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Stop trying to hide Simon What did all our Coaches do in Round 1 over in Perth? Looked like bugger all to me. Still played exactly like 2019....

Whilst I feel sorry for the individuals who have lost their jobs and their places on the gravy train, this could be the best thing ever to happen to the game. Dozens of assistant coaches, line coaches and every other fad the AFL community can concoct, and the players execute the basic skills worse than they did 30 years ago. So much time is spent on structures and tactics that do nothing but complicate what should be a simple game and detract from the spectacle. These people have created the illusion that they are essential, when they are anything but. I look at a player like Petracca who has all the talent in the world, but his natural instincts have been beaten out of him with a sledgehammer and he now does things like kick 40 metres side ways to a teammate on a worse angle, instead of having a shot at goal. There is no way he would have done that before reaching the AFL.

No.31 1994 Round 24 v Sydney at SCG As we sat down to watch this last regular season game on TV. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in September in Sydney. The Dees had to win to make the finals. We were playing the bottom placed Swans away. The Swans were coached by Ron Barassi, brought in to be the saviour of the derailed Swans. Whilst they were on the bottom, sometimes the Dees had trouble with such games so I remember being a little anxious. The Demons started on fire with early goals from Lyon, Hilton and Schwarz but the Swans were also attacking and scoring. Paul Kelly always played well against us and was again today. Cresswell kicked two goals to keep the scores close. We were up 8 goals to 6 goals at quarter time. The score bonanza continued with Martin Pike kicking 3 in a row to give us a handy 5 goal advantage before late goals to the Swans had us up by only 14 points at half time. Lovell and Kowal were injured and we were down to 19 fit players. Dees had 14.2 thanks to Pike,Schwarz, Charles and Lyon as multiple goalkickers. Our accuracy continued right up until 19.2 when Lyon missed one. Schwarz was showing his ability. Great marks. Kicking goals from the boundary about 55 metres out. Wow. He had just turned 22 yo but a star. The Swans could do nothing to stop him. Tingay and Viney were driving the footy forward to our dangerous forwards. We were 36 points up by 3/4 time with an amazing 21.4.130. Sean Charles added his 4th and 5th, and Schwarz his 9th goal as we kicked 27.5. Schwarz 9, Pike5, Charles 5, Lyon 4. A dangerous forward combo. The day had 3 stories. Firstly the amazing accuracy. Secondly, finals here we come ! Relief but excitement. Thirdly, confirmation of a new star, the equal of any star forward in the league, David Schwarz. Nine goals from CHF. He had 54 goals and over 150 marks for the year from CHF. His leap and agility were unrivalled. He’d kicked a goal in every game. Melbourne 27.5.167 defeated Sydney 18.13.121

This argument is a furphy... Given there has been no live sport on TV for a while even a Casey v Frankston game would rate through the roof.

Is it my imagination, or was Neeld given the flick seven long years ago? And not last week?

Jeez the picture of him for the article doesn't look great. I'm not trying to derail the conversation to mitigate his own personal choices, at the end of the day he had free will to make his own path, but our club at the time was such a disgrace and I really did think we had a player with him. He absolutely killed it in the final against the Saints, he racked up possessions easy and was a decent kick of the footy. He should've been a long term top player for us, instead we brought in the tanking culture to go on top of an already poor club culture. He went to Carlton, which to me smacked of arrogance when talking with distain about the tanking attitudes at Melbourne. Carlton were just as bad as us, they just did it early enough to not cop any sanctions.

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a lot of the growth in coaching/football dept over the last few years has been to focus on those 1% advantage areas. i would argue that this has often been at the expense of the football basics . Focussing on basics doesn't need more coaches or specialist coaches. keep it simple (kiss) would make it easier on the players and they could spend more time on the footy skills side instead of the bs which most obviously get confused with anyway.

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I agree with you to a degree on Robbo, but on Davey im sorry he revolutionised the small forwards role as we know it today. With his quieter than a librarian tackling, pace and exquisite finishing skills.

Laurie Fowler has to be in the team. Three time Bluey Truscott B&F ahead of Robbie. Fowler did the job every week. He was tough. Determined. 140 games in 7 years. Victorian rep when only him and Robbie were considered the only decent Demon players. Played for Victoria in 1981 and then got cut by the Dees. It was Ridiculous. I saw Grinter and Fowler. Both were great blokes to have in the trenches. But I’d choose Fowler.

Regarding your last line, spot on. Everyone loves Stynes and nobody would ever want to criticise him, but it's important to reflect on a few home truths. . Stynes, Lyon and Schwab were very very close to each other and had been for years. Stynes was the one who brutally sacked Paul McNamee on the spot as soon as he walked into the club as President and appointed his mate Schwab into the role. McNamee had only been in the job for 5 minutes, yet apparently his death knell came when he wanted to recruit Jonathan Brown on a big-money long-term deal. Suitors were hardly reaching out far and wide for Schwab and he didn't appear to leave Freo in glowing colours. It was clearly a boys club back then. Stynes might not have been well when the 186 debacle occurred, but his allegiance would certainly have been with Schwab over Bailey sadly. It continued beyond this. . Garry Lyon became involved and looked after Schwab (along with Stynes), giving Schwab a 2-year deal (which alone should raise eye-brows). Who hired Neeld - primarily Lyon and Schwab. Not one to excuse Neeld because he's clearly shown even in recent TV interviews his lack of self-awareness and man-management skills, something you would have expected he would have reflected on over the past 7-8 years. However, it's still my view that he was initially hired to coach with one mandate from Schwab - to [censored] the players in an old-school militant manner - much because of Schwab's knowledge of their distain of him. The reality in any management position is you can lose your direct reports (or players in this instance) in a single moment only never to get them back again - it's clear Neeld did this straight away and had no way back. Yes, it was his fault. Was it a condition he was hired under? Perhaps.

Just curious if people are actually looking forward to the footy coming back this year? Right at the moment I really couldn’t give a stuff about this year and the thought of watching Collingwood, Essendon and Richmond every week for the next five years is also sickening.

The coaches are worried about how the standard of footy might look like going forward , but the games it at its lowest ebb IMO. The low scoring has reached a crisis point. In 2000 we had 5 games by the end of round 1 where both sides scored 100 points. Last year we had 3 games - for the entire season!

The loss of development coaches will be critical as the "hub/lockdown" situation continues. This club of anyone has learned how damaging the lack of good development to young players can be, thinking that all was required was to draft talent. Coaching is not about what happens on game day alone. In fact it is the easy part of the job. Getting the basics and the game plan/style into 40 odd players is not something that can be done by 1 or 2 assistants. And what if the plan has to change because critical players get injured? Other players have to be taught a new/different role. Look how miserable we were last year, when we had all manner of players on the field playing out of position, or not ready to play at senior level.

This was well put together but as mentioned above I'd be interested in getting an understanding of why they played so badly. Was part of it that Geelong didn't pull up like many teams do when a major thrashing is brewing. It was the last season where a variety of teams were savagely beaten (even we won three games by over 80 points) and the Cats did beat Gold Coast by 150 points the next week (fair fortnight) so I wonder if what would have been a 20 goal loss under normal circumstances exploded because teams were in a percentage race. Or were we so bad that once they got to half time 110 points up they thought they could go for something special without extending themselves. Also: - Did Bailey really pay for the team to stay overnight in Geelong because the club wouldn't pay as was rumoured at the time? - Why did Moloney play when he was so sick that he went around like a zombie for the first half having zero touches? I know they're not going to make it a four hour doco but these are things I'd be interested in. - I'd like to hear more about the Schwab squib. It's one thing to say you can't sack a CEO and coach at the same time but why? We'd just lost a game by 31 goals, I don't think anyone was going to think we were any more of a shambles if a board member took over as interim CEO for a few weeks. It was certainly a memorable afternoon, right down to going to a movie afterwards and yelling at some hipster doofus behind me for talking too loudly.

Start riding scooters to training? #dingonfire

Height problem easily fixed: Jakovich FF, NeitZ CHB, Hardemann HBF. Febey EMERG. You gotta be cruel to be kind. A great side.

B: FOWLER, WIGHT, JOHNSON HB: B.LOVETT, HARDEMAN, S.FEBEY C : TINGAY, WELLS, FLOWER (C) HF: LYON (VC), SCHWARZ, YZE F: FARMER, NEITZ, DAVEY FOLL: GAWN, T.VINEY, JONES IC: STYNES, J.MCDONALD, GREEN, ALVES EMERG: WILSON, ROBERTSON, JAKOVICH, WHITE

Terrible story. I remember seeing him out relatively frequently in that 2012 - 2015 period. Venues where that sort of stuff was rife although it was never my thing. He was always too slow. Looked like he was 38 when he was 28. Hang on, I'm 38 and look younger now ?

Paywall.

From broken to smelling the roses. Awesome, I hope he makes it to the games record for us and hope above all hope gets to lift the premiership cup before he’s done.

who knows!

Oh dear. These rants could go on and on....

Is posting lots sequentially in a thread the online equivalent of raising the volume of your voice in an argument to talk over someone to get you point across?

what did you expect.....a phd thesis?

Yet another F1 plot twist: https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/52661201

Really not excited by this, mainly because we will struggle to win games.

You'll probably find out more here in a couple of minutes: https://www.afl.com.au/news/433632/watch-live-at-12-45pm-aest-gillon-mclachlan-to-reveal-return-to-play-details

As an MCC member I insist on the right of deciding to go or not on the day. Usually not.

The good teams will be Bing. if you have to sacrifice anything, it should be the hangers-on, and the lifestyle coaches. The very last people to be "let go" should be the people who teach the basics... kicking, tackling etc etc. If MFC get rid of people who teach the fundamentals of Footy so we can keep other , more generalised coaches, then we deserve whatever comes our way. NO club can afford to get rid of kicking/tackling coaches less than MFC. While we are at it, identify whoever it was that advised our mids to keep bombing it long to the forwards.... they would be the first people i would assist with a career adjustment. Interestiing times ahead.

Hi-5ing yourself... gold haha. ps kudos.

Is this the MFM thread? he seems to own this one,

Deserves a dong, ding

Maybe the game should be less coached, analysed, compartmentalised, scrutinised, etc. Many observers talk about footy being a simple game at its core, and it should be! This is an opportunity for the league and clubs to bring the game back from a two hour, over-thought, rolling scrum

For the first half maybe but if it's not a close match then people will switch off. The AFL will be looking to pit two evenly matched teams. We would get belted by both Collingwood and Richmond based on 2019 form. Until we can prove that 2018 was not an aberration then we don't factor into evenly matched contests.

Will draw a huge sellout crowd at the 'G'...

He's got to kick them from now on, as they will all become 'captain's goals'. Perhaps that's the genius strategy in making him captain, so we get an extra match winning goal out of him here and there? In all honesty though Max really does need to sort this problem out and probably even more so now that he is captain. These misses would have been twice as deflating for the team comming from their captain. I also think we should give Nathan Jones some credit, he was generally pretty bloody reliable at slotting goals under pressure. It's really quite frustrating, because Gawn isn't a horrible kick and is quite capable of nailing them from 40 - 50m out.

Easy fixed. He always sprays to the left. Teach him to run towards the point post (not straight at the goals) and his natural action will swing the ball through the goals. Like Buddy does with his left footers when he brings the ball across his body.

IMO The worst coach we ever had. EVER! Cale Morton was a pretty limited footballer also IMO!

Making things up? he had one bad hamstring injury that he took 6 weeks to recover from, as opposed to being an ongoing problem

Well I had a good laugh.

Nah, that's a bit revisionist I reckon - the club let down Jnr Mac big time and paid the price. He missed a whopping total of 6 games through injury in his final year with us and, statistically, was performing as strongly as ever. He still had 2 good years left when we showed him the door - 2 years that would have been spent showing Scully, Trengove, Tapscott, Gysberts, Morton etc the ropes of AFL footy. Not saying he single-handedly would have turned around the careers of our many wasted draft picks, but our lack of senior leadership at the time was undoubtedly a massive problem. There's a reason one of the first things Paul Roos did when he arrived at the club was recruit a 31 year-old Daniel Cross.

That's very generous to Neeld and his approach to development, communication and people management. Each to their own, but tactical footballing nous is just a small element of coaching and you don't 'toughen up' young people by neglecting to nurture and support them. If a player has a positive relationship with their coach, they will run through brick walls for them. You don't hear many stories of Sheedy, Matthews and Malthouse being cold to their players - they were more akin to father-figures. The club was at its lowest point in its long history when Neeld left. He, and the regime that he was working under, completely gutted the club.

Wrong. Delisting senior players is one thing, doing it in the fashion we did is another. Absolutely appalling way to treat guys who'd given their all to the club for the bulk of their careers.

Delete. Bad memories especially that loss v cats.

SERIOUSLY!!