At the break of Gawn

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.

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.

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).

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.

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)

No surprise. He was invisible last week. Dixon hasn’t been any better though and has kicked less goals. Their only performing forward is Robbie Gray. I’ll be very annoyed if we lose to them next week. Their ball movement is dreadfully slow.

It’s difficult to judge Port’s forward line while Paddy is injured (I think he’s back this week though) as Dixon has had to ruck and that other young kid (Marshall I think) is out with personal leave, meaning Watts was there no.1 almost and he never does well in that circumstance. i just hope he keeps his spot so we can see him line up against us in a Friday night game (it’ll be an interesting dynamic to watch).

It’ll probably still be short of the vitriol you threw at Jack Watts over the years.

I’d still prefer Macca running the defensive coach role over Chaplin. He was a spud of a player and has zero runs on the board as a coach.

It says on the MFC website that Macca is a player development coach but according to the article he also shares with defensive line coach role? Makes it even worse that we have two defensive coaches and yet it’s a complete shambles at the moment.

Maybe Goodwin thinks Macca down there will get the message across to the players but Macca didn’t want to go? (Being optimistic here) Tom Morris is a Dees fan and hosts that inside Melbourne podcast, but not sure how good his sources are regarding the reason.

It was a standard Watts game. He had plenty of those games for us as well. He probably still would have delivered the same for us this year but he wasn't in Goodwin's plans.

It'll be great to see him play finals at Port if they are good enough. Watched the highlights of that and his skills were as good as ever. The club has pretty much rid itself off that era apart from Jones (I don't count Gawn due to his injuries) so all we have to do is to look onwards and upwards and see what this team can achieve.

I like Hogan but he doesn't have the athletic leap of someone like a Joe Danniher, Ben Brown or Tom Lynch. Hogan is more of your classic FF/CHF mould like Jonathon Brown. I have no doubt he's still going to be a star but he's not going to be in the same category as the aforementioned 3.