titan_uranus

One of Jordon and Hunt is going to be a hard luck story. Jordon hasn't missed a game all year (whether in the 22 or starting as the sub). Hunt was a mainstay of the side for the first 20 weeks, wouldn't ever have been dropped but was one of our rare injuries this year.

The more the Dogs try to change to adapt to us, the better IMO. They can beat us by just playing their regular game, so I doubt they are going to mix it up. Their path to victory comes from taking territory away from us, which they will achieve if they dominate CPs and clearances. That means they put their best mids in the middle for as much of the game as possible, in the hope of taking Oliver/Petracca/Viney's grunt away from us and forcing us to play too much of the game in our back half.

Bont 23, Macrae 22, Libba 20, Martin 19, Dunkley 14, English 8, Treloar 2.

What a blast from the past it is to see you, Ash. Thanks for the support!

Nothing wrong with Wines winning the medal. Would have loved Clarry to win it, but it's about the 10th most important thing happening for our club this week.

Far out, Seedsman and Keays the two best players on the ground in our 7 goal win?!

Wines will get 3 in Round 23 (at least), so that's 35. Oliver would need to get 8 or 9 out of the last 9 votes to win. Bont will struggle in the final three games given the Dogs lost them all. Walsh keeps polling when his side loses so he could get there. But looks likely to be Wines. In the end, Petracca and Gawn took too many votes of Oliver, whereas Wines soaked up most of the Power votes.

I was there - there were about 10 Sydney players who were better than any Eagle. They've just handed votes out to someone who collected a whole lot of touches. He had no influence, at all, because no West Coast player did.

Dom Sheed got a vote in West Coast's insipid loss to Sydney. What the actual [censored].

I'm pretty sure the GF edition has always been more expensive than the H&A season records.

Meanwhile did Gawn get 2 votes from the Queen's Birthday game? Surely not.

The Bont is going to win this. He's like Dusty in his winning years, he just stands out and the umpires notice him.

I reckon Goodwin will quietly be loving all the "what tactical masterstroke is Beveridge about to pull" talk. No one's talking about what we're going to do. I like it that way.

I don't entirely know what you're on about here, but I'm still interested.

Agree on most of this. Naughton was hardly dominant in Round 19 so was that really all worth it for the Dogs? But one issue to remember is that whilst Bruce won't be there on GF day, Martin playing means English will be in that role. So if Petty goes to Naughton, May has to go to English (assuming we want to keep Lever free).

As you'll see from this Tweet, it's not clear if either of these is correct (at least, as at 2017). Generally speaking Clint Bizkit is right, the team higher on the ladder wears its home jumper, but 2015 was an exception - West Coast finished above Hawthorn on the ladder, but in the Grand Final the AFL made West Coast wear its clash jumper, so that Hawthorn could wear its home jumper (albeit with white shorts).

My guess is for this purpose - we sent our jumpers off to get the logo, so we used these old jumpers for photos/media? I don't know otherwise.

We stopped wearing it after the 2019 season. It's not needed against the Dogs (or West Coast, a side we've also worn it against). Their jumpers are royal blue and there is no clash with our much darker navy blue.

I suspect we were wearing the redback jumpers because we've sent our regular jumpers off to get the Grand Final logo heat pressed onto them. We stopped wearing the redback jumper after the 2019 season. We don't sell it any more. The AFL has already confirmed we're wearing our regular jumper, too.

Jones is the only player on our list to have played 200 games. His 200th was in late-2015. Bernie Vince played his 200th game for us in 2017, but obviously they weren't all with us. I think, prior to Jones, the last MFC player to get to 200 games for the club was Brad Green in 2010.

There's nothing about this I don't like.

Patriots, 49ers, Chiefs

The interesting thing about this is I recall Montagna on Fox Footy arguing that we tried this sort of thing in Round 23. In the first half we were sending a player up to the contest, and being beaten and then having no spare in defence. In the second half, we reverted back to having a spare behind the ball. If he's right, we tried it then and we didn't like it. The test will come in the GF if/when the Dogs send that extra man to the contest.

I agree with those who question Smith's defensive efforts. All the examples I've seen in the media in both the semi and prelim were examples of him running into attack. So I had a look at the pressure acts stat on the AFL website, which also includes defensive half pressure acts. Smith had 22 pressure acts, 8 of which were in the defensive half (i.e. 36% of his pressure acts were in the defensive half). By comparison, Treloar had 26, 12 in defence (46%), Bontempelli was 25 and 12 (48%), Macrae was 17 and 9 (53%), Dunkley was 26 and 8 (31%), Hunter was 13 and 6 (46%). Libba, interestingly, was 20 and 4 (25%). In our prelim, Oliver had 27, 14 in defence (52%), Viney was 23 and 15 (65%), Harmes was 21 and 13 (62%), Petracca was 13 and 9 (69%). Langdon was 12 and 8 (67%), Sparrow was 16 and 8 (50%), with Brayshaw 20 and 8 (40%). Maybe I'm reading too much into this but I read this as our mids working harder into defence (all bar Brayshaw did 50% of their pressure work or more in the back half, whereas for them it was only Macrae doing that).

Did that actually happen, though? I wasn't sure if he was moved into defence for any period of time or just happened to be caught there, which happens from time to time (Ben Brown was caught in defence a few weeks ago, against Geelong in Round 23 maybe).