titan_uranus

It's unbelievably bad luck that the AFL has had two 1 v 2 games this year and both of them have occurred during lockdowns. This is now three of (you'd expect) our top four most profitable home games lost due to COVID (Brisbane, Queen's Birthday and this, with the fourth being ANZAC Eve). We also lost a home game vs Hawthorn, a larger Victorian club. Even if we get a crowd vs Adelaide, the best we'll do this year is to finish with six home games at the MCG in front of crowds for the season, and of those games four will have been against interstate sides. I have no idea how that stacks up against other clubs but I'd be surprised if many clubs had a worse set of home game crowds. Edit: I missed the Carlton game. So it's a bit better - crowds at 6 home games, 7 if we get Adelaide.

It's very simple and brought about by some very lucky fixturing. Melbourne, the Dogs, GC, Adelaide, Hawthorn and Brisbane all play each other in the original Round 19 fixture, and the original Round 20 fixture. So the three games are flipped, because they can be, and it doesn't affect any of the other clubs or games. So GC now plays Brisbane this week instead of next week, and Adelaide now plays Hawthorn this week instead of next week. That allows us to play the Dogs this week, and then next week we return to GC v Melb, Hawthorn v Brisbane and Bulldogs v Adelaide.

Except none of this was apparent last week vs Port. The playing like individuals thing seems only to show up when we struggle against bottom 10 sides - i.e. I think the struggles kick in first, and then those players you've mentioned return to pre-2021 form and start trying to be the hero. The root cause of that, IMO, is that we don't prepare properly for bottom 10 opponents (i.e. the ruthlessness and intensity we show vs top 8 sides is missing from the first bounce). So whether it's a bad start (Collingwood, GWS) or it's getting a lead and then feeling too comfortable (Adelaide, Hawthorn), we let bad teams fight back and get belief, and when the pressure of "oh no we're going to lose this game when we're not supposed to" sets in, our players deviate from the system that has won us 13 games. What about our draw is a positive? Repeat games against the Bulldogs and Geelong, the two best sides in it. As much travel as any other Victorian side, including two trips to Adelaide, a trip to Perth, a trip to Geelong, and a possible trip to Darwin. At least three games after this week without a crowd (Dogs x 2, Hawthorn), and a further two home games in front of almost no Melbourne supporters (Brisbane, Collingwood). Whilst I'm supportive of the argument that we have an attitude problem in these games, I actually think too much is being made of the Oliver-Spargo thing. I'm not entirely sure Oliver was all that angry, and it's possible Spargo ignored Oliver's call or something like that. Oliver was also fresh off running the length of the field to make that option, so it's not as if he wasn't doing the team thing to get there. In-game stuff like that is not as big IMO as stuff like laughing at half time, or Gawn smiling on the bench - stuff like that IMO shows me what's really going through our players' heads by way of preparation and thought. Selwood's a good example - I can't imagine he'd ever be laughing at HT of any match, but on field does anyone whinge at the umpires more than him?

The AFL loves the flexibility associated with moving the repeat games around, so I'm not sure they'll immediately go for the first 17 games being 17 opponents. It surely won't happen. We'll likely be in lockdown until the end of this week at the earliest, and I can't see the NT allowing anyone who has been in Victoria this weekend (which we will be, when we play the Dogs) to enter the NT next week. Surely the game has to be moved to Queensland. Why? Finals are still just under two months away. Last time things got dire in Victoria was a similar time period ago, and we'd recovered to the point of having decent-ish crowds back by last week.

Tom Morris reporting that we're playing the Dogs on Saturday night: Friday Port Adelaide v Collingwood (Adelaide Oval) Saturday Carlton v North Melbourne (Marvel Stadium) Gold Coast v Brisbane (GABBA) West Coast v St Kilda (Optus Stadium) Adelaide v Hawthorn (Adelaide Oval) Melbourne v Western Bulldogs (MCG) Sunday Sydney v Fremantle (Metricon Stadium) Geelong v Richmond (MCG) Essendon v GWS (Metricon Stadium)

Jon Ralph also tweeted that the AFL wants Port v Collingwood to stay on Friday night but if it can't go ahead due to SA's requirements, our game vs the Dogs will replace it. So I guess we have to prepare for a six-day break into the Friday night game at this point?

I suspect we're not saved the Darwin trip, not yet anyway. My gut tells me the whole reason they're making these moves is because the NT won't let us in this week, so they want to delay it a further week to see if the NT will let us in next week. I can't see why these three games need to be moved otherwise - if Port can FIFO, surely Brisbane (vs Hawthorn) and Adelaide (vs the Dogs) could too.

You do know we beat the Dogs this year already, right? At their preferred venue? It's very easy to feel despondent after a loss or, in this case, a draw, but reflecting on the season so far we are very much in the hunt for this win.

The season's not being called off. It just won't happen.

I think that's right. If we finish 3rd or 4th, in all likelihood 1 and 2 are the Dogs and Geelong. I'm sure it's possible that, say, Port doesn't lose again and finishes top 2, whilst one of the Dogs and Geelong collapses worse than we do so that we finish above them. Most likely outcome, you'd think, is Dogs/Geelong top 2, we finish 3-4. Otherwise we slide further and drop to 5th or 6th.

Just in case anyone isn't aware, we cannot miss finals from here. We're 5.5 games clear of 9th with 5 games to go. Relax, Demonlanders. We have qualified for the finals.

Well we don't actually know what the other three forwards were doing because they're off screen. I certainly didn't mean to slot Viney entirely so my post was poorly worded in that regard, but Viney could have kept running if there was nothing on. I don't know why he chose to kick it at that point. Keep running, I say. Maybe, as has been suggested, he sees something off-screen that indicates a lead but the sync between him and that person (Jackson, maybe), is out of touch. He had more time and space to work with, is my main point.

Jeepers. It's revisionism when you now argue that Richmond was missing so many players you couldn't name them when in reality it was just two. What about your post isn't undermining our wins? You're going back to three strong wins against top 8 sides and putting up arguments that in my view are either blatantly wrong (e.g. the Richmond injury one) or unfair criticisms which don't take into account the things we did right (e.g. Geelong not "twigging" to the stand rule - which by the way is news to me). There isn't an ounce of "poetic licence" in my post. You're arguing our previous wins against top 8 sides don't automatically mean we''ll win the remaining games against top 8 sides. That's a completely fair argument. But you're doing it by arguing our wins against Geelong, Richmond and the Dogs weren't actually that good. That's not a fair argument, for the reasons I've outlined above. Nothing "poetic" about it. And for the record, I've never argued we're going to beat all of Geelong, the Dogs and West Coast in the run home. But given how we've played against top 8 sides this year, it's not unreasonable at all to think we can, or even that we're more likely to beat them than we are to beat Gold Coast or Adelaide.

GWS loses Greene, De Boer, Briggs and Stein. Sydney loses Mills, O'Riordan and Cunningham. One massive out for each side.

Second quarter, 7.30 in. We're 26 points up having just kicked a goal. We win the centre clearance, Oliver kicks to Viney inside the centre square and he takes a mark. He plays on as he has space in front of him: There are two players deeper than Fritsch, who you can see gesturing for the ball to his advantage. He can take at least a few more steps but chooses to kick at this point, ostensibly to the deeper players, but his kick lands nowhere near a leading Melbourne forward and ultimately right in a hole covered by three Hawthorn defenders: This is the sort of thing we see all too often from Viney, with no real improvement in this area of his game. If that kick is the limit of his distance, why didn't he take a few more steps? He could have drawn vandenBerg's opponent and had the handball out laterally.

I'd love to know the reasoning behind this. The chance of there being a crowd greater than GMHBA's capacity is probably 0%. Why must the game be played at the MCG?

Would have loved to see a Carlton loss to really get the natives restless but alas in classic Carlton style they've put in two quarters of tripe but will win the game off the back of 20 minutes of AFL-quality football. With a win they won't move up from 13th but they'll only be a game and around 10% out of the 8 with five to play. Their last five are North, St Kilda, Gold Coast, Port and GWS, with only one of those games being away from Marvel.

You're entitled to be pessimistic but this is unfair revisionism. If anyone on here tried to justify a loss to a side in Round 4 for not having "twigged" to the stand rule, they'd get pilloried. But if you want to give Geelong that cop out, then it's only fair to note in response that we'd spent all pre-season preparing for a Brown-Weideman forward line and so were still "twigging" to having to play without them. Smith played for them and Higgins has been dropped this year as being borderline best 22. Plus we were missing May after the first quarter. The Dogs wasn't an "early" win, it was in Round 11. Reducing that win to "we tagged Libba and they missed Dunkley and Treloar" doesn't do our hard work anywhere near the justice it deserved. Your revisionism reaches new heights on the Richmond win though. "Missing too many players to list here"? They were missing a grand total of two best 22 players, Vlastuin and Prestia. Martin went down midway through the third after having been tagged out of the game by Hibberd. They were at peak Richmond in the first 15 minutes, where most sides fall apart, but we weathered the storm and turned it around. Feel free to argue we'll lose to the Bulldogs, West Coast or Geelong in the run home, but don't do it by undermining our strong wins against every single top 8 side we've played this year. So to answer your question - who knows what would have happened if we'd played two consecutive games against top 8 sides. But a "closer look" at our wins doesn't reveal anything you're arguing for here. Indeed, I'd argue that the "closer" you look at our wins, the more you realise we lift and play premiership winning football.

Pretty sure a teammate got angry at him, too, because I recall after his miss they cut to him and he was mouthing back and gesturing as if to say "what was I supposed to do?" The answer, IIRC, was to slow down and hit one of the players laterally. Unfortunately he took off and wanted to keep moving, and ended up making a bad decision to neither full bore go for goal nor to pass it to Brown.

If our home game vs the Dogs is brought forward, it will be our fourth home game affected by COVID. We lost our two most profitable games to the first Victorian lockdown, and we're about to lose the Hawthorn and Dogs games too. It's just awful luck for us. Compare the situation to the Dogs who, through what will now be six COVID-affected rounds, have had one home game (at the start, vs us). Or Geelong, who've also only had one home game in those six rounds but that home game still was able to have a crowd, albeit a reduced one. They're at home this week but at the G - a game that, with a crowd, they'd probably have had a larger crowd for Richmond.

It was more like 50 metres out. It was an annoying miss but probably not an egregious one. The worst misses were Brown's in the first quarter and Spargo's in the second. Hunt streaming into the forward 50 in the second quarter when we were 26 points up also didn't end as well as it could have.

They don't need to win by anything much - right now, 3 points up, they're in the 8 on percentage (although both West Coast and GWS can pass them if they win today).

You'd sure as [censored] hope not! But I'm sure Gill will tell us we have to be "agile and flexible". And we got shafted in being the side sent to Darwin in the first place. Plus the GC and WC games are critical to our fixture as they're the only two sides we're yet to play.

I had given you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you were complaining about Rivers being dropped for shanking it and therefore missing out on being in the firsts. I now see you're complaining about Bowey (and Laurie) not being in the firsts. Which is even more ridiculous. The fact we have last year's draftees getting stronger and better at Casey is a tick for our list management, not a cross.

It is even more interesting when you look at other star mids: Martin - 52% Neale - 48% Pendlebury - 48% Tim Kelly - 46% Bontempelli - 44% Dangerfield - 43% Selwood - 40% Josh Kelly - 40% Yeo - 40% Cripps - 39% Wines - 39% Fyfe - 38% Boak - 37% Kennedy - 36% Cotchin - 24% So Viney at 46%, Petracca at 44% and Brayshaw at 43% actually stack up really well.