I'd rather Roos does whatever it takes to get this team as competitive as it can be. If they get a few of the potentially winnable games in the first few rounds it will do a lot more for memberships than a few meaningless wins in this new NAB Cup comp.

This year the NAB Cup is truly Mickey Mouse. There are two games for us (14 days apart) and who knows if they'll even be televised.

These games will be purely experimental at best.

To study history properly requires people to engage in active questioning and learning, and not merely in the passive absorption of facts, names, and dates.

Therefore a real understanding of history requires an engagement in historical reasoning; listening to and reading historical stories, narratives, and literature with meaning; thinking through cause-effect relationships; analysis of documents, photographs, film, newspapers and records of the past.

You don't need to have consensus but its worthwhile to respect other peoples opinions which requires being able to understand and interpret what they say and not to distort because you simply dont like what you hear or read. Hence, my point that our decline began when we were making the finals under Neale Daniher and making mistakes at that time has been distorted into a suggestion that I blame him and him alone for the current state of the club. This is simply untrue I dont lay the blame on any one person for the mess were in which, in my view, is the collective responsibility of many.

I've said before that we should always try to understand how we got into a place (i.e lean our history) so that we dont repeat the same mistakes in the future or as the philosopher Santayana more famously put it:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

That is indeed very deep, WJ.

Our ills are multi factorial.....IMMHO they extend back to Don Duffy (as well as his committee / board) and all who have (to date) succeeded him.

One can but hope that the mold has been broken by PJ and PR - only time will tell.

My recollection is that while we made the finals in 2004 to 2006, it was still very much a roller coaster ride with some real highs and lows (my idea of a very bumpy road) during each of them.

Top of the ladder in round 18, 2004 then finished the season with barely a whimper losing the last four games going from 14-4 to 14-8 followed by elimination in the first week of the finals .

In 2005 we were 9-3 and in second place after giving Collingwood a flogging in round 12 on the QB weekend (albeit that they were tanking)and we then lost 7 in a row to drop to 11th by round 19. Some of those defeats were real floggings and our percentage dropped from 121.5 to 91.5. We were saved by three narrow wins (Geelong at Skilled by a point, the Bulldogs by 4 points - thank you Jeff White - and lowly Essendon by 10 points) which enabled us to scrape into the finals. Eliminated by Geelong first up by 55 points.

Then we get to 2006 when we lost the first three games and were 15th after round 3 before going to 11-4 after a purple patch and finishing up with only 2½ more wins for the season to drop to 7th. We suffered a 10 goal thrashing at the hands of Adelaide in round 22 while, a week earlier, we squandered a 38-point lead in our draw at the Cattery. We then beat St. Kilda in the elimination final before going down to the Dockers 11.8 to 14.18 in a game in which we were never in the hunt.

In the following year, we lost the first nine games on end and our years of doom and gloom were well under way.

I call that a "roller coaster" notwithstanding that we fell into the bottom half of the finals of each of the three years. As to your claim that it's "not even a bumpy road" -

Unfortunately, the club failed to see the warning signs that should have been evident during that crucial time when senior players were given a free rein to play as they wished (often selfishly) and there was little regard to proper succession of leadership or younger players being given more responsibility. As for our recruiting - pfffft! Neale Daniher was past his use by date but we were all seduced (myself included) by the fact that we were making finals but in fact, this was the time when the foundations were laid for the disastrous era to come. That includes the four wasted Bailey years and the last two under Neeld.

I hope we, as a club, have learned our lesson and can move forward in the future but let's not ignore or sweep under the carpet what happened in our past.

I think the roller coaster depended on David Neitz in those years. He held that mob together. You could add Jeff white as well. If hose two were out or struggling the rest just went into shutdown. Perhaps exclude Robbo who stood up when Neitz went down in 2005?

Neitz led by example and was a great player perhaps without being a really great leader. If he had been he would have demanded more and got more commitment from TJ, Yze, Robbo, even White in that era. That said I take nothing away from Neitz who single handedly kept us in the game. Oh for a forward like him who loved smashing a pack to take a mark or set up a goal.

Mark neeld's appointment was an elaborate tanking agenda that the club knew would deliver Paul Roos?

Seriously we've heard all the stories - players in tears during bakes, the Brad Green story, the Brent Moloney story, the game day autocrat stories, the run in with either Viney Snr or Rawlings depending on who u hear it from, etc, etc, but it really serves no purpose to rehash these issues now.

We got what we wanted and needed.

good to see fame day footy training rather than more laps around the tan. Hoping trenners can have a crack this year instead of spending the whole season focusing on stupid maximum weights.

Read the topic and lock it if it's going down this path. We've all accepted our past, but reliving it doesn't help. Want to talk Neeld feel free but go to one of the 50 threads!

Prefer Santana to Santayana