Members' Wing

And has been in and out of the side pretty much the whole time he's been at the dogs including this year. There's about 15-20 players they have that I'm more concerned about playing on Sunday than him.

Salem for Kent only change I'm tipping

CEO is the most important by miles. They're there at the coalface every day, President's role is vastly overrated.

Yep, not saying he would. Just staggered that AngryAtCasey would rather trade him than ANB. That's up there with the more astounding things I've ever read on here.

You'd rather trade Dom Tyson than Alex Neal-Bullen?

Who's Luke Oliver?

Stuie I don't disagree with you but please stop quoting the AFL player rankings as if they're an authority on anything. These rankings have Ivan Maric as the 51st best player in the comp and Max Gawn the 167th. They also have Cam Pedersen as the 266th best player in the comp and Jesse Hogan the 277th.

Yes.

I still think Dawes' best is better than that of the other two. If he can get his body right he's still best 22 for mine.

That's the exact same article in the post immediately above yours

Most people, I would have thought.

I don't. They're $1.55 favourites to win the game.

I haven't seen them, just going off a tweet from Mark Stevens

Petracca on extended bench, what a tease!

The other thing I think we need to do better is open up the forward line, which makes it so much harder for Hogan to be double or triple teamed. Anyone who was at the game on Saturday will have noticed that at every centre bounce Essendon only had 4 blokes inside 50 with the spare 2 playing as "2nd wingers" on each side. This gave Daniher all the space in the world to get one-out contests. Hogan is going to win far more one-on-ones than he'll lose, but even he can't beat two or three. Leave Garlett and Kennedy down there at his feet as their immediate opponents won't be tall enough to negate Jesse, but the other key forward should stay as far away from Hogan as possible.

I'm usually a punter too!

Of course we can all dream, I do too. We've all suffered an almost unbelievable amount the past decade or so, with both on and off-field tragedies. And I would absolutely love to be proved wrong, but I'm just playing the odds.

I'm exactly the same. My productivity for the week halves after a Dees win.

And that's your prerogative mate. I'd just prefer to be a bit more realistic rather than wildly and blindly optimistic. So much can change. Remember how excited everyone was about the list we were building in 2010-11? There's threads that people here dig up from those days predicting our 2013 and 2014 premiership teams, where it eventually transpired that we won six games over the entirety of those two seasons. If Hogan leaves or Petracca does his knee again we're in a vastly superior position to cope now than we'd have been 5 years ago, no question about that. But it'd still set us back. And it's such an even comp these days that you need so many things to serendipitously fall into place, you need good management but you also need luck - especially as a so-called smaller club - or else you become a nearly team like Richmond or North and end up with nothing.

Fair point, I was more talking about playing in Prelims as my definition of challenging for a flag. I don't think we'll make a prelim this year, 2017 or 2018. 2019 to me is more realistic.

I would have thought that of all the supporter bases in world sport, ours would be a little more circumspect after all that we've seen. In this millennium on only two occasions (07 & 08) has a team won a flag without playing finals in the preceding two years, and we're not even a finals team yet. I'd love nothing more than to wipe egg off my face after this post being brought up in a couple of years time, I just think some of the optimism on here has turned to hubris pretty quickly and undeservedly. I'm not arguing that the future isn't bright - I'm really excited - just that those who think we'll challenge for a flag in the next 2/3 years are treading a very fine line between optimistic and deluded.

People don't honestly think we'll be contending for a flag in 2-3 years surely?! It doesn't work like that, there's a progression. Some of the talk on here this past week I'm afraid has been completely delusional. It was great to have a win to start the season, brilliant. But we were at home playing a team who'd missed finals the year before, and scraped over the line with the opposition having thrown the game away with dreadful kicking for goal. The how many will Hogan kick this week thread is an embarrassment. I know most/some of the answers have a degree of facetiousness, but let's just win two games in a row for the first time in 5 years first before we start thinking about one of our forwards kicking 10 goals or being ready to contend for premierships. There's some real light at the end of the tunnel now and the list has a lot of promise but so do a number of others; Dogs, Eagles, Collingwood and the two expansion clubs to name a few, and with free agency it's going to be easier for clubs like Hawthorn, Geelong and Sydney to extend their premiership windows. Suppose I'm trying to say that God knows we've been patient for a long time, and sat through some horrible times, but we're going to need to stay patient for a bit longer. We're not even close to being ready to challenge for a flag just yet!

Not sure where you're going with this Ted.

I've read this four times and still have not the faintest idea what it means.

Jesus, we're really not! We've got a hell of a long way to go before we get there.