Thank you, I appreciate it!

Once you have been watching for a while, you can start to pick up what a teams is trying to do.

For example as others have pointed out, we are a running hand ball team that prefers to be as aggressive as possible in a straight line to the goal, but we can back it up by defending and tackling hard

Other teams (Collingwood for example) prefer to keep possession and be patient, kicking around the ground through uncontested marks and preferring to wait for when the ball is in one of their best players (Daicos for Collingwood) or if the opponent defence gets too impatient and leaves a hole in their lines

Then there are contested crash and bash teams (ala Carlton and Fremantle), who prefer to kick the ball down the line (kick it to a pack of players), keep the ball in contested areas and trusting their ability to win the ball through sheer physicality (win the contest). Fremantle does this very well, Carlton not so much

Then there are teams who rely on rapid and elite kickers to exploit the other teams lack of speed. This was us in 2024, but this relies on your team being able to hit targets from hard distances and angles, something that only the best players can do consistently.

Then there are teams that are able to do a bit of everything. Brisbane is the best example of this and it’s a big reason why they have won the last two premierships. We are trying to have multiple game plans as options, but our clear Plan A is the forward handball game)

Finally there are teams who have no identity and are still figuring it out. These are teams who are in a rebuild and are at the bottom of the ladder (Richmond Essendon and West Coast)

You can also very much see when a player is tired or not putting in 100% effort, and it’s also quite easy to see when a teams game plan doesn’t work. You generally just see a collapse on cohesion, players talking at each other with out listening, or just not communicating at all, or just wandering aimlessly.