Axis of Bob

And I'd rather be paid a million dollars a year in my job ..... but my past actions and performances have suggested to my employer that doing that would be a terrible idea. It's the same with Collingwood and de Goey. I assume that de Goey is thinking that someone is desperate enough that they will pay him a contract without the behavioural clauses (probably St Kilda, if history is anything to go by) and then make Collingwood decide to match that contract (without the clauses) or let him go. The really interesting bit will be if Collingwood matches the contract or not.

The perceived injustices meted out to Jordan de Goey is a strange hill to die on.

Averaged 0.82 tackles a game this year. That ranked him 555th out of 571 players this year for tackling. Of those who averaged fewer tackles, he's the only one to have played more than 6 games and be under 190cm. The only semi-regular non-key position/ruck that tackled less than him was noted defensive hard man, Riley Bonner. I reckon that's got a fair bit to do with his non-selection in the second half of the year.

This is the comment that you originally took umbrage with. rpfc did not say that the outcome could not be fair. He merely said that having a panel made up entirely of white ex-cops was not the best idea. It's entirely possible that you assumed that he was meaning what you thought he meant but it's also entirely reasonable that he didn't mean it that way. But there is also no doubt that having a panel made up entirely of white ex-cops is not the best idea.

It's not just that, either. A recruiter's job is to identify the best talent but the player selection also depends on what the priorities of the football department are and the strategy that they're going for. For instance, you mention Essendon. I have mates tell me that Essendon's recruiting has been good and then mention the successes they've had. They're mostly right too, but selecting good players is only part of that puzzle because they now have a midfield of Parish, McGrath, Merrett and Shiel ..... 4 individually good players but also nobody over 6 feet tall nor defensively inclined. Then they get smashed every week in contested possession and end up losing. Essendon has selected a team of players whose whole is less than the sum of the parts. How much of that problem is with the rest of the football department's strategy for selecting players, and how much is the recruiter overvaluing the attributes demonstrated by smaller midfielders over the attributes of bigger midfielders?

Saying that Taylor has an awful record outside the top 2 rounds is like saying that Tony Lockett has an awful record outside of taking marks and kicking goals.

So when their good players retire, their age profile will look better?

That also is not true. Max's % of time rucking did not change throughout the year. He consistently spent around 55-60% the ruck, with Jackson spending 35-40%. In fact, for the Brisbane final he played even more ruck, with 66% of his time being spent in the ruck. Coupled with the fact that he played 90% total game time, it means that he only played 25-30% of games somewhere else other than ruck. Source: AFL Ruck Contests - DFS Australia

He's played over 200 games already, so you should probably have had a bit more doubt. Melksham is an experienced role player who can play a wide variety of roles and clearly follows the coach's instructions very well. He came into the side this year and did an excellent negating role on opposition intercept players and won us a game as well. He'll be very low cost, content to play VFL, provide leadership and provides decent cover if things hit the fan. He'll also be an easy delist at the end of next year, which could be important when the alternative would be on a two year contract. I can see why you'd keep him and see why you'd let him go. But overall the difference between those options is kind of whatever.

100% I agree with you. If you want a dominant key forward history shows that it's almost entirely in the first round because it's such a difficult skill set. My comment was only in relation to the correlation between underage goal kickers and dominant AFL forwards, not the value picking a key forward int he first round of the draft. There are a lot of ways to kick goals in juniors, it's a recruiter's job to know (and detect) what parts of a player's game translates from juniors to AFL .... and that's really tough!

Josh Schache kicked 34 goals in 7 TAC Cup games (4.9 goals per game) and 24 goals in 6 Championship games (4 /game). I'm not saying that Cadman is a dud (or making any judgement on him at all), I'm just saying that 'being a proven goalkicker' at junior level is often pretty uncorrelated to success at the next level up. The way those games are played, and the relative development of the different players, can often result in very different skill sets being rewarded.

Just because we didn't counterattack well (we really lost a lot of run from the back half with Salem hobbled, Bowey out, and Rivers and Hunt offering very little offensive punch this year) doesn't mean that having the opposition kick inside 50 slow and short is bad defending. This was especially obvious when Brayshaw went back into the midfield. Also our pressure around the ball was down on last year, which means that it's a lot easier for the opposition to avoid being counterattacked. Hard disagree. They will want him spending a lot less time in the ruck than this year, not more, given that he's a 31 year old behemoth that's had 3 knee reconstructions. Keeping Max going as long as possible would surely be the number 1 priority, and having him be smashed in the ruck for 80% of the game is the worst way to do that. Getting a big brawler to bully the ruck contests means that we can protect Max and use him to dominate the highest leverage aerial contests (wherever they may be).

I know that you're talking about this like it's a bad thing but I see it as the opposite. We are forcing teams that are used to playing a particular way, to play a way that's different to how they want to play. If we are forcing Geelong to kick the ball away from Hawkins and Cameron then that's a win. It also means that we are forcing shallower entries and slower entries, which helps us to counterattack more easily. What Max allows us to do is to troubleshoot. If we are dominating the defensive aerial contest or struggling up forward then we can swing him forward, and vice versa. Max has gravity - wherever he goes the opposition's focus will follow. By bringing in a big ruckman to bully the ruck contest it allows us to use Max to exploit his league leading asset .... his contested marking ability.

Mason Cox has kicked 6 goals in 16 games this year, whilst averaging about 40% ruck time. He averages 0.7 marks inside 50 per game, whilst Max has averaged 1.1. Max is top 50 for marks inside 50 despite being a primary ruckman (23), with Darcy Cameron the next best on 16 and Tim English on 14 being the next highest rated primary ruckmen. The other thing it allows us to do is we can play fewer tall forwards when we know that we won't get beaten in an aerial contest. This allows us to play smaller forward lines where Kozzie can be a more attacking small forward or we can play more creative players like Laurie. Currently we need to play multiple talls because Brown can't reliably bring the ball to ground without a supporting tall to hold the pack. A kick to Lynch, McKay or Hawkins is , at worst, a crumbing opportunity because they won't be outmarked. This allows you to play more mobile players that can cause matchup problems (eg, Cameron, Curnow etc). We have the mobile forwards to make this work, but we need Max to take advantage of it.

http://dfsaustralia.com/ That's where I got it from.

He attended 56% of all ruck contests against Sydney. That's basically the same as his 53% rate for 2022 and 58% in 2021. He averages 89% game time in 2022, which means that he spends about 35% of his time on the field NOT as the primary ruck. This also includes the times where he is just playing behind the ball. Gawn is the best contested mark in the league and teams absolutely wet themselves when the ball is kicked near him. The leading patterns required of a footballer 20 years ago (or even 5 years ago) are very different to now .... since 2017 nobody has even kicked 70 goals, let alone 100. Brendan Fevola was the last player to even surpass 80 goals, which was in 2009. You don't need to be able to lead for the ball anymore because you don't play as much one on one with a zone defence. What you do need is a player that can take advantage of a weakness in the zone (eg, a weaker opponent nearby) or to be able to mark/influence a contest against a set defence. Max does both of those.

Being an early pick is not the same as having huge potential.

All these things were true on draft day in 2015. Since that day 7 years ago he has provided a mountain of evidence across multiple clubs of why he's not an AFL footballer.

We have Oliver, Petracca, Brayshaw and Salem all signed up for at least 5 years, with the first two signed up even longer. That's the period we need to be looking at for our success. Whilst Oliver and Petracca are on the list, we are a chance at winning the flag. With Max still around we would be near-favourites. We should be maximising our ability to win flags over the next 6 years or so, whilst we have our best players playing their best footy. If that means that we have a moderately bad team after Petracca and Oliver retire, then so be it. The difference between finishing 10th and 16th in 2030 is not really important.

Imagine Hawthorn supporters' disgust at drafting Buddy from WA (pick 5), then leaving Hawthorn in the middle of his career for an interstate team .... when they could have had John Meesen (pick 8) for his entire career! At least you would have been happy that we had a whole career of Jack Watts, rather than that West Australian Nic Naitanui. What a terrible, terrible post.

Your mail isn't worth the paper that you flushed.

Rucks tend to play on longer than most. This is especially true for those that don't rely on leaping. I imagine, based on his big bodied bullocking style, that Grundy will still be effective at 34-35.

Don't be silly, old. He was clearly referring to Darren Bradshaw, who is Daniel's younger brother. He's only 41 now.

To be fair, I was referring to writing a blog without receiving feedback. Supermercado clearly gets more than enough of his human interaction from the African start-up community.

I see pessimists as not seeing the forest for the trees. Can you look past the individual faults to see the strength of the whole? It's incredibly easy to see things that are wrong. As humans we are hardwired to be pessimists because we respond to threats far more strongly than we do to opportunities. That's because misjudging a threat often led to being eaten by a lion whereas misjudging an opportunity might have resulted in a meal of nuts rather than meat. The consequences of our failures were very different, so humans erred strongly on the side of caution .... on pessimism. It's easy to point out the individual flaws in a bigger plan because it makes you sound smart and other people are more likely to react positively to the pessimism because they are hardwired to do so. The challenge for us all is to acknowledge that those possible threats exist but also to understand that we are inherently biased towards being influenced by those threats. Overall we are an excellent team who has a proven finals record and several of the best players in the league. And if that is too difficult, because it is genuinely very hard to do, then think about it from the opposition's perspective: If there was one team that you didn't want to play in finals this year, who would it be? The answer is, obviously, Melbourne.