titan_uranus

Agree, the timing makes little sense to me. I can't see Declase being an alternative to Daw and I can't see how Nietschke going down motivated us to go look at Declase. I suppose could be a retrospective admission that our list was unbalanced and the Nietschke/Hore injuries are giving us the chance to re-balance it?

You know, at some point you are going to have to say that a decision the club makes is a good one, just to give your unending, unyielding, and often unfair criticism of the club's decision-making some meaning.

Be careful what you wish for. Yes, Bruce was annoying. The post that did the rounds last year on the proportion of a game he spent saying rhetorical questions was gold. But if Channel 7's idea of a replacement is Hamish McLachlan or James Brayshaw, we're in for a worse combo than we have with Bruce. Jason Bennett and Nigel Carmody are the future, but I suspect there's next to no chance of them getting Friday night games.

The debate should start and end in the same place: Essendon should [censored] off. They made their bed when they moved to Marvel and signed apparently a 25-year deal to do so, they can lie in it. If the AFL is going to allow the request, the only fair thing to do is to play a double-header that day without touching our game (or at absolute worst, bring our game forward to 1.10pm to allow a bit more time between the two). Moving us to Marvel, or shifting our game to Sunday, or swapping Essendon-North with a Sunday game, creates unfairness for everyone else, as a result of a problem of Essendon's and the AFL's doing.

Fair point on Jones re: his ability to find the ball. His natural CP-winning traits help him in forward line scraps, and I think he's generally a good reader of the play. No issues on his workrate, either, even if he's not a ANB-level runner. But I'm not sure whether that role is better suited by someone who gets it a lot but is prone to making errors, or someone who may not get as much of it but will impact more (e.g. Pickett, Spargo).

Sad news. Have many/any players made it back from three ACLs like this? Morabito, maybe? You'd have to think the odds aren't great. Hopefully the club looks after him through 2021 and maybe considers giving him another shot in the 2021/22 off-season, if there is a spot available.

What frustrates me about the whole "find a home" thing is that the facilities and location already exist, they're just occupied by a side who shouldn't be there. Maybe we should spend our money redeveloping Victoria Park, so that Collingwood can get out of the "Holden Centre".

Not close? So there's Flower, Barassi, Stynes, Lyon...anyone else before Gawn gets a mention? He's a 4 x AA, 2 x BnF, 1 x AFLCA MVP, captain and someone so likeable and marketable he brings people to the ground and sponsorship in the door. But he's "not even close"?

And as to the season generally, you'd expect WA will keep the same rules in place until vaccination is widespread. That's not just political and pre-election, it's also largely because WA is not equipped to deal with an outbreak of any sort. Hence the 5-day lockdown after 1 case. They can't afford it to get out, so they can't afford anything other than strict border control. Either WA makes an exception for the two AFL clubs, or they won't be flying in/out of WA each week (i.e. like last year they'll have to do blocks of games in WA and blocks on the road).

As to the impact of Round 1, they're not moving our game. For one, the MCG is our home ground and for so long as it's available, we deserve the right to play there. For another, it's Fremantle's only game at the MCG all year. Again, so long as it's available, and so long as the AFL's plan is to have the GF at the MCG, Fremantle deserves to play there.

Mate, next page over is this one: https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/covid-communications/covid-19-coronavirus-controlled-interstate-border#lr Victoria is a "low risk" state, which means 14-day quarantine period still applies. To move to "very low risk" you need 28 days with no community transmission.

I'm yet to watch the full replay but at this stage my interest lies more in how we set up and tried to defend and attack than the result (which of course is pleasing). Seeing TMac show some form is mightily encouraging. I like the idea of Gawn dropping forward rather than back, but we're going to find it harder to do that in games where May and Lever aren't able to dominate, or the opposition is able to work through our zone better.

Has this been confirmed by the club?

Lol WTF. Who are you complaining about here? Cam Pedersen, Sam Frost and Tim Smith?

Some of the commentary on here is genuinely unbelievable. You'd think we'd used pick 1 in the draft on Daw. He's training with the club to see if he's capable of taking a spot on our list that only exists because the options we actually wanted to go with (B Brown, Weideman and Hore) are injured. If he gets the list spot, he'll cost close to nothing. If he doesn't cut it at AFL level, he'll play VFL, and we're back where we started yesterday, which is a list with B Brown, Weideman and Hore injured. I'm happy to discuss if there are other key position players not currently on an AFL list who would be ready to play AFL football in the first 4-6 rounds while we wait for B Brown and Weideman to recover. Not surprisingly, there have been very few (if any?) such other players suggested as better options.

OK, what was your point? Because to me, your posts read as if you were critical of our list management for not having more talls on our list.

Oh come on dazzle, what rubbish. We went into this season with B Brown, Weid, Jackson, TMac and M Brown, not to mention Petty. We didn't and don't need more tall forwards. Suggesting that we should have then added an 18-year old project player to the list is ridiculous. How would an 18-year old fix the problem you're discussing here of McDonald taking the number 1 defender and Jackson the 2nd? List management cannot plan for worst case scenarios of the number 1 and number 2 forward getting injured in back-to-back weeks. It's not as if TMac hasn't done it before, and indeed M Brown has played the number 2/3 forward role well too. They're wholly acceptable options as the back up we'd planned them to be, and now need to rely on. It sucks that this is where we're at, but it is what it is. Most recent premiers have faced injury issues at some point in their season.

I love this. A lot.

Paine can stay but we need to be ready to move on from him if he can't keep his composure under pressure and/or continues to struggle with the gloves. Funnily enough, until this summer his strengths were his keeping and maturity and his batting was his major weakness. Now that's completely flipped. I agree that our batting is the pressing issue but the funny thing about the India series is that the Sydney and Brisbane Tests were set up by our batsmen to be won, and then our bowlers failed to get the job done. The bowling unit can be improved. I'd rotate Starc at the very least, if not drop him altogether. He leaks runs and doesn't take top order wickets when the going is tough. Langer/Paine are too fixated on the fact that he's a leftie, he swings it occasionally, and he has a nice yorker. His results aren't good enough and he flags after any more than two Tests in a series. So as we did in 2019, we need to be ready to have 4+ fast bowlers to play the five Ashes Tests. It's time to start thinking about Lyon's succession plan. He's a regular failure in the fourth innings, even on favourable Australian pitches. I'm not sure whether Swepson is the next best red ball spinner in the country but someone needs to be ready to come in either during the Ashes or at their conclusion. The batting isn't an easy fix either. There's no clear number 5 (but Wade's time in the Test side should be over) and I'm not sure what our best opening partnership option is. Keeping Warner in the side gets in the way somewhat, but I suspect he and Pucovski will get the openers' roles. Labuschagne and Smith pick themselves and Green gets to keep his spot at 6.

Agree Macca. The India series was wonderful marketing for the Test cricket product. In the meantime, England has the upcoming four Test series in India. Then it has a two-Test home series vs New Zealand, and then a five-Test home series vs India. So it has 11 Tests between now and the Ashes against the clear two best sides in the world outside of Australia and England (if not actually the best two sides). They also played two Tests in mid/late January 2020 in South Africa, then three Tests vs the Windies and three vs Pakistan in their 2020 summer, plus the recent two against Sri Lanka. Which all means that from the end of the January 2020 Sydney Test vs New Zealand until the start of the 2021/22 Ashes in November 2021, we will have played four Tests whilst England will have played 21. 21 Tests to 4 in preparation for the Ashes. Surely Australia can invite someone here to play some Test match cricket at a non-AFL ground in our winter? Or instead of playing South Africa, if NZ isn't doing anything we can head over there and play them?

So the South Africa series has been called off. Sad, but not surprising. Has big ramifications for the WTC, if anyone cares about that. Losing the series to India was bad enough but we also lost 4 points for a slow over rate in Melbourne. As a result, without the SA series, whether we make the final depends on the India-England series. We'll make it if the series is drawn at any score, or India win 1-0, or England win 1-0, 2-0 or 2-1. Which all means we're unlikely to make it.

The press conference today is a sadly ironic window into the precise problem this report is trying to highlight. Rather than true acknowledgement of the issue, Eddie tries to spin it in the most egregiously stupid way possible by opening with the "historic and proud day" comment. A pathetic attempt to suggest Collingwood deserves to be congratulated for instigating the investigation. And his comment that Collingwood wants to put an arm around Lumumba and take the heat out of the race debate is unbelievable, from a moral standpoint as well as a PR one. That's not, in the slightest, the right thing to do. A press conference of brand management, narrative shifting and damage control. The same things that strike at the heart of Collingwood's broken leadership/culture in the first place.

Thanks @Bring-Back-Powell and others for the write ups. Terribly sad news for Hore. One question for those who were there. Did we play three of Brown, Weideman, Jackson and TMac in the "A team" forward half during the whole game?

Agree. If the AFL can do it in 2020, it can do it again in 2021. The Victorian government has worked out a way to get 1200 tennis players/staff into Melbourne for the Australian Open. The NSW and Queensland governments have worked out a way to get the Sydney and Brisbane tests played. The games will go ahead, whether as currently planned or with hubs or with quarantining or special rules or no crowds or whatever. The hope is that the outbreaks we've seen in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in the last month are aberrations, not the norm, and that the earliest doses of the vaccine go to hotel quarantine workers to prevent it getting back into the community once we get rid of it again.

@Macca sorry I missed the tipping, was away for a bit. Will try to join in this week. A truly amazing first quarter. Kinda crazy to think the Browns and Bills are in the Divisional Round of the playoffs, and could theoretically contest the AFC Championship game. Gives us Demons fans some hope.