wretched.sylph

okay, it's a troll. lol, i bit on the Barry swipe.

yes. no. no. no. yes. yes. Dom has struggled, you are quite right. he needs time, that's all -- which is precisely why the contract was warranted. Dom has excellent skills and he is very quick. he does not have that quick burst that some others have, but by the same token he can keep it up where others drop off. No he is not an "inside type". he never will be. i'm not pointing at you SoNS, but there are some (many) on this forum who would like nothing better than a team consisting exclusively of rabid knuckleheads ("there, i said it") -- there is a name for that: "Rugby League". Dom Barry is not "scared". he is unsure of himself and has played very little football with the senior team. it would help him immensely if his team-mates rewarded him for tirelessly working himself into good positions, but mostly they prefer to kick it down the line so that Chris Dawes can get get scragged by 3 opponents. i have seen a lot of Dom and what i have seen makes me think he will prove a very good winger for us.

I used to be a Juventus fan. The officiating in Serie A during that terrible, league-wrecking drama (match fixing) a few years ago was immesurably superior to what we get in the AFL. The AFLs standard of umpiring cannot reasonably be put down to incompetence because it is always biased, and incompetence is blind. They are cheating.

it's something that can happen when you've taken a lot of really good drugs.

6. Lynden Dunn ... awesome, just awesome. 5. Nathan Jones ... got some important clearances and was very clean today. 4. Jordie McKenzie ... smashed Stanton and was good with ball in hand today. 3. Jack Grimes ... desperation was inspirational. 2. Dom Tyson ... played like Dom Tyson. 1. Dean Kent ... most important forward today. Honourable mention: Everybody else. Great team effort.

There is something in this that the poster, and other player-sympathisers, don't seem to have noticed. The example picks out Essendon's two youngest (at the time). It is indeed easy to feel sympathy for these two players, but they are not representative of "the players". However, the example also picks out two other players: "Watson's doing it, Fletcher's doing it". And that was Watson's job. Where were the senior players, the "leadership" group? What happened to their duty of care towards the young players they were supposed to be "leading"? They were busy slandering the one guy who did have the integrity to ask that pertinent question, Kyle Reimers. [link] [not a great one, but most of the Reimers stuff seems to have vanished] Even given the stupidity of football players generally, it is statistically impossible for all of them to be so stupid as to think all was well. It is quite clear that they were intimidated with science-jargon over particulars of the drugs involved, but the processes were so outrageous that they could not have failed to provoke that uncomfortable "this is not good" feeling: waivers for massive numbers of injections off site... and if anybody asks, it's "vitamins". Seriously? It is much easier to ignore and transgress moral or legal prohibitions as one-of-many than as one-and-alone, and that is precisely what they did — not "it's okay because everyone else is", but "i'll be okay because everyone else is".

And not just any old hill, but a lonely windy hill. I wonder if they pushed [censored] up Hille? :D

CURRENT 2012 PLAYERS (29) 1. Michael Hibberd 2. Tom Bellchambers 4. Jobe Watson 5. Brent Stanton 7. Leroy Jetta 8. Jason Winderlich 10. Nick O'Brien 11. David Zaharakis 12. Mark Baguley 15. Courtenay Dempsey 16. Tayte Pears 17. Jake Melksham 18. Michael Hurley 20. Jackson Merrett 21. Dyson Heppell 22. Jake Carlisle 23. David Myers 24. Alex Browne 26. Cale Hooker 28. Elliott Kavanagh 30. Paddy Ryder 31. Dustin Fletcher 32. Travis Colyer 34. Kyle Hardingham 36. Lauchlan Dalgleish 39. Heath Hocking 40. Ben Howlett 25. Ariel Steinberg 29. Cory Dell'Olio FORMER 2012 PLAYERS (17) 2. Ricky Dyson 3. Scott Gumbleton 6. Angus Monfries 9. Brent Prismall 10. Mark McVeigh 12. Stewart Crameri 14. Sam Lonergan 19. David Hille 20. Henry Slattery 29. Alwyn Davey 37. Kyle Reimers 38. Michael Ross 13. Anthony Long 41. Brendan Lee 27. Luke Davis 42. Nathan Lovett-Murray 45. Hal Hunter POST 2012 PLAYERS 2013 (8 players) 6. Joe Daniher 9. Brendon Goddard 14. Jason Ashby 33. Dylan Van Unen 35. Martin Gleeson 37. Sean Gregory 38. Nick Kommer 41. Will Hams 2014 (8 players) 3. Paul Chapman 19. Shaun Edwards 27. Zach Merrett 43. Kurt Aylett 46. Orazio Fantasia 44. Fraser Thurlow 45. Johnny Rayner 47. Patrick Ambrose

there's a "like" button. not ignored.

McKenzie should come in -- we need a tagger vs collingwood, and his VFL form is very good. Not so sure about dropping Gawn because i think that he and Jamar would provide a ruck dominance that is too valuable to dismiss. Weather may make this decision easy though. Riley would also be a good in vs collingwood. And Dawes is a no-brainer.

i really like this post. especially this bit:

lmao.

netball is a much tougher sport.

No. If anyone can shut him down, Jordie can. Said perfectly.

We lack "champions" — genuine game-breakers. We don't have a Hodge or Pendlebury or Ablett or Roughead or Riewoldt. These players were all PPs (IIRC). And it's not possible to trade for a champion (certainly not from our position). Any PP that we have to trade would be of very little use. We need 3 or 4 players we can build around. At the moment we have, potentially, 1 or 2 (Watts + Hogan).

very good post.

well said.

I think this is not quite right. We have our first 3 tall forwards, our first 2 ruckmen, and our best defender missing. That is more like Roughhead, Hale, Gunston, McEvoy, Gibson + 1 other tall. And if Hawthorn lost that list they would be shot to pieces. Yeah, look what happened to Fremantle's structures when they lost Fyfe and Barlow: no clearance machines > structures fail > smashed by 10 goals. All teams are fragile. No team could cope with an entire element missing, be that outside speed, clearance players, tall defenders or forwards, or even small defenders/forwards for that matter. So to answer the OP's question: Just too much for any team to cover. That said, we do seem to lack forward depth, something i doubt many of us had considered before these injuries.

My feeling is that Trengove has developed a habbit of holding a bit in reserve for the sake of that "elite endurance" of his. It's a hell of a lot easier to run all day if you keep out of top gear. It works the other way around too: if you run all day it's very very difficult get into top gear.

Viv Michie: contested poss. = 7 uncontested poss. = 4 disposals = 10 @ 90% (9 useful disposals) clangers = 0 1%ers = 1 tackles = 2 marks = 2 time on ground = 70% Jimmy Toumpas: contested poss. = 4 uncontested poss. = 14 disposals = 18 @ 66.7% (12 useful disposals) clangers = 1 1%ers = 0 tackles = 4 marks = 7 time on ground = 80% Jack Trengove: contested poss. = 8 uncontested poss. = 11 disposals = 20 @ 55% (11 useful disposals) clangers = 2 1%ers = 0 tackles = 2 marks = 4 time on ground = 96% Matt Jones: contested poss. = 6 uncontested poss. = 16 disposals = 21 @ 71.4% (15 useful disposals) clangers = 4 1%ers = 1 tackles = 3 marks = 4 frees against = 2 time on ground = 75% also consider that Mitchie and Toumpas played forward. it had seemed clear that Roos was going to cut players on account of their "basic skill errors". Mitchie was 1 of only 3 players not to register a clanger. considering how much we were hurt by turnovers, i would have thought that those 3 were the only safe ones.

McKenzie is injured.

yup. i read through this whole lame thread to see if someone had mentioned this. sunday was my first ever live AFL game. i have watched every Melbourne game for the past 4 years on tv. that is, i've seen all of Toumpas's games on tv; and i had never noticed just how strange his running style is until i saw him live. perhaps this is a result of the surgery he had (or the problem which lead to the surgery)? but until he corrects his running style he is doomed to slowness. correction _will_ make him faster.

agree re Jones. he was very impressive today. i would also add that he prevented quite a few turnovers through both sheer hard work and managing to collect some very bad passes. really not fair on Pedersen though. he worked very hard. it's not his fault that the mids took soooo long to make a decision that he ran out of spaces to lead to. worse, they often ignored his good leads in order to pass to... another mid (start all over again!).

his comments will improve when his IQ improves.

he always had it. but it used to be concealed behind a strange moustache and a bad habit of mouthing off. this—>