Axis of Bob

I think it's more that Melbourne have shaken loose the possibility of him being traded and other clubs have seen this and done whatever they can to give themselves a chance to get him. He's an absolute jet and it would be silly not to speak with him if there was a chance he'd move clubs. I think we are uniquely placed to have him shake loose, with a situation and carrot for GC that other teams just can't match, but I'd hope we'd make the call too if the roles were switched around. That is, GC won't move him for another team and he's contracted until 2028, so the point is pretty moot.

Yep. I think the difference is that having those players makes your club more brittle, less resilient. Everything is fine when you're winning at every club. When you hit a bit of a bump in the road then some clubs can deal with it whilst others can't and I think that is a lot to do with the internal trust and faith that the team/club has with each other. If something goes wrong but you believe in your team mates to do the right thing then you just keep your nose to the grindstone and get through it. If you've got some problems bubbling away under the surface when something goes wrong, that's when those issues pop up as a reason for the problems and the internal divisions happen. Bailey Smith's issues started being an issue before and after the GF that they lost. Those issues are now sitting just below the surface and, if anything goes wrong in the future, team mates are going to link Smith's behaviour and the GF loss pretty closely. I agree that Maynard and Zorko are very different in terms of their effects on team culture.

Judd’s strength is his ability with the play in front of him, particularly one on one. His weakness is his ability to influence the game when the play is around him (ie, 360 degree chaos), like you see in the midfield. He struggled with this in juniors too, when he just couldn’t get involved in the play further up the field and ended up getting through to the rookie draft. We did well to identify a role for that type of player, where the game could be much simpler for him and let his strengths work well. He works in straight lines, unlike Bowey and Salem, which is why they were preferred as rebounders. McVee has a shot up the field in the midfield but simply couldn’t get near the footy at all. It’s played away from his strengths and leant in to his weaknesses. Freo tends to tell returning players exactly what they want to hear (eg, you can be a high possession player!) because they know that the trick is getting them to make the initial move back ‘home’. Once they’ve done that they can play them however they want since they’re unlikely to leave and it’s only a two team town. I hope that’s not the case for Judd as well but I don’t hope that as strongly as I used to.

You’re lost, champ. BigFooty ForumFremantlePurple is the new black - The Fremantle Football Club - The Dockers

Clayton Oliver, as a premiership winning, 4 times B&F winner, twice Coaches Association MVP and 3 times All Australian, is most definitely a Melbourne legend. Denying that is stupidity. That's not to say that moving him on is the wrong thing, nor that he has not been a negative influence on the club for the past few years.

He will if a deal doesn’t get done. And if it’s an ordinary pick offered in a poor draft by Freo then there isn’t much incentive for Melbourne not to send him to the preseason draft.

I enjoyed this one more than I should have.

I'm having a difficult time being convinced by a list that ranks Zac Merrett as the 7th worst midfield kick in the AFL, without even having those same arguments about Tim Kelly and Jason Horne Francis.

If someone can find me a less important statistic than disposal efficiency then I'd love to hear it. It doesn't measure how well you kick or handball the ball, it only measures how easy the kick or handball is. Using this as a metric to measure the quality of a player's disposal is like counting the number of marks to determine how good a player is at marking. They aren't measuring the same thing.

You are welcome to your views. Everyone has a different one and they're all based on different things. You can consider my responses to the arguments you made to be direct attacks on you personally if that is how you choose to take them. However, I think that the record can stand pretty comfortably that my argument about quality of your best players vs your bottom 6 players (ie, the point I addressed initially with you) was unrelated to your eventual argument that a player being well paid creates resentment through the rest of the playing group. We were definitely arguing different points by the end, which is why I called many or your arguments 'unrelated'.

It's also irrelevant to the idea that success is about your bottom 6 players, not your top 6. The top players create the highest differentiation between teams because the value of replacing them is so high when there are only a finite number of places on the field at any time, and fewer in the most impactful, premium playing positions. Koz plays in a premium position, is probably the best at it in the league, and his presence is therefore far more important to our success than the quality of our depth 'replacement-level' players. Kozzie is worth 10 Spargos in terms of his ability to affect the results of games over the next available VFL player. I think you're arguing a bunch of unrelated stuff based off your feelings of discomfort about the money. That's fine but the idea that someone getting paid a lot of money for being a star player is going to make players play worse because they're jealous of him is both irrelevant to what I was saying and also a bit off the deep end.

Why wouldn't they want to play with Kozzie Pickett? He seems like a great young man who is well liked through the club, plus he's a superstar player. Why does 'playing for each other' have to be associated with having less talent on your list?

Do you think we'd be a better chance of winning a flag with Kozzie Pickett or with two Charlie Spargos and a Marty Hore?

Dusty and Riewoldt made Jason Castagna a triple premiership player, not Kamdyn McIntosh and Ivan Soldo.

I think they’ve been keen to have Turner’s marking in the team and have tried to shoehorn him into the forward line but he’s a really natural defender who reads the ball through the air incredibly well. I’m sure they prefer him in defence long term for his intercepting ability, which is made easier with Petty now moving forward more permanently.

Given we have done everything we possibly can this year to introduce more attack, run and dynamism into our defence, it shouldn’t come as a major shock that our best team includes Turner in preference to McDonald.

Good start and has a skill set that would make him an excellent AFL contributor from the beginning. At a minimum he's a good long term player because of his combination of mobility, smarts and skills. The question is how far can he develop his game. If he can develop his ground ball and contested football game then he could become a really nice, balanced midfielder who can complement some of the bigger bulls. If he can't then he'll always have a role as a neat, team oriented wingman or ball using half back and club leader. He's a very low risk pick. We've already seen how high his floor is. I'll be intrigued to find out where his ceiling is.

I assume when everyone is saying South Kensington, what they really mean is Macauley. Macauley is on the Upfield line and about a 10 minute walk to Arden St. North Melbourne is an ever so slightly longer walk but North Melbourne has a lot more trains running to it. If you end up at Kensington or South Kensington Stations then you're probably lost.

The development of the key forwards is generally related to their ability to compete physically at AFL level. But I think we're all hung up on the physical size, which is only a part of that. The much bigger issue is the ability to run at an AFL level. That's where you see output from younger tall forwards, like Amiss, Cadman, Cameron, King, etc, who have the athletic ability to play AFL football even when they weren't playing as true key forwards. The issues that Jefferson has had as a young player have been much less about his physical size (although it's partly that) and much more about his inability to run at an AFL level. The first year he really struggled to make it to contests. When he was in those contests he did OK for a young stringbean but he made it to so few of these contests that he had very minimal impact. This was especially so given the secondary role he'd play in the VFL forward line behand a number of mature talls, so the ball wasn't directed at him either. He'd have some great individual moments but they were rare because he wasn't near the ball enough. Last year his running was much better, he got to a lot more contests (albeit still below average) and had more impact as his role increased, resulting in a massive uptick in his output. As he continues to improve his running, the game will get easier for him and the skills he has will show themselves more often. It's much easier for us supporters to identify a skinny player than a player who lacks AFL running because you can see a skinny player from a single glance whilst the poor runner happens over a period of time. Jefferson was always going to take longer to develop because his strengths aren't athletic ones, so he needed time to build those to a level where he is no longer a liability as a senior footballer. Players like Caddy and Curnow are the exact opposite.

Don’t worry @Timothy Reddan-A'Blew, I was never in it for the prizes. I was only ever here for telling media pundits where to shove it! 😁

A good point well made, RM. 😁

It’s less about which kicks are effective and more about which kicks each player takes (mostly based around where they take them from). A defender will either kick long to a contest in slow play or cop the ball short to an open player. Both are very easy kicks to make. A midfielder kicks often from stoppage, under pressure where kicks are often intercepted or don’t go far enough to be considered a long kick to a 50/50. Forward mostly kick to situations where the defenders far outnumber the forwards, so effective kicking is very difficult. For 2024, the top 10 players for disposal efficiency (10 game min) are all key defenders, except Luke Ryan who is a third defender. In fact the highest ranked non-defender is Karl Amon, who is ranked 51st. By comparison, the 21 lowest ranked players for disposal efficiency were forwards or rucks. Disposal efficiency doesn’t measure kicking skill, it just tells us the situations in which they are being asked to kick. Are we to believe that Jamarra Ugle-Hagan is the worst kick in the league whilst Ben McKay is the third best? Disposal efficiency is a truly terrible statistic for measuring the ability to kick.

Disposal efficiency is a truly terrible statistic for measuring kicking quality.

I looked at it and thought the same thing. A glass ceiling is a barrier to growth that can't be seen, indicating that O'Hehir has very limited in terms of potential growth. This is, of course, the complete opposite of what was intended.

Yep. Familiar to football supporters of every football club since about forever. Except Terry Wallace. The nuffies loved him.