At the break of Gawn

People are delusional if they think J. Smith is going to play his first final in a Prelim. If there's anyone who will come in, it'll be Vince. 

On 9/11/2018 at 10:24 AM, Thehardtackler said:

There was a Hawks fan who phoned Gary Lyon and Tim Watson on SEN this morning. He said he thought that Melbourne and their fans were getting ahead of themselves. His justification was that some of the fans had already booked flights to Perth and that the Hawks would not play as badly as they did against Richmond, playing Melbourne. He also implied that the Hawks have our measure. Anybody else hear it and have an opinion? Gary deflected it. 

Hawks fans are forgetting they had one of the easiest draws to finish off the season. Let’s look at who they played from round 15 onwards:

Giants - L

Bulldogs - W

Lions - L

Carl - W

Freo - W

Ess - W (4 pts)

Cats - W (fell over the line)

St.Kilda - W (4 pts)

Sydney - W (SCG where Swans have been bad all year)

Their record against top 8 teams are 5-4 but those wins came against Us, Pies in rnd 1 when they were no good. Geelong twice, and Sydney at the SCG.

I think their top 4 finish has really flattered them. They lost to Brisbane twice, and 8 of their last ten wins came against teams in the bottom 8 with the only two wins being Sydney and Geelong.

Obviously none of this history matters when it reaches 7:50pm on Friday night, but it’s why I’m confident in tipping the Dees to an 8 goal win.

Hearing Lewis speak on 360 last night, you can tell the Hawks won’t be taken lightly at all. Also the team wasn’t overly impressed with the Geelong win with lots of areas for improvement identified.

Call me crazy, but I reckon we’ll beat them by 8 goals. We’ll be better in front of the big sticks this time and I think their younger players will crumble again. 

I hope they use the round 4 game as their barometer. We played nothing like our brand that day, had terrible defensive set ups (and not using wings) plus it was a wet game (Friday will be dry).

Would we rather play West Coast over there again or Pies at the G (if we get past the Hawks)? I’m thinking Pies at the G. Kennedy and Darling (playing a full game) is a scary prospect.

Such an amazing game to be at. It was good to see so many Demons fans show up. To beat Thursday night’s attendance is outstanding!

Can’t wait to watch the pre-match, match and post-match on Fox tomorrow that I IQed.

5 minutes ago, Cranky Franky said:

Worst ever I agree. Sheehan didn't do his homework or didn't ask the right questions.

What effect did the captaincy have on the career of Grimes & Trengove

Why was Stef Martin let go.

Why were Moloney & Rivers traded ? 

Why was Jones ignored for the captaincy.

Time for Mike to retire.

Agreed. If Mike had done his research he would have had heaps of ammunition for rebuttal. 

The one good part was at the end when Neeld clipped Tommy Morris for going early on the Essendon story without all the facts.

I think we’ll win but I don’t say that with much confidence. You can never take a team too lightly with ultra competitive players such as Selwood, Dangerfield and Ablett.

Hearing his side of the story, it seems like a lot of the direction was given to him by higher powers. Lyon, McLardy and Schwab hatched one of the worst plans in footballing history.

Also, he believed the players basically voted in Grimes and Trengove.

No Jack Watts questions.

Are the $35 GA tickets allocated specific seats or just an area? Was planning on going with an MCC friend with a visitor ticket (but sold out) so I’m wondering if we can still sit in GA area with my ticket and he gets in with his MCC pass.

I think another point people may be forgetting is the media commentary that JW was always receiving and Goodwin said in a statement that the narrative wasn’t changing, plus it was distracting to the club. 2017 fuelled fire that his 2016 season did to ease it.

Can you imagine the media commentary this season if he wasn’t in the best 22? For every good news story about us making finals there would be three articles about Jack Watts.

Another 10 votes for him you’d think for round 22 (the AFLCA keep rnds 22-23 votes hidden to add some suspense). He was on 80 at the end of rnd 21 with Cripps on 83 and Mitchell on 87.

Mitchell had an ‘ok’ game against the Saints (might get 2-3 votes) while Cripps had a slow start to the game (2-3 votes) but the big votes will go to the Dogs. Based on that, I think another good game from Max and he’ll win the AFLCA award which is probably the second best individual honour in a season.

1 hour ago, dazzledavey36 said:

Lets be serious though..

The way our half forwards crash and tackle with such high intensity, there is no way Jack Watts would have fitted into that forward line at all.

There is a pattern in the Simon Goodwin game style this year and hence why Jeff Garlett has struggled this year. Even Fritsch for someone so skinny will courageously fly across packs and go for those marks.

I look at someone like Sam Weideman yesterday and some of his tackling and pack marking was something i never saw from Jack Watts at all from his career.

He would not have been in our best 22 yesterday. 

Agree with this. JW never had courage in the air and I feel he never wanted it enough as some other players. He’ll look back on his career as something that has opened doors for him (such as Skwosh and maybe media related stuff) but I feel that he’ll definitely look back on it with regret at what he could have achieved.

The great thing about this forum is that we can share the pain as a collective and use the forum to air our grievances. I feel sorry for the passionate isolated Demon supporter who may not have any friends or family to share the pain with and are unaware of sites like this.

How does a team kick 15 goals in a row? Geez Freo are bad.

Can’t see us winning this game unless we see a dominant performance by a couple of players. Perhaps Gawn, Oliver and Tmac. I just want to see someone take the game by the scruff of the neck and lead the way (and preferably not McGovern).

I’m in Europe at the moment on my honeymoon and I actually wish in some twisted way we were like Melbourne of 2008-2009 where I’d check to see if we’ve won any games at the end of my holiday. Instead I got up at 7:20am to follow the scores and end up feeling deflated.

Giving hope and then tearing it away with disappointing losses is actually a lot harder to stomach.

Sam Michell wrote in his autobiography that Clarkson sent him a text in 2010/11 asking “have you ever played well in a final?”. 

This is the sort of brutal honesty that Goodwin needs to ask Jones but replace the word “final” with an “extremely important crunch game”. If he can’t stand up with any authority in the last 2 games then he can’t be a captain next year. He’s getting into Taylor Walker territory.

17 minutes ago, dazzledavey36 said:

Goodwin said Melksham would only miss 1 week...

Hamstring strains are never one week. Was always going to miss at least 2.

I’m not sure if that has been posted yet, but this season is reminding me a little of the 1998 season at its end. We beat Sydney at the G on a Monday night in Rnd 21 to secure a spot in the finals and then we defeated Richmond in rnd 22 to secure a top 4. Richmond needed to win to make finals but having lost to us, instead finished 9th (which could be like for GWS although I suspect they will still make it)

With top 4 now up for grabs, I have an even stronger doubt that we’ll win this game as every time it’s happened, we’ve dropped one. Surely we can’t lose to the GC. Even if some of our “leaders” don’t stand up, the competitiveness of someone like an Oliver and Brayshaw won’t let this slip.

I’ve just had a quick look at the Suns injury list and with S May also not playing, if we were to lose this it’d be our worst defeat since the 186pt game. 

7 hours ago, binman said:

Agree. Made stranger/worse by his elite basketball background. Basketball 101 is managing the clock and preserving a lead at the death. And rule number 1 is not giving the ball back to the opposition. If you have it they can't score

And you have achieve that by holding it as long as you can yourself before making a pass to team mate who repeats. You don't even take an open shot if it involves giving the ball back with time for the opposition to score and win or draw (which at the elite level can occur even if say 4 points down with only 10 seconds  left - a quick score and a turnover under the basket and you can still draw or even win if one play is a 3 pointer).  Which is what jeffy did.

Trac would have run that scenario a million times in his basketball training. 

I’m going to assume it was a rush of blood to the head and that he’ll never do that again. 

I’m o/s at the moment so I didn’t see the game (just highlights and the last 2 minutes), so I just have two comments.

1. Petracca’s barrel was one of the dumbest pieces of clock mgmt football I’ve ever seen. Ever. I reckon he got scolded pretty bad for that, thus the tears. He had plenty of opportunities to go sideways. All in all it was a horrible last 2 minutes but by god that was awful.

2. Any team that lets the opposition double its goals kicked for the game in the last qtr doesn’t deserve to win. The fact that Geelong kicked 8 goals in 3 qtrs of footy and then 8 in the last is simply disgusting.

1 hour ago, Cards13 said:

Hawkins looks like he is playing Melbourne. Dominating.

Has been in a purple patch of form of late. Bit of a worry for us in a fortnight.

11 minutes ago, Gorgoroth said:

To me, Jones has reverted back to his own game and worrying about his game. 

Viney has stood up when we have needed some one too. Today’s was a good example, he was set a task he shouldn’t have been doing (tagging) did his best, wasn’t great at it, didn’t worry about that but tried to will the club over the line in the last.

We have had many a year of Jones and got nowhere, time for a new sole captain.

Get rid of the older group (Jones, Lewis) and let Viney take over with a few new guys. 

Agree. Viney’s quiet first half was due to Goodwin’s bright idea of tagging Jack Steven - which was clearly a mistake. 

He did this when he used Jones to tag Mitchell (against Hawks) and it failed then as well.

Viney, Gawn, TMac, Jetta and Lever should be the 2019 leadership.