titan_uranus

Whilst Melksham might have brought in better kicking forward of centre, there are downsides. One is his 2021 form. Another is his lack of defensive pressure. And a third is that we'd then have to send TMac or Brown into the ruck and we'd at those times be back to one tall forward: remember how we looked with one tall forward vs GWS? We're also not going to flip a switch just by bringing Melksham in: we need to demand improvement in decision making and execution from Petracca, Oliver, Viney, Harmes, Brayshaw and Gawn as well. If they keep turning it over, we'll largely look the same. This isn't to say Jackson deserves to hold his spot, just that it's hardly "perplexing" that we didn't make that change.

If you're referring to Melksham, whilst I wasn't against us trying him it's not like he's been in any sort of form of late, and we know how damaging (in a bad way) his lack of defensive pressure can be. As to Jackson/Rivers, poor form doesn't always mean needs rest. Again, whilst there were arguments about both their spots, were we going to make four changes in one week?

It's hard to argue against the two outs and I'm really happy to see Bowey given a chance, and Sparrow given a game. Harmes surely on thin ice. Would want to see a massive game from him (tagging Touk Miller, maybe?).

In: Bowey, Sparrow Out: Hibberd, Jordon (both dropped). Emergencies are Hibberd, Melksham, Weideman and Jordon. https://www.melbournefc.com.au/news/989406/round-20-team-young-demon-to-debut

I agree with you both entirely, but I can nevertheless foresee the government saying that throughout the pandemic different pockets of society have been impacted in different ways, that there is no universal fairness, and that it's in the best interests of the competition/economy/society generally if we have a Grand Final with 100,000 vaccinated fans as compared to 40,000 allowing unvaccinated. It would disappoint and anger me unquantifiably, but I can see it happening.

Olympics-related, surely. Unless games are also on 7Mate?

This article says that our quarantine in Perth isn't going to be as straightforward as previous teams have had, because Joondalup resort is booked out: https://www.sen.com.au/news/2021/07/29/melbourne-thrown-covid-curveball-ahead-of-perth-trip/ Apparently we'll be in a Perth CBD hotel, but we will have some access to Optus Stadium for training and some corporate space to hang out, and Red Bull (a sponsor) is going to install some things to make our time easier (eg. a basketball ring in the corporate space). But still, not going to be as easy it seems as the Dogs, Saints and Tigers have had.

Well, Bowey won't be playing on Rankine: https://www.afl.com.au/news/655103/suns-axe-former-no-3-pick-nine-goal-sharpshooter-to-make-debut

FWIW, if the rumour was at any point true, and at any time the club had considered playing in Darwin a commercially sensible option, whilst I would understand that I would disagree with it. We have to have faith that our 2021 season is going to be indicative of medium term success, which will mean medium term financial benefits. If we finish top 4 and win a final, thereby making at least a prelim, our early-2022 fixturing should provide us with opportunities to help recoup our 2021 losses. As will increased membership/sponsorship opportunities. Quarantine from today into a GC trip into hard and difficult quarantine in Perth into Darwin into a possibly season-defining game in Geelong (on what could very easily be a 7 or even 6 day break) will be brutal.

No way Hunt gets dropped after last week's game, which was an improvement on his previous weeks. You'd imagine it will either be Rivers or Hibberd.

Soccer is nowhere near as physically taxing as Australian Rules. NFL is but players don't spend the whole game on the ground and wear padding. And in both of those sports players get paid significantly higher salaries. And another issue is in both of those sports travel is relatively even: e.g. in the EPL every side plays every other side home and away, and in the NFL every side has either 8 or 9 road games per season, alternating fairly.

The problem with analysing free kick counts is the erroneous but often held assumption that the free kick count should be even, or close to even, at the end of each game. An inferior side is going to be caught holding the ball more, or will infringe in marking contests more. When you're more under pressure you'll tend to grab a jumper. So on and so forth. An overly aggressive side may choose to give away free kicks to help pump up their "aggression" (Richmond may well do this, given they're so far in the negative for frees this year). So it follows that the free kick count does not need to be even to indicate "fair' umpiring. I felt on Saturday that the Dogs got the rub of the green - key 50/50 contests that could have gone either way would go the Dogs' way, but not ours. And the holding the ball call against Brayshaw late in the second was a momentum changer IMO. But that doesn't mean I think there is an umpiring conspiracy.

What's the point of posting that you think GC is as good as Hawthorn and we couldn't beat Hawthorn, then? As I said, the same argument applies the other way around (and of course, with a 12-1-4 record, it applies significantly more against you than it does in your favour). The comparison you're drawing is an incredibly bad one to draw in support of an argument that you think we will, or might, not win this weekend.

Example number 94123 of the MRP system being broken. An elbow to the head deemed serious enough to be a reportable offence is worthy of a fine, but a perfectly executed run-down tackle results in a two week ban, whilst contesting the football has the AFL sending you directly to the Tribunal. Utterly, completely, farcically, broken.

Whilst you're welcome to question whether we'll beat GC, the argument that we drew with Hawthorn therefore we won't beat GC is one of the worst arguments you can roll out, seriously. We beat Port 2.5 weeks ago, and GC is clearly worse than Port, so shouldn't that mean a comfortable win?

If the game ends up being played in Darwin, I wonder whether that will force the FD to consider some rotations for freshness in with the Perth game the following week.

The only potential good thing to come from playing this game in Darwin will be money, if we get a financial benefit to going there. We just saw on the weekend how we play when the ball is slippery. The conditions aren't going to suit us. Let alone the physical impact having to immediately fly to Perth to commence quarantine.

So that we don't have to fly to Queensland and then fly again to WA? So that we can avoid playing against an opposition's home crowd? So that we can play at Marvel, where we're we've won 8 of our last 10? Plenty of reasons to think about, at least if you haven't already given up on the season.

Agree, except that the removalists apparently lied or weren't wholly truthful with contact tracers early on, which slowed down our initial attempt to ringfence the outbreak. Broke the mask-wearing rule then didn't help contact tracers. [Censored] them. But I know that it's hard for the government to punish them because we want people to have no fear in telling contact tracers what they've done and where they've gone.

When it happens once that may be true. But across all our post-bye games we've been repeatedly missing shots. It's true that the game plays out differently if a behind is a goal and vice versa, but we are consistently winning territory, moving the ball from the back half to the forward half, applying pressure, but missing shots.

I agree that there's more to it than straighter set shot kicking but our goal kicking is IMO the single biggest problem, and that's because we're missing enough easy shots per match, repeatedly, for it to be noticeable. Brown's two easy misses on the weekend were just that: easy. He should have kicked both of them. So should Pickett in the first quarter (a snap from 25m on a slight angle). Really sad that Stats Insider hasn't updated its set shot charting since Round 6. If it was up to date we'd be able to get a sense of how many "easy" shots we're missing. On the comparative metric, I understand what you're saying but what we know is that post-bye, in every game we've played we've had inferior goal kicking accuracy to our opponent in that game. That side may then kick inaccurately the following week but that doesn't impact us: what impacts us is our own accuracy vs our opponent's accuracy when we play them, and post-bye we've been far less accurate each game than our opposition. Having said that, I agree with you that the way we deliver the ball inside 50 is a problem. We get it wrong too often - we go to the square when we shouldn't, then we go to the pocket when we should go to the square, etc. Part of it is that we have some average decision-makers doing the delivering (ANB, Harmes, Viney and Gawn all struggle with making the call on where to send the ball). Part of it is we fluff the kicks (e.g. Pickett had McDonald streaming into an open pocket but missed him). I suspect part of it also is that having not settled on our preferred forward set up, TMac and Brown haven't yet gelled together and nor have our mids gelled with them. Pleasingly Brown was involved all match as a target, so that was an improvement, but then TMac went missing and that's no good.

There's no alternative, due to the AFLPA insisting that clubs do not have any more than one five-day break in the season. The logical game to be on Friday night is Essendon v Sydney but they fall foul of that rule. You may think our game is more deserving but I'm pretty confident the AFL doesn't really want GC on the Friday night if they can avoid it, and at any rate doesn't even know where our game is going to be played yet, so the more time they get to fixture it the better.

I like the article's stats: the AFL doesn't scores from turnover (as far as I know, anyway), so it's interesting to see we're down 15.7 points per game on that metric. Funnily enough, we're going to the boundary less from defensive 50 than we were earlier in the season. Doesn't really support the recent comments on here that we've become "more boring". I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our goal accuracy has dropped from 45.9% to 37.5%. Doesn't that help explain why our goals per inside 50 have dropped from 23.6% to 17.8%? Are you arguing that the relative drop (13th to 18th, compared with 7th to 17th) means there is more to it? If so, I'm not sure if that's the right conclusion to draw because our ranking is relative to other clubs, whose form is largely independent of ours. Or have I missed something here?

On the one hand, the fact the AFL has moved Hawthorn v Brisbane to Tasmania could suggest they can't get the Queensland sides into Victoria. On the other hand, it's a natural fit for Hawthorn to play in Tasmania, but less so Gold Coast as its their home game. So it might be that they wanted to make the call on Hawthorn now, and if it turns out Queensland relaxes its position later in the week so be it. I expect they'll wait to see what Victoria says tomorrow, then try to get an exemption for us to go into Queensland without quarantining, so that we can play at Metricon. In that event, we'll then fly direct from Queensland to Perth to commence 7 days quarantine before playing West Coast next Saturday or Sunday.