling the impacts of his departure. 

Compare the two main forwards each team was kicking to. Curnow and McKay – average age 25.5, a total of 202 games and just under 400 goals. Jye Amiss and Josh Treacy – average age 19.5, a total of 48 games and 56 goals. 

We’ve been suggesting it all year that we’re not the finished product and that we’re two years and 40 to 50 games per player away from seriously challenging. The individual contests yesterday only emboldened those beliefs. 

That isn’t to say we didn’t expect a better performance than what we received and it isn’t to say we expected to be below 6th to 10th at this point of the season, but sometimes the reality is stark and isn’t determined by our impatience or expectations. 

It’s more of a ‘how did this happen’ and a ‘where do we go from here’ review podcast than the usual therapeutic hour-long post-traumatic loss pod, but we need to talk it out none the less. 

So, if you can stomach revisiting or talking about yesterday’s dreadful display then by all means come along and hopefully somewhat rid the frustrations and heal with us. 

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