titan_uranus

What? You want us to be like Port? Downhill skiiers/flat-track bullies etc.? Like we were in 2018? Seriously, feel free to be disappointed with tonight, but FFS this is an unbelievable position to take.

Incorrect. Our results speak for themselves. You don't win every game you play to this point of the season against the top 8 by accident or a fluke. Everything else you've said describes our wins against the good sides perfectly. Good offence (e.g. sides like Bulldogs and Brisbane) can't beat good defence (us). Every time a top 8 side has thrown their best at us, we've countered it and won. The issue isn't whether we can win finals. We've shown we can. The issue is whether we are going to give ourselves the best shot at it, which starts with ladder position.

vandenBerg had three goal assists (or at least it looked that way) and that'll likely be enough to hold his spot, but he is a very vanilla footballer so I'm not sure that's a long-term fit for our best 22. Don't be fooled by Viney's 32 disposals, he's struggling to get involved in a positive way when we're going forward. There is merit to the calls to drop Jackson. He's very important structurally but the last few games he's struggled to get involved in the ways he was earlier in the season. ANB's playing mediocre football too but I suspect the defensive stats will keep him in the side.

The umpiring really killed us. Petty gets called for HTB in the fourth when he slips over with barely any prior. Hartigan then gets caught after taking a player on and drops it in our forward line, but doesn't get called. Brown gets called for the "hold" on McEvoy in the second. So many 50/50% calls went their way but then didn't go ours.

He had Jordon on short but did the team thing - he ate up more time, and then kicked long to the boundary. Problem was Hawthorn outworked our talls and brought the ball back through the centre. Wasn't Lever's fault. "Accurate"? You've got literally every single match prediction over the last month wrong.

This isn't about changes to personnel, it's about changes to attitude. We need to work out why we don't apply ourselves against bottom 10 sides the same way we do in prime time games against top 8 sides. In saying that, we need to think about Viney's role.

Really have to work on Viney's role. He's not the midfielder who should be streaming forward and delivering inside 50, because he consistently misses targets. So why does it keep happening?

6 - Oliver 5 - Petty 4 - Salem 3 - Lever 2 - Fritsch 1 - Jordon

Except for when we turned the first GWS, St Kilda, Richmond, North Melbourne, and most importantly Brisbane games, right around. And resisted comebacks from Geelong and the Dogs. We have a clear problem against bottom sides but we won't be playing them in the finals, and our record against top 8 sides speaks for itself. This isn't about whether we can/will win finals, this is about whether we will ruin our season's hard work by giving up a top 2 or top 4 spot.

A reminder that you are now 0-5 from your game picks post-bye.

Lucky to get anything out of that game. We won one quarter tonight. One. Against the 17th ranked side missing something like 10 best 22 players. We have a clear, blatant problem of failing to play our best football against bad sides. We've played five games against the bottom 4 for two wins, and the two wins were average. We are going to cost ourselves ladder position from leaving 10 premiership points behind in these games. You could see it at half time: having conceded three goals in 10 minutes, Petracca and Oliver were laughing. I dare say you wouldn't see Joel Selwood laughing at half time of any game. But even despite our terrible play, we still had 5 more scoring shots. Again, our inaccuracy in front of goal costs us premiership points. They kicked something like 8 straight goals through the middle of the game whilst we missed shot after shot. Even at the end, in a game where we needed a point, Spargo, Pickett, Fritsch and Brayshaw all had set shots for a combined two points. This isn't a gameplan or talent problem. It's a psychological problem, coupled with goalkicking inaccuracy.

I can't shake this thought either. I know he's improved his ball work at Casey this year but Sparrow was in reasonable form vs Essendon and GWS and hasn't shown himself to be as big a liability with the ball as vandenBerg traditionally has been. We cannot afford him to give the ball away by foot, nor can we afford for him to throw his weight around and give away silly free kicks or, worse, 50m penalties.

On paper we should win this game by 10 goals. The Hawthorn side running out tonight is awful and we have a hell of a lot to play for. But we're 2-2 against the bottom 4 and neither of the two wins was convincing: we were down to North Melbourne by 4 goals and we were only 4 points in front of Hawthorn at the start of the fourth quarter the last time we played them. MFC supporters IMO have every right to be worried about this game, given our 2021 form in these sorts of games.

We have a game in hand. Win tonight and we stay two games clear of Port with five to go. Port's win is not that bad for us. They're the worst side in the top six. We shouldn't be worried by them at all. If they push Brisbane out of the top 4, that's a good result for us.

Why is this a bad thing? It's a Geelong home game and the only reason this game is supposed to be at the MCG is to allow more fans to attend. That's now irrelevant given the restrictions. It 100% should be in Geelong. Get as upset as you want about them passing us on the ladder, but this is fair.

I guess a lot of Demonlanders are going to be happy seeing vandenBerg in the team. Disappointing IMO for Sparrow that he's missed out on a midfield spot, but let's see how vandenBerg goes.

It poured last night and Geelong beat Fremantle by 10 goals. But as others have said, my main concern is the win.

Correct. We've never won 17 games in a season before. As I mentioned in the embarrassing records thread, Hawthorn won 17+ games in a season five times in six years (2011-2016).

I'm not suggesting it's impossible or unworkable to adjust the fixture, all I'm suggesting is that it's both sub-optimal and not as easy as just scrapping future return games. There are fairness and integrity issues at stake. Other examples include the games earlier in the year where sides had home games flipped to away games on the basis that there would be a return game later in the season (e.g. Brisbane v Collingwood, St Kilda v Sydney, Brisbane v Fremantle). Sure, this is all better than abandoning season 2021, but until scrapping games becomes the only option, I advocate against it and I'm sure the AFL will do what it can to avoid it.

Need some junk time Fremantle goals here. Gap right now has been shortened to 1.2%. Geelong roughly need to outscore Fremantle by 14 points to pass us on percentage tonight.

A night game gives us FTA exposure which will be more enticing and rewarding for our sponsors. Surely a better result than the twilight game on Fox.

You'd have to think it's close to 0% of a chance we play this game in Darwin. Presumably will end up at Metricon.

We need Fremantle to give.a yelp here. Geelong are only 11 points away from passing us on percentage.

Let's hope the decision to lockdown early works and we're back up and running again in a week or two. But it's hard/impossible to be confident about what will happen with the rest of the season. Oh yeah that makes sense. While we're at it, given we have truckies here, when we need a delivery of food or other essential supplies from NSW I suppose we should stop the truck and spend an hour moving all the food over into our truck? Honestly, think about how ridiculous what you're suggesting here is. There are other issues with this though. Some teams (rumours suggest we might be one) planned for a 22-game season by way of our training loads. Degrees of unfairness start to arise if you suddenly chop the season down to, say, 19 games. Otherwise it then gets a bit complicated. The Dogs, for example, after this week will have three games left to complete (Adelaide, Essendon, Hawthorn). Adelaide, by contrast, will have just one (Bulldogs). Some sides are going to have too many games whilst others will have too many byes. The AFL's come this far, I expect it will do everything it can to finish the 22 rounds as intended.

Removalists are generally considered essential workers as people need to move house for a whole host of completely valid reasons, including to escape domestic violence or because they'll otherwise be turfed out by a landlord. There is only so much governments can do. In this instance the individuals who were allowed in failed to follow the rules.