titan_uranus

Agree that Hogan shouldn't be our biggest concern. It's Walters that scares me most. He's a genuine superstar and we don't really have anyone who is fast enough or smart enough to deal with him.

Given the number of people who have said they have nothing to look forward to MFC-related, or aren't excited for football, or have lost emotion/passion, I must be lucky (or just odd) but I see so many things to look forward to this year. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the backline works as we get games of experience into Lever, May, Hore, Salem, Hibberd and Frost as a unit. I love watching Gawn every time he takes to the field. Baker will hopefully continue to show promise and Lockhart will probably get games again as the season progresses. Weideman's contract signing and the lack of pressure on him to be the guy to carry us to finals gives him the opportunity to unburden himself and maybe that will release him into form. Finals might be gone but the long-term plan remains and the final 10 games give us plenty of opportunity to keep that plan alive.

Yes, unfair. There is undoubtedly a lot of irrational and unjustified hyperbolic rubbish on here and you don't get drawn into that, which is always to be commended. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with you, and I thought the tenor of your post was to knock May and one way you did it was to note De Goey had kicked three. Saying "well he didn't kick all of them on May" is accurate, so then what is the point of mentioning it in the first place? Marking May more harshly because of your high expectations is fine, but it appears to me that a corollary of that is you mark OMac more generously because of your lower expectations. We're all more than entitled to expect May to play high level football given what we gave up to get him (although I disagree with your argument that we should have kept Hogan instead - he wouldn't commit to us beyond 2019 and so the opportunity arose to turn him into May. I'll defend that decision in that context until the cows come home). But I remain of the view that your post about his defensive work was unfair in light of how you have commented on OMac this year. Anyway, that aside one point you make that I do agree with is that it's not really the big forwards who are tearing us up this year as much as it is smaller or medium forwards. Hibberd and Jetta being injured/out of form are probably doing us more damage than Lever/May missing or Frost/OMac having limitations.

I reckon this is really unfair of you. With OMac your rating was always "he spoils and that's a big part of a defender's job". You never seemed to look at who was kicking goals and whether they were on him or not. May comes in and your first criticism is that De Goey kicked 3 so he wasn't as good as Demonland thinks. May showed more defensive bodywork and positioning of an AFL standard than I've seen from OMac all year. He was on De Goey in part because we lost Frost and our match ups seemed to go askew (initially we had Frost on Stephenson but when he got concussed IIRC we sent Hibberd there, and I suspect the initial plan was Hibberd to De Goey). And there are maybe two defenders in the AFL who would have stopped De Goey's goal.

Need to consider in context, i.e. with the stats for what we've scored in the same final quarters: Hawthorn - 2.3 GC - 3.4 WC - 1.3 GWS - 7.2 Adelaide - 1.8 Collingwood - 2.6 So we've scored 16.26. Which means we've generated more scoring shots in those final quarters than we've conceded. I think the reasons have been previously touched on - our opponents are regularly generating shots on goal that are uncontested, or in open forward lines, or in the goal square, or directly in front. They're taking shots with confidence (generally leading us) and they're not under the sort of pressure they should be under.

Seriously? He had the flu. Unfair IMO. I feel as though Spargo is getting the 2019 Coaches' award, a bit like ANB last year. Lots of running and contested work but no flair and poor skills. It's one thing to say he's getting CPs and working hard but the reality is he offers very little offensively and as a forward, that's not great. It's one of the reasons ANB is playing VFL, not AFL.

6 - Gawn 5 - Harmes 4 - Brayshaw 3 - Oliver 2 - May 1 - Petracca

If you think the colour of our jumper is relevant to our form in any way, you’ve got absolutely NFI. For the record, Collingwood wore their clash jumper on Queen’s Birthday last year. First time I can recall either side in a Melb-Coll game wearing a clash jumper.

We have three major problems IMO. The first is the gameplan. It’s been tweaked (we keep more forwards deeper than we used to) but it’s not working, and so long as it’s not working it hurts our confidence as we see fast break after fast break turn into opposition goals. The second is the forward line. Whether injured or not, TMac shouldn’t be playing. He’s a complete shadow of his 2018 self and is a liability offensively and defensively. But it doesn’t stop there. Our forwards are low skilled, lacking confidence across the board, slow and weak defensively. Even a modicum of scoreboard pressure would make us a better side but we continually miss easy shots and either fail to put our opponent under pressure (eg today) or we keep the door open (eg last week). The third is our co-captains. Would Viney or Jones be playing on this form if they weren’t captains? IMO, they wouldn’t. I loved seeing May and Lever, and Gawn was unbelievable against a superstar opponent. Harmes and Brayshaw were strong all day and I thought Weideman got better as the day went on. But we’ll finish bottom 4 this year and we need to address all three of the above issues to move forward.

On paper, this is undoubtedly the best 22 we've fielded in 2019. But we have to be realistic. The backline isn't going to immediately gel and I expect it's going to get exposed more than once today. Other than the obvious interest in seeing the backline playing together (indeed, playing at all), I'm really keen to see how our midfield goes. If Oliver is out, I expect to see Brayshaw getting more stoppage minutes and that could be a good thing for him. Either way, their midfield is excellent and if we can't compete there then it won't matter that we've got a better backline.

I think Weideman signing on is great news. I think @Matsuo Basho's posts on Weideman's comments, personality and ability to succeed in the AFL are terrible. The idea that there is a one size fits all approach to "mental toughness" is a classic example of what is wrong with society (and in particular older white men).

How many sides lose a game where they have a 31 point lead and from then on have more scoring shots than their opponent? How many sides lose a game where they lead at all three changes, twice in one season? The frustration is somehow getting more severe. Luckily I haven't seen the second half. To be fair, we were missing five first-choice defenders (Lever, May, Salem, Jetta, Hore), which doesn't help. The stats and commentary suggest they started scoring too easily in the second half (in the first half they were struggling to convert their inside 50s). But we still generated enough shots on goal to win the match and should have even with their scoring. The story of MFC 2019 (and indeed MFC 2017 and 2018 too). The players need to be better but we can't keep playing football like this and that's on the coaches.

Garlett should have 3 goals this quarter. His misses have been shots he should be kicking. 8 scoring shots to 4 but only a 9 point lead, too.

This is our best first quarter this year, with 6 minutes to spare. First time we've kicked 5 goals in the opening quarter.

We've scored 7 times from 11 inside 50s. This is anti-MFC-2019.

Infuriating mistake from Fritsch.

How was that not HTB, but the one on Viney was earlier? This is the best Garlett has looked in years.

So with those late changes, the changes from last week are now: In: Hibberd, Hannan, Kennedy-Harris, Weideman Out: Hore, C Wagner, Lockhart, Petty The two late changes suck but the team is better off overall with these four changes. C Wagner and Petty were superfluous to our needs and we get two better marking forward options in Hannan and Weideman. JKH improves Lockhart, Hibberd replaces Hore adequately enough (less defensive stalwart-ness but more offensive drive).

Good post. There's more to our problems than just the injury list, and our list depth should be better than it has been, but our injury list has had both breadth and depth, if that makes sense, and it's cut us much deeper than Richmond or Collingwood, who are at ay rate better-placed to cope. Welcome(?) back?

I have no problem with the three outs, nor with the three ins, but I am amazed that both Spargo and Stretch have remained in the side. Hopefully both of them put int marked improvements on last week. You know Gibbs and Jenkins were out of the side because they'd been dropped for poor form, don't you? And you know that Jenkins is possibly in the top 5 most over-rated AFL players?

The injury list thing is interesting, although of course not the entire picture. One thing that it doesn't mention and which I'd like to know is the number of best 22 players out. We've constantly had 5-10 best 22 players missing from any given team we've fielded. There's just too many missing players, IMO, for cohesion or continuity to build in our 22. I don't know if that's backed up by evidence, it's just a feeling. You're not allowed to bag Pert for our on-field performances unless you can suggest a rational reason why he might be influencing our on-field performances. He's the CEO. He's here to run the MFC business. If you have a suggestion as to what he's done that has impacted the on-field performance, go ahead.

More unnecessary pessimism. "Frost is a better bet than May" is not a sentence that is backed up by any evidence. It's just your way of whinging about May's start to his time here. Saying that Goodwin is only going play May over Frost to "justify his recruitment" is more whinging. We will play May when he is fit and ready and he will be an improvement on Frost or Oscar or Petty.

He's excellent. But he wouldn't commit to the club long-term. He wanted to play in Perth. We 100% made the right call. Our problem isn't trading Hogan, it's the complete lack of form of TMac and Weideman combined with the ineptitude of those kicking it to them. Agree. The non-shepherd of TMac's shot at the start of the second killed us. We had a modicum of momentum at that point and could have got the crowd up with an early goal. TMac not making the distance is bad enough, but no one in the goal square to shepherd it through is unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable.

I'm not sure what your point is. Our side was the second youngest of the 18 sides to play Round 10. It was also the second most inexperienced. What part of that is misleading? The stats aren't posted in absolute terms - the average age was 24 so we're clearly not a side full of teenagers. They're posted in relative terms - whatever age we had, 16 sides were, on average, older. If you want to have concern over list profile, it's where you're old but inexperienced. That wasn't us this weekend (not on average, anyway).

These are two major issues that need to be worked on. How often did a GWS player take a mark inside 50 on a lead, with our defender trailing them? And how often did it feel like our forwards could get no separation on their GWS defenders? Only Hunt was regularly getting away from his opponent and he took three or four good leading grabs. But is it chicken or egg - are we seeing lack of separation from forwards because they are having the ball delivered behind them or above their head, as opposed to out in front of them to their advantage? Our kicking going inside 50 isn't improving. Agree to an extent. GWS' superior foot speed was evident today - so many times players like Kelly and Whitfield were able to break free from stoppages and get clearance on our mids. But generally, we looked much quicker last week with 20 of the same players playing this week. The game was much more on our terms last week - we were winning CPs and clearances. Today GWS beat us in the middle and, as is too often the case with us, if you beat us in CPs/clearances the rest of our game falls apart. You mean the same Jesse Hogan who played all four quarters today against Brisbane and didn't get a single kick? Meanwhile Dean Kent had 14 touches and zero tackles.