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Back home this week to take on the unbeaten Tigers who look like being the team to beat (just ahead of WP, SU, SF & Peelmantle) in 2022.
They look to have a far more even spread across their 22 this year with the likes of Edwards, Elliott, Lim, O'Connor, Carter etc really stepping up to support the usual dominate Bolton, Rogers, Mountford, Martinis etc whilst House, Manuel, England & co have been reliable targets up forward in hitting the scoreboard.

For Swans it was good to finally get a win in a close game after what had been about dozen losses in similar circumstances in the last couple of seasons.
Once again not much point nominating players who might be available to play as something the first 3 rounds has proven is there is always going to be a handful missing through covid and most are only declared out on the Friday night/Saturday morning which is very frustrating both for the club and fans alike!
 

Fairly depressing looking at Swans record against the Tigers over the last 7 or 8 years. Of the 18 times we have played them since the start of 2014 we have only won 3, the last being Round 7 2017 at Bassendean. So Claremont have won the last 9 meetings. On a positive note Swans did produce 2 competitive performances against them last year, a 24 point loss in round 1 ( even though we kicked 18-1!) and a 22 point defeat at Claremont in round 22. So maybe we are due for an upset win!

I think Swans plans for the game would have to revolve around a tight defence to try and restrict the potent Tiger forward line and try to reduce the impact of their prolific midfielders ( easier said than done I know. )  If Swans are to pull off an upset then they will have to reduce it to an ugly defensive game. As we saw last year Claremont have too many goal kicking options for Swans to win a shootout.

Interesting to see where Jones plays this week although its hard to speculate on individuals because of the ongoing COVID situation. Hopefully the boys who missed last week will be able to return.

Mike I just did a quick calculation and have tallied that we have had 25 of our best 45 players from our senior list have missed at least 1 game so far this season including a number who have missed all 3 games whether that be from covid, injury or other.
That is on top of only having half a squad on the training track at the moment as was mentioned on a previous thread.
As we have posted before we just dont have that experienced enough depth to keep covering that amount of players being unavailable that the likes of CL, WP, SU, SF etc seem to be able to do most seasons.

Wow thats a lot of players out BH. Puts the season so far into a bit of perspective. We were just a few kicks away from being  3 -zip instead of 1-2, despite all the COVID issues. Hopefully this will all settle down at some stage.

Got to keep tight reins on the midfield Claremont are quite strong on the ball and around the centreline and if Swans' forwards can harrass their halfbacks a bit that will greatly help out cutting run or slowing things down.
Mind you Covid will impact on manpower so it's a hard task
 

We hear you Southy, it has been a bloody frustrating season so far with all of the covid outs every game but not sure what else we can do at this stage other than hope the 22 who do run out give their all to compete for the jumper.
With any luck hopefully the current covid situation improves over the next few weeks at least..............

COVID is all over the place at the moment. The case numbers reported are nowhere near the real tally.
It is moving quite rapidly amongst young people and footy clubs are obviously full of young people. Every club will be affected at some point so it makes predicting games meaningless.

The team named looks OK with Aiden Clarke and Pina back. I would have bought Kemp straight back in as he is another goal kicking option and we are going to need all the options we can get against Claremont. Hopefully no more last minute COVID withdrawals. Also good to see Josh Cipro named in the reserves, hopefully he can get through the game and return to the league team after the State break.

This game could be won or lost with one simple move of the chess board - we must not go head to head against Bolton and let him run around opponent-less through the middle. Historically he runs his little energy saving X patterns through the middle of the ground, gets dangerous into the forward half and has crucified us. Hopefully we don’t let him roam free as we always have. In the least man him up and force him to chase easier stats deep in the defensive half. Simply can’t afford him to let him have his usual care free 35+ and 3+ majors against us if we want to win 

After 10 appearances and 5 years we have finally knocked of Claremont.
Form lines like in the AFL will be difficult, with COVID ravaged teams.
Had our noses in front all of the second half.
Even with multiple 50/50 decisions going Claremonts way.In the second half..
It did remind me of Claremonts loss in the 2020 GF.Control of the footy but overuse of the footy.Which will always turnover the more you handle it.