titan_uranus

Well with Fritsch suspended, Sparrow injured and TMac and Harmes allegedly dropped, we're not necessarily fielding our best 22 this week.

I think there's a major cultural difference between being late to training and a mistake (albeit a big one) in the middle of a game. i'm not excusing vandenBerg, btw - indeed, I am not sure he should be playing right now given his output and the clangers/turnovers outweighing the positives he brings. As to Harmes, I agree. I am firmly of the view he shouldn't have been moved to the backline and I think he probably should have been tried as a forward/mid before being dropped.

I know, but I had considered Harmes to fall into the favourites category (along with Melksham and vandenBerg). We've seen Goodwin drop Hibberd, Jetta, Jones and now Harmes this year. It's a trend towards ditching favourites and dropping players who are truly out of form. It's just a shame that trend never extended to Melksham.

I'd like to know more about what happened to Fritsch before we all get stuck in. But if he did something stupid I hope he learns his lesson. Could well cost us a finals spot. If TMac is out, and we drop Preuss, then you'd imagine we must bring in Brown. If not, we'll likely be rucking Weideman when Gawn rests, and we can't afford to do that. If Harmes is out, I will agree with that call, but I will question how Melksham survived being dropped all season.

Yep. 6.3 to 1.1 at quarter time in front of 50,000+ people on a Sunday arvo. Remember it well. Didn't go on with it from there (8.9 to 9.11 from then on). Was also the game we made fun of them by talking about us making finals and them missing. Then we missed the finals. Brought serious bad karma.

What?!

Not sure they're tanking. They're three games and percentage behind 17th with 4 games to play. Which means they'd have to win them all to get off the bottom. Which wouldn't happen even if they tried, so they should really be going all out to beat Hawthorn next week or, better for us, GWS or Carlton their following two games.

Essendon will pass us tonight if they go on to win, but before this board goes berserk at that fact, bear in mind that they're struggling against Hawthorn, a bottom 4 side, and their next three games are against West Coast, Geelong and Port.

Hold on @Skuit, that's hardly fair. I'm not justifying the act of drink-driving. The distinction between what's happened here and your example is that Dahlhaus and ANB are both guilty of the same offence, but ANB's offence did greater damage than Dahlhaus'. Your example involves ANB committing a second, separate, offence on top of the first one. That's not what happened. As I said though, I agree with the principle that it's fine for ANB to have received a harsher penalty than Dahlhaus. The issue I have is that Dahlhaus' penalty is borderline non-existent (is there any evidence to suggest $1,500 fines deter players, or are considered punishment to players?) and is too far away from ANB's penalty. That indicates to me another example of the AFL over-weighting the importance of the outcome on the penalty, when the action should be what is the key factor. When you add to that the repeated instances of the AFL saying that sling tackles are bad, the head needs to be protected, and the possibility of head damage is enough to make sling tackles bad, IMO it all points to a sign that the AFL's system on this issue is not working.

That's two different offences though. ANB didn't commit a second offence of "dangerous tackling while drunk". He and Dahlhaus did the exact same thing, but ANB got punished more than four times more heavily than Dahlhaus for the consequences. The concept of a worse outcome leading to a more significant punishment is nothing new nor is it wrong. The issue is when, as is the case with the AFL, the outcome is overly important in the matrix. The difference between what ANB did and what Dahlhaus did is not terribly great, yet ANB got 4 weeks and Dahlhaus no weeks at all. IMO, if ANB was a 4 week suspension (and that's arguably justifiable), Dahlhaus was 1 week at a minimum.

All hell should now break loose.

That's a ridiculous comment. The current proposal isn't to extend the State of Emergency for 12 months, but to provide the government with ability to do so. And regardless, the existence of a State of Emergency doesn't mean life can't get back to "normal". Indeed, the government's argument is that it needs the State of Emergency to allow life to get back to a safe normal by providing the ongoing power to require masks to be worn or density limits in places like stadiums.

Yes there is - 17 games and 1 bye means 18 rounds.

I believe we're talking about the one in the clip in this article: https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/afl-2020-melbourne-western-bulldogs-loss-christian-petracca-fox-footy-garry-lyon-afl-ladder/news-story/38ccaf7a995af7ffe59d01d770fc8ca3 Looks to me like the tap was probably always going to go to Petracca and he wasn't going to be tackled by Liberatore quickly enough to prevent him running forward and kicking it. It's always tough dissecting individual plays like this, but IMO it was a poor choice from Petracca.

Most of the time it's not in the tackler's control. The player getting tackled will sometimes get their hand up to take the brunt, or sometimes their shoulder will take it, or their head will take it but not on the temple, etc. All of which can be matters of centimetres' difference. The issue we should all have is with the action. If you pin an arm and sling a player into the ground you should be suspended. If we're trying to eradicate that tackle, then we shouldn't care about the outcome of it. I can see why ANB should get more weeks than Dahlhaus: both get suspended for committing the same offence, but ANB's penalty is greater because he created a more severe injury than Dahlhaus did. Makes sense (we can query whether 1 week vs 4 weeks is the right difference but the mere fact ANB got more weeks is easy to justify). Where all hell will break loose is if Dahlhaus, who is challenging at the Tribunal, gets off altogether (or reduced down to a fine).

Not sure about Collingwood yet. If they lose to Carlton this week, their final three games are against Brisbane, Port and Gold Coast. Without their injured stars, they'll be hard-pressed to beat Brisbane (in Brisbane) or Port and that just gets them to 9.5. Makes their game vs Carlton this weekend an absolutely critical match for both sides. If Carlton lose, and assuming they also lose to Brisbane in the final round, they'll need to win their other three games just to get to 9 wins. That requires a win over the Giants: hard to read them but on current form, given that game is next week, you'd back Carlton in. As you've mentioned though, Carlton still have their Adelaide game to come which will help them with percentage. If GWS loses to Fremantle this week, then their final round game vs St Kilda becomes huge, but assuming they lose to St Kilda too, like Carlton they'll need to win all three remaining games to get to . The Carlton-Collingwood game is critical. If Carlton win, Collingwood's path to 9.5 becomes really tough, and puts us in a good spot to finish the year ahead of them even with only 9 wins. But it will then give Carlton a good chance to get to 10. That's a very long way of saying that if we beat St Kilda this weekend we'll be in with a good chance, but if we lose it's almost curtains for us.

You see the irony/hypocrisy here, don't you?

Lends support to the argument in favour of getting Viney into the forward half. I would argue Harmes also would be an improvement on our forward line.

It was his offensive drive on the weekend that stood out to me. One of his opponents was Larkey vs North, which would account for the three goals BRFE mentioned. Not sure who his other opponents have been. For the same reason I wasn't happy dropping OMac to begin with, I'm comfortable with Tomlinson in the side: I think our back half is solid and developing well. To the extent we conceded goals too easily on the weekend, I put that down largely to the way in which we set up in the forward half of the ground. A combination of Harris Andrews, Luke Ryan and Steven May wouldn't have made a difference to stopping some of the Dogs' scoring chains. (I still think we can get more out of Tomlinson though).

Well written, @3183 Dee. I agree that the way we play is a sustainable brand of football, with one caveat: we're yet to prove that our current list can sustain it for four quarters and/or for long enough within a season to make finals, win finals, and win a flag. When we speak about the importance of forward half pressure, we look to the same players who fail to deliver the requisite level of pressure consistently: I'd suggest Pickett and vandenBerg, and ANB when he plays, generally do well with pressure acts (where can that stat be found, does anyone know?) but players like Fritsch, Hannan, Melksham, Spargo, Hunt, Jones, ANB, previously Garlett and Kent, have all been inconsistent. None of them bring the same output on a weekly basis when it comes to defensive pressure. Some weeks they are up and about, chasing every defender, tackling hard, repeat efforts. Other weeks they look disinterested, or too slow to impact the contest, or too weak to stick tackles, or a combination of all of those. And of course, of the three I've mentioned who are more consistent pressure-wise, vandenBerg commits far too many turnovers/clangers and ANB's a poor kick and doesn't get enough of the ball. So the question for me is whether we're capable of raising the consistency across the forward half of the ground to a level which can prevent the lapses we see within games (e.g. first quarter vs West Coast, second quarter vs Brisbane, third quarter vs Bulldogs). If we can, the rest of the way we play means we can challenge. If we can't, we'll never get there.

That's the spirit! Since criticising the selections for the Adelaide game, you've posted twice before this: once complaining about our AFLW trade period, and once complaining about our trade in of Kolodjashnij. Then we lose, and you're back again complaining about our Rising Star nominated first year player. It's posters like you that make this place so difficult to deal with sometimes.

That was a shocking game. But it wasn't the last time we played St Kilda. We played them again in Round 19 at Marvel. We were close to them all game, led them at QT and HT and only 4 points down at 3QT, but lost by 19. Was a real chance to have won a game late in the season.

1. So the 16 clubs other than Adelaide who all fail to win the premiership this year will be poor sides like Adelaide? 2. What's that got to do with the winless Adelaide? 3. This is your best comparison between us and Adelaide? 4. What's that go to do with the winless Adelaide? And without hindsight, which were the good players we gave away? Sure, go on if you've got some better reasoning than this.

You can't continue to annoy the entire board but then complain when people call you out. Each week you bump threads out of nowhere, many of which are your threads to begin with, almost always after losses.