Carlton’s head of football Brad Lloyd has delivered a frank assessment of the club’s performance so far in 2021.
The Blues were a chance at three-quarter time of their Sunday clash with Sydney at the SCG, but fell away in the final term to go down by 22 points in an all too familiar occurrence.
That defeat has the Blues pinned in 13th position on the ladder with a 4-7 record and in danger of slipping away from a much-needed finals berth.
Lloyd has offered his opinion on the matter at hand and how the Blues are again underachieving under David Teague.
“It’s been pretty ordinary at this point in time,” he said on SEN Breakfast.
“There’s still plenty of footy ahead, but we’ve been disappointing, to be frank, on how we’ve gone so far.
“We’ve managed to score okay offensively, but we struggle to defend the way we’d like and been scored against pretty heavily at different stage of games so we need to improve.”
Garry Lyon spoke of the constant expectation on the Blues and how it has become a theme that they concede blocks of goals in games which more often than not leads to defeats.
Lloyd admitted the trend, indicating that is becoming a bit draining.
“I guess as you’re building as a team you take a bit out of that, but you don’t anymore because it’s happened so often,” he added.
“We have been in games for so long, so we don’t really take much out of that now.
“We take it that we can be in games and be 27 points up against the Bulldogs and probably should have been a bit further up, but it’s been happening a lot.
“When we’ve turned the ball over we have struggled to get up and cover opponents and defend one on one as strongly as we’d liked.
“And probably our ball use could improve as well. So look, there are areas we’re going pretty hard on behind the scenes with the playing group and the coaching staff and we’ll keep doing that until we get it right.”
Asked by Tim Watson if it is time to start looking at whether it is the methodology or the personnel that is holding the Blues back, Lloyd replied: “I think it’s a bit of both.”
“We’ve been working on the method, but then there’s times in games when it’s not a method thing. Often times it’s poor execution by a good player. Just some errors that you don’t see during training, but I guess that’s pressure and those things can mount in games.
“We’ve had games where there have been moments like that that have cost us games and cost us leads. That’s what good teams don’t do, they get it right more often than not.
“It’s a bit of both. Work on our method, work on our personnel. As a club we’ve just got to keep building our list, building our durability as well.
“It can be complicated and simple at the same time.”
With the club sitting two games and percentage out of the eight at the halfway point of the season, have the expectations been tempered already?
“It becomes more challenging but we’ve got a lot of winnable games coming up as well,” Lloyd said.
“We’ve been in games against top sides, we’ve probably been in the majority of games throughout the year. We feel we can win these games of footy, we’ve just got to get it done.
“It’s probably not a big concern right now, we’ve just got to get our act together for this weekend.”
The Blues meet West Coast this weekend with the venue still to be confirmed amid Victoria’s latest COVID-19 outbreak.
Following that there is a bye scheduled for Round 13, before fixtures against GWS, Adelaide and Fremantle as they strive to get their season back on track after three losses from their last four games.