titan_uranus

This is what I mean. A win adds nothing to our season so why do people care so much if we lose? So on the one hand, you won' be concerned if we lose to Carlton because their record is around ours. On the other hand, we should have "taken action" after losing to St Kilda, who have double the wins of Carlton this year. Do you mean we should have sacked Goodwin after the St Kilda game?

You bring this out frequently, Macca. Just because you hold a minority view does not mean the majority view is "group think", nor that you are right. Just on the topic of Frost being a whipping boy, whilst traditionally that has been the case on Demonland I reckon the past few months have seen the most positive commentary on here around Frost I've ever seen. And I think that's deserved, as I think this year has been his best for us and he has improved his game in a few key ways.

Agreed. I'm certainly not advocating for tanking and want us to win every game from here if we can. But hyperbolic posting about how the club is going to fall apart if we lose to Carlton is just that, hyperbole.

Does it really matter that much? It's not like a win is going to change people's thoughts about us. The people who think we need to rebuild aren't going to stop calling for a rebuild. Let's focus on playing a more sustainable brand of football.

If Gawn is anything less than 100% he should be rested for Preuss. If Gawn is 100% then Preuss can be considered as a replacement for one of TMac, T Smith and Weideman. One game of 3.3 from T Smith is not enough for a very limited 28-year old player. Lever for Petty is an improvement. Replacing ANB and Hannan is a possibility too; personally I'd only do one, particularly if we're already bringing in Preuss and Lever.

It's par for the course on Demonland, and particularly for people like olisik, who have very little positive to say but a tonne of negativity. Draft pick hindsight analysis is wonderful but even if we did completely stuff the Sparrow pick up that's about 50th on the list of things that have gone wrong this year. Richmond 2016 anyone? That was Hardwick's 7th season as coach. Three straight finals appearances without a win, then a bottom 6 finish with an 8-14 record. Your final sentence is a classic Demonland analysis - it's not just one thing. It's both of the two you mentioned, and more.

We fixed this last week vs Fremantle and it looked good. Was it the players failing to implement those changes this week? Was it the way Brisbane played which encouraged us to play fast and aggressive? Or was it coaching? I suspect it was the players failing to suppress the instinct we've drilled into them over the last 18 months to play on repeatedly.

I can think of three more important things than a list rebuild that we need to do going into 2020: Change/tweak the gameplan - less playing on, fewer handpasses, more kick-mark, feeding into better connection between the midfielders and forwards Fitness - full overhaul needed here. Too many players stuck in rehab too long, too many injuries, not enough two-way running, too many players failing to develop physically Leadership - Viney/Jones need to be removed from captaincy and it needs to be given to Gawn. We need to make some list changes too of course, but we don't need the drastic changes that some on here suggest. I don't agree that we stand to benefit by trading out someone like Brayshaw or Petracca. We'll get a top 5 pick and a second rounder in the 20-25 range. Do our homework, take those to the draft, and bring in two quality top-25 draft picks.

None of us know for sure what May was talking about with Frost. It could well have been a specific thing discussed before or during the game which Frost messed up and May found disappointing. I rarely agree with anything Leigh Matthews says but I agreed with his comment that, if anything, May might have gone on about it too long, but it's impossible to know given we couldn't hear what was being said. I'll say one thing though: at three quarter time, neither Viney nor Jones looked like they wanted anything to do with it. Whether you agree with May or not, I find it unforgivably poor that neither captain got involved even in the slightest.

From what I saw (second half only), we lost this game through two areas: our midfield got badly beaten, and we gave up goals at critical times through turnovers. Brisbane are a high scoring side and don't bring defensive pressure that much. They feed off centre clearances and turnovers and we gave both to them with far too much ease. The number of times we would have a chain of possession going but would either kick directly to a Lion, or miss a target and turn a 100% mark into a 50/50% contest, or we'd fumble on a chain of handpasses, or we'd drop a mark - we just kept doing it over and over again. And we couldn't get on top in the middle so we couldn't stop their momentum from the contest either. We can't keep playing Hunt, ANB, Hannan and Weideman in the same forward half, when most weeks they are all passengers. Something needs to change in that area.

If Lever and Hibberd are fit, they come in. Petty and Wagner are the ones to make way. But if there is any doubt on either of them, we shouldn't be risking it. ANB and Hannan struggled yesterday. Hannan has more upside and there's no obviously better player ready to come back until Melksham is fit, so they probably both stay. No idea why anyone would suggest bringing Preuss in when we've just seen TMac and T Smith kick 3 goals each, given Weideman is the most mobile of the three (i.e. the least like-for-like replacement for Preuss).

The only thing we should be doing that we mightn't be doing if we were pushing for finals is to err on the side of caution with injuries. Otherwise, there is no good argument for tanking, no good argument for trying to get a "better" draft pick. We should be aiming to finish 13-9 or as close to it as we can get.

6 - Viney 5 - Gawn 4 - Lockhart 3 - Oliver 2 - Petracca 1 - TMac

No. But right now he's behind May, Lever, Frost and Petty IMO. So we might not see much more of him. Challenge has been laid down to him to improve his strength, bodywork, positioning and ability to get involved in offence, with all of the above being better at most, if not all, of those things than him.

Yes they were two down on the bench for much of the second half, but Fremantle are a better side than most are giving them credit for. They've beaten Collingwood at the G and GWS in Sydney. Our score of 85 was the second highest score they've conceded all year. At times we made awful mistakes but as has been mentioned we had a noticeable change in tactics with a lower amount of immediate playing on, less run and carry and more kicking and uncontested marking. When we looked good, we actually looked great. Lockhart is a beauty IMO. He just wants the ball, he wants to get involved, he's great in close but he can kick too. Viney was a lot better as well, but he still kicks the ball far too high. Fritsch is a much better player across the wing/half-forward, he nailed two inside 50s early but still had a couple of howler turnovers. May is a gun. His bodywork is as good as any key defender in the league but he's actually a lot quicker than you'd expect for someone of his build, and importantly he can actually kick the ball. Really, really impressed with these two games from him. Would love to get Lever back out there ASAP so we can get May, Lever, Frost and Hore playing with each other and continuing to build chemistry. TMac had a terrible first half, he looked completely bereft of confidence and pretty much everything he did was a mistake. But he kept working at it and his second half was a return to 2018 TMac. Jones' mistake was careless but Walters dropped his knees to milk it. It was a two-goal turnaround, so if it hadn't happened we'd have won by nearly 5 goals. IMO, this win was more than just them being two down. Very undermanned - they had two best 22 players missing (Lobb and Pearce). So wrong there. Walking wounded - sure, they were two down. So-so - nope, see above. This is just completely unnecessarily OTT pessimism. The umpiring was poor, but I don't know if it was all that one-sided against us. The free to TMac in the fourth quarter where he kicked the goal from 50 was a shocking free.

His bets included spots, though. He bet on himself to kick 3+ goals. That required him to influence the outcome of the match to engineer 3 goals for himself, even if that was a bad outcome for the team. We've seen the footage showing him go for a 65m torp with 2 minutes left. Collingwood at that time were 40+ points up, but imagine if the Saints had been leading when he took that mark. Imagine if he'd gone for the low-percentage barrel with the game on the line, just because he wanted to get his own personal goal-count up to 3. There's a fair debate to be had around the AFL's taking of gambling money with one hand and doling out harsh punishments for gambling with the other, but that doesn't make what Stephenson did OK. It was not, and his penalty is probably too lenient given he is back for finals.

No, we are not a chance. We'd need to win 9 out of 10 games and build our awful percentage up by 30% or so. Our fixture still contains Fremantle (6th), Brisbane (7th, and on the road), West Coast (5th), Richmond (8th, and by then likely to have more of its better players back in the side) and Collingwood (2nd). We'd therefore need to win all bar one of these games, and win the rest (Carlton, Bulldogs, St Kilda, Sydney, North Melbourne in Tasmania). It's not happening, even if we turn our form around rapidly. Having said all that, IMO the only thing we should "relax" our position on for the last 10 games (as compared to if we were 5-7 and borderline in the top eight) is player fitness. Don't rush injured players back, and when in doubt we should rest rather than persist. If TMac's sore, get him out of the side and rest him up. Ditto Viney, and anyone else. Otherwise aim to win all 10 games in terms of selection and gameplan.

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.