Preserving the Pearce Powder

Everything is under control. The purple Pearce powder preservation plan will pay off. Time to Restump Podcast the manic moments of mayhem against the Dees.

Straight off the top, quite simply, if Alex Pearce plays, we win that game and you can't change my mind.

We may have won plenty of games without the skipper in the past, but when the heat really goes on, we need the General back there organising and executing.

Did the Dees expose our vulnerabilities that we may not have known existed? Is our reliance on Alex Pearce a concern? As silly as it sounds, has constant winning wallpapered over our deficiencies or reliances?

We haven't faced a lot of adversity this season to date. We've had just a handful of challenges and our injured players rarely resembled a list.

The reality is Andy Brayshaw was down, Murphy Reid finally saw a tight tag and had little influence, Freddy was horribly absent, we were vulnerable down back, we wandered away at times from the selflessness that has served us so well, we suffered moments of complacency and yet we lost by just a kick. 

To put it bluntly, the Dees played out of their skins and cannot play better than they did. We, on the other hand, can and will.

Tidy up of just one of Mason Cox's nightmare moments and we walk away with another 4-point package. However, it is preferable to get the lesson now rather than in September.

From this point on, in future meetings against Melbourne, Harrison Petty's name is in big black bold letters pregame on the whiteboard. He doesn't get to shed tears over some hurty words, garner widespread sympathy, play the taunting victim and be the catalyst for a pathetic rule change, and then come out and make a mockery of his own episode and play this wannabe fake tough guy character! You can't have it both ways and it was a little disappointing we allowed it. Alex Pearce would have rendered him irrelevant!

Anyway, we live, we learn, we look into the loss, lock in on the learnings, leverage the lessons and liquidate the lapses.

On some small level the loss alleviates the pressure a little. It removes any dangerous perception of invincibility that could have possibly internally crept in. It could work favourably as a grounding agent that will do us well heading into September.

Well, that's enough laundering of the language here. The truth is, other than from a mental perspective, the loss had no impact and it means very little. However, dismissiveness alone doesn't feed the bulldog. So, join us to continue the loss legitimising conversational gymnastics on the pod.