I think we did gel in 1990 around the middle part of the season winning something like 8 on the bounce, including wins over Glenelg and Port Adelaide footy Park and North at Prospect. Then Weeding went down and some lingering off-field issues came to the fore again. My belief has always been that those sides you mentioned had our measure simply because we weren’t as physically hard as them. John Cahill used to say the more a side handled the ball, the less their style stood up in the presssure of finals (not verbatim by you get the drift). I used to think he was fairly and squarely thinking of Norwood when he said that. We tried to play attractive footy as opposed to effective footy and those 3 sides simply found us out. One of our biggest problems was that all of the heavy lifting in the “mongrel” department was left to Macca and not spread enough across the entire playing group.
That's pretty much right about 1990.
Slowish start, pretty good in the middle, but then the wheels really fell off at the end with thrashings from North and Port in the last 2 rounds before an inglorious exit at the hands of South who had a 9-11 minor round record :roll:
We certainly were bit of a "handball happy" side, which led to over possession.
Perhaps lacking in a bit of toughness sometimes.
1988 sticks out badly where after a good Qualifying win over Centrals we lost Macca (knee) and Kelly (suspension) and then had a disasterous match against Port, although the match against Glenelg ended up being a much closer affair.