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Dear AFL, Please give us an opening round blockbuster to kick off the year, but not against Essendon because they'll be up and about, and not against Carlton because they've got the wood against us, and not against an interstate team because they don't draw a crowd, and not against a top team because that will hurt membership sales, and not at Etihad because our supporters don't like going there. Basically, we'd like to play Richmond every week (but only if it's our home game.) Yours sincerely, Demonland

For me, it's not about the result, I would back us to win that one, but playing the Saints on a Sunday (possibly twilight too) at Etihad while the Bombers get a Saturday night at the MCG is just farcical by the AFL. What happened to rewarding teams on performance? Essendon finished last after systematically cheating the drug code and have been rewarded at every turn.

I saw this on Facebook and thought it was worth sharing here because it shows exactly where Lynden Dunn's heart is - "These are the moments I will miss! Looking my mates directly in the eyes after a hard fought win and belting out "It's a Grand Old flag!" I know in my heart of hearts that I leave the Dee's giving every moment, everything I possibly had. I consider myself blessed to have spent 12 great years at this Football club and no matter where I go or what I do, my veins will always bleed red and blue. Only at the moment there is some black and white in them as well. I have played with some of the all time greats of the MFC and met some incredible people along the way. I would like to thank the fans for their support, especially through some very grim years. There is definitely light at the end of the tunnel and fingers crossed finals are not far away. To all my teammates who I have ever played with ... you are the reason I play football and the reason I love the club so much! You have meant everything to me and I wish the current players all the best in their pursuit for greatness! Finally, thank you @melbournefc for helping me live my childhood dream of playing League Footy. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity you gave me as a 17 year old straight out of high school. Bring on the Queens Birthday Clash in 2017 - Dunny" When the club gives away jumper # 14 I hope it will be to a very special person. Well played Dunny!

For what it's worth, Melbourne's fixtures for round one since 2000: 2000 vs Richmond MCG 2001 vs Richmond MCG 2002 vs Hawthorn MCG 2003 vs Hawthorn MCG 2004 vs Hawthorn MCG 2005 vs Essendon MCG 2006 vs Carlton Docklands/Etihad 2007 vs StKilda MCG 2008 vs Hawthorn MCG 2009 vs Nth Melbourne MCG 2010 vs Hawthorn MCG 2011 vs Sydney MCG 2012 vs Brisbane MCG 2013 vs Port Adelaide MCG 2014 vs StKilda Etihad 2015 vs Gold Coast MCG 2017 vs GWS MCG We have had a simply unbelievable run of home opening matches at our home ground this century.

The Saints?!? At Etihad?!? Let me be the first to say Goodwin has no Plan B!

Can't wait! ...and I'm being completely serious.

no time like round 1 to get the monkey off the back and kickstart the season with a positive win... http://gph.is/18RTEdl

This deal was like walking into a Rolex liquidation sale without knowing there was a sale on. This stuff never happens to us. Go Dee's 2017!!

Saints will be getting Carlisle back too. He is a damn good player. But we have Hibberd and Lewis coming in. Dees by 72

It's just a good chance for us to beat them convincingly, continue to knock off these shite records and set the tone for the season.

Quite frankly, I'm happier to play against a team that's had the wood on us and at a venue where we haven't performed well in recent years than to have a home game against a team we're expected to beat easily. I prefer the challenge. It would have been a lot tougher if we had been drawn to play Essendon in their home game at the MCG (which incidentally makes a mockery of us having to play home matches at Etihad) as happened last year and was originally suggested for a repeat in round one. The Bombers plan on putting on a march to the G again and to have an emotional welcome back for their drug cheats. Beat us last year and derailed our start to the season. Won't happen this year.

I agree Stuie. But we all know the AFL lacks integrity and base all decisions on money and that is it. It's the world we live in unfortunately.

Hogan loves Etihad. And there endeth the postives.

Backup ruck/forward.

Exactly. Round 1 seems as good a time as any to break our duck there and against the Saints. A few fans need to toughen up a bit.

Dogs have been given the Friday night slot after playing on Sunday in 8 of their last 10 opening round fixtures. On-field success is what it takes. This will be a big test first up for both sides. It's still a dismal ground for us so until we can routinely perform well there, we're treading water. This drops us in the deep end. I like it, personally.

50k? try closer to 80k. it's gone 75.7k, 83.5k, 62k (when it was in round 2, and there was much gnashing of teeth from the carlton and richmond folks about it), 81k, 78k in the last five years. it works well as a season-opener, with two 'traditional' vic teams, one of whose former and most legendary players is the longstanding chairman of the afl, kicking off the season, in a fixture request that both clubs have had for the best part of the last decade makes plenty of sense. it's a 'fixture', not a draw. we put in the request every year to host queen's birthday and to have no docklands home games, and one of two requests is granted...peptides requested friday nite season opener this year and were 'granted' saturday nite against a bigger team (e.g. hawks not us), and you can bet that some of the other requests that teams have made won't be granted. i would always love it if the clubs made their requests public so we knew what it was that they'd asked for had been 'granted' or not. it's all set up for television, ultimately. gotta play everyone at some stage, and i have zero dramas playing saints at docklands as THEIR home game but i'll be screaming bloody murder if we host any of the tenant clubs at that ground as OUR home game. that, and the lack of fixture organisation to ensure that we have a bye / longer break after a game in the nt are my two bigger fixture gripes than anything else.

On other forums I will state all preseason that we can't win this, but I do believe we can. Goodwin has another summer to hone his 'outnumber at the contest then spread' game-plan and from a talent perspective, especially in the midfield, I believe we have the Saints covered. The players will be excited to play for Goodwin and won't take in any baggage. Joel Smith is highly rated and suits a fast deck. He's a smokie for round 1.

We need to stop complaining about playing at etihad. Good teams can play anywhere/anytime. Unfortunalty the ground doesn't play to our strengths. Quick sides run circles around us on this ground

Carlton, Collingwood and Essendon host on our ground before us. [censored] off!

I take credit for the upsurge in membership. Last week I registered the entire family, kids, their spouses, grandkids all at my cost. Exception being my wife who claims to be a Bombers fan (fittingly she's a pharmacist) but with Melksham and Hibberd on board, I think she could be convinced - especially if we creep closer to 40k.

For whoever it is who is asking - I'm experiencing the same thing.

It means, "man who disgraced himself by the bad influence of ignoble people but who was able to redeem himself by leaving them and surrounding himself with wise and upstanding people instead".

As a final word on the MCC/MFC membership there is a small proportion of MCC (so-called) Demon supporters who are too lousy to take out the add-on MFC membership despite the modest cost. The MCC/MFC members as a group are generally a passionate bunch and hold these others in disdain.

It's well known that Cousins was not squeaky clean. But as you imply, there really is no comparison. Cousins was into "recreational" drugs, and although they can be performance enhancing, that's not why he took them. (Or so it appears from this distance.) Also he was in it for himself, not for any footy related reason. And, he was cunning enough to time his use so that the AFL testing regime, such as it was, never caught him. He's no angel, and probably lucky. Compare that to the coach-instituted team-wide doping programme at EFC, unprecedented and breath taking in its audacity.

I tried to finish the book a few times over the past several months and found myself skimming the pages as I passed the half way mark without taking in the words. Perhaps it was the style in which the book was written but I tended to lose interest and eventually put it aside altogether. My interest was piqued again with the season coming to an end and my being laid low in bed with a cold so I grabbed my volume and finished it off in a single sitting this morning and into the early afternoon. From my point of view, it wasn't particularly satisfying in regard to it being a revelation of many unanswered questions I had about the troubled times in the lead up to his sacking as coach and the unrest surrounding 186 and its aftermath all the way to the disintegration of the board that replaced that of Paul Gardner which appointed Bailey in the first place. Bails comes across as really good bloke. He was thrust into a job at Melbourne that could never have resulted in the type of success that say, an Alistair Clarkson has achieved at Hawthorn. Clarko most likely would have failed had he come to coach Melbourne in 2008. Similarly, Mark Neeld was, in my view, in much the same boat - there were too many divisions and too much bad history. Some call it the Norm Smith curse and while others might laugh at the notion, it's inescapable that our club has been blighted by more than its share of tragedy over the past five decades since we became known as a club that sacked its coaches. After all, if you can sack the very best, then coaching at this club will always be a dangerous activity. And we sacked the very best in 1965. The troubles that stretched beyond Bailey's tenure were indelibly tied up with that history and I think we're fortunate that the "bad history" might have become just that - history. The club is now run in a different way, without the interference that marred administrations in the past. There is a better chance that the current coach won't have to deal with "wankers" or "bullies" and if that happens, one of Dean Bailey's lasting legacies will have been to aid in the process that rid us at last of the curse.

Anyone notice they can't see who's being quoted anymore? Sorry had to post this here as no need to start a thread about it..

It will be great to break the hodoo against the saints in rd.1. Bring on 2017

It bemuses me that low numbers seem so important. Why? Ron Barassi wore 31, not 3 or 1. And many other very fine players have worn numbers in the 30s and 40s. What's so special about wearing a low number? It's not as if the game was like rugby where every player number signifies a position on the ground. (I wore 14)!!!

Not convinced it works like that. The who plays who home v away in any year is random and not determined on a 1 for 1 basis. - When fixtured to play away games against the Saints those games will continue to be at Etihad, that's their home ground. - Every year it seems we get one home game at Etihad, I doubt that will change and apparently we asked to play a Victorian club there to avoid the 8,000 crowd and massive loss that came v GWS in 2015. If we put in that same request we might well host the Saints at Etihad again. Or maybe the Dogs or North. If we don't have that same request then we'll play the Saints at the G when we are fixtured as the home side. If we could ever win at the ground semi consistently then we'd host our one home game there a year against an interstate side and get 20k. But I don't blame PJ and the club trying to avoid a costly and embarrassing 8,000 crowd.

We'll probably start favourites and I'll make a nice tidy sum backing the Saints!

Let us never forget what happened to the Wizard when he moved from number 33 to 8

Luther, I totally agree. At first I thought this must be some kind of sick joke, but let's just get rid of these silly hoodoos like grown ups and get on with the business of success. Saints at Etihad, yeah so what?! Carn Dees, bring on 2017!

You've warmed to Joel very quickly and adopted the "outnumber and spread" game-plan concept. Smart man! Not sure, as you're not, that Joel will be ready round one as we have three that have just made his job a lot harder, but I share your enthusiasm.

I sort of like this fixture. Nothing like facing your 'demons' first up. First game is only worth four points but all pre-season the focus will be on being as fast and as fit as they have ever been to compete with the Saints at Etihad round 1. Could set us up for the season.

✔️ Just do it!

Anyone, any time, anywhere.

Typical bloody AFL Agree with all you have said!! Friggen useless excuse of a footy ground. Although I hate it, it really does give us the opportunity of payback! Two shizenhuisen performances againts the Aints last year. Plus bury this friggen cannot play at Shitihad fiasco! Time to Flex some muscle and display new mantra "Keen Dees to appease in 2017"

I'm delighted that we're commencing our next phase under a new coach who is known for his attacking flair with our young emerging side, fresh, fit, stronger and with some AFL experience added to make us even harder to beat. The perfect launching pad for a new era.

I'm OK with this. We win...and it's very possible...and we're off to a flying start. The Saints are overly reliant on a handful of ageing champs and Stevens. We can do this.

Only by idiots.

Clever fixture. Put bad games in round 1 when you'll watch anyway. Then you get more good games for the rest of the year!

That is such a dull round 1 fixture. Not a single game i'll go out of my way to watch. I look forward to the rest of the "fixture" where we get to play our home game against the Saints at Etihad too. The AFL. Experts at making amazingly poor decisions seem normal for 10+ years

There's not a team we won't be able to beat in 2017. Inconsistency will be our enemy, but the gap between our best and worst will continue to close.

So, our full list of players 26 or older is - Lewis, Vince, Lumumba, Pederson, N. Jones, Garland, Garlett, Jetta, Spencer. Just 9 players. 5 of them reliably in our best 22, a couple of fringe/mature depth, and an crisis-only ruckman. Of the entire rest of the list, every player is either able to contribute at AFL level, or a kid worth monitoring their progress. Oh, plus Trengove on a one-year contract to see how he comes back from injury after finally doing a pre-season. How did this happen, we have become a club with basically close to no dead wood, no list clogging waste of salary cap players. Some clubs have almost nothing but dead wood!

It never fails to amuse me on posters who cant recognise the difference between everyone recognising the reasons that a player has been delisted (and most posters universally accept that the Dawes decision is the right decision) and giving that player a classless, vitriolic, plain nasty send off. Am I glad or happy he is gone is not a question that crosses my mind. Do i understand why he was delisted and do i agree with decision ? Absolutely. There can be obvious exceptions when we believe a player doesn't give it his best or is disruptive or dishonest about the way he leaves the club. But that is a rarity. Thanks to any player who came to our club, gave it their best shot and for one of many reasons didn't make it.

Newton and Michie were scaffolding, they provided temporary support while the main building was being constructed. I imagine that Bugg and Kennedy will follow suit in coming years.

I don't think ANB has shown any promise at AFL level. He got on the end of a few at Geelong last year but generally struggles to get involved. Needs to find an elite attribute to make the leap in much the same way Sam Mitchell worked on his hands in close to make up for his lack of pace.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I received my copy of "Breakfast with Bails" in the mail early last month. I finally opened up the book this morning to find the place where I had left off reading the early chapters that were available to download onto Kindle and which I read while in flight above the United States. I have now read a further 3½ pages that resonate strongly on a number of levels, particularly after witnessing an outstanding film based on the true story of how a team of reporters from Boston Globe investigated and ultimately exposed a massive cover up at the highest level of abuse within the Catholic Church which had enormous ramifications worldwide, including in Australia (and judging by the weekend’s headlines, it remains a very much live issue). The events covered were disturbing in themselves and for that alone I recommend that you see Spotlight but there was also a sub text that leads me to the story of the 3½ pages of the book about Dean Bailey. I'm referring to the work of the characters in the film - "investigative journalism": a search for the discovery of the truth about a single topic of interest. A search that involves the delving into of documents, interviewing witnesses and researching issues. Checking the facts or if you like, "accountability reporting". We saw it to effect in the work of Fairfax journalists Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie with Stephen Dank and the Essendon saga, just as we saw the opposite with the other type of journalist which brings me to the football editor of the Herald Sun Mark Robinson, a Bomber fan whose body of work on that subject was downright embarrassing. It was also Robinson who threw Dean Bailey under a bus with his "Dead man coaching" story at a point not too far into the 2011 season. That's what the 3½ pages I read this morning were all about. "Robbo" with his "coaching pressure barometer" on his Foxtel programme had already designated Bailey as a high risk to lose his job but this was at a time when his team had a record of two wins and a draw in five games. The two met face to face and Robinson offered a dispassionate response that read a bit like the Nuremberg defence - "Yeah, I went too far; the heading was no good. But you gotta' understand I don't write the headings." In this case however, the words were also in the text of his article so Bailey could have called him for his bullshit but rather, simply unemotionally accepted it with a, "Yeah, no worries." That was Bails. The offending article came after a poor game from Melbourne against the Eagles in Perth. Bailey's team capitulated weakly to some heavy defensive pressure all over the ground, a performance that admittedly, set off doubts in many peoples' minds (including my own) about the style of coaching he had adopted for the still developing side, but Robinson was way out of line coming up with a virtual epitaph to Bailey's coaching career at such an early stage in the season. The team reacted in its next game with a 16 goal win over Adelaide at the MCG. Coaches of losing teams are an easy target and Robinson used his position in bully-like fashion. It was weak, cowardly and ugly but Robbo has form. Look at how he dealt with the Garry Lyon/Billy Brownless situation last week - more easy targets for one with an agenda who might not be too interested in checking his facts before firing bullets. And Robbo claims to be a mate of Garry's who even dropped in to play cricket with the family. Ironically, Lyon has taken flack in some quarters for his role in the appointment of both Bailey and his successor Mark Neeld who were both thrown under the buses by the media vultures. Robbo’s barbs must have had their effect on Bailey even if he didn't show it and even if he didn't read the on-line message boards and social media or listen to talk back radio and taxi drivers. I say this because from my brief experiences of speaking with him at a couple of Melbourne functions (he was always very approachable), I concluded he probably never felt completely secure in his role as the head coach of the club. There was a sponsor’s function at a Volvo showroom on the eve of the 2008 National Draft when I mentioned to him that one of the club's problems in recent years was its inability to turn high draft picks like Colin Sylvia and Brock McLean into champion footballers. He seemed to take this comment as a direct criticism of his coaching and I had to reassure him that this was not what I meant. At the time, Bailey had been coach for one season while Col and Brock had been at the club for five years without fulfilling anything close to their promise (or perhaps our expectations). Ironically, the club drafted Jack Watts with its number one pick on the following day. The "dead man coaching" tag followed Bailey for the rest of the season to the end of July that year. I expect the rest of the book will cover these events in some detail but I don't think it can be understated how difficult life was made for the coach of a team going through a topsy turvy season with an attendant build-up of tension through the club. The constant internal and external criticisms would have taken their toll as it does with all clubs where the coach is under pressure. As for Robbo, he would do well to look to characters like another Robinson - Walter "Robby" Robinson of the Boston Globe who led the Spotlight team's investigation to a Pulitzer Prize, rather than play for sensationalist headline grabbing attention for his agendas. On that note, I'll leave you with the comment of one who is said to have opined that when Robbo was chosen to replace Mike Sheahan at the Herald Sun it was like "replacing Frank Sinatra with a karaoke singer."