titan_uranus

He also said that something that's important to work on throughout the year is getting a stable gameplan in place. He said that, no matter whether Hawthorn or Fremantle or Geelong etc. win or lose, you can identify exactly how they play the game. So for us, he wants our players to be consistently able to play a brand of football weekly, such that you can look at Melbourne, even if we're losing, and see what we're trying to do.

Another thing he said of interest - the two most important things for us to work on are midfield depth (worked on already, obviously), and two-way running. Two-way running, the ability to get back and forward, is something he said he noticed we sorely lacked this year.

Heard a little bit of Roos on SEN and then straight after on 3AW. Most interesting thing he said - his plan for Clark is for him to be a second ruckman. He thinks we get a lot better as a club if we have Clark as a ruckman/forward.

England 0/310. Carberry 145*. Cook 154*. New opening pair confirmed, you'd have thought. Root to bat at 6. Cutting, Copeland, Henriques, Holland, Maxwell = all lacklustre. Meanwhile Victoria is 7/196, Rogers a valiant 87* whilst the rest struggle. Lyon's taken just the one wicket so far (I hate this media crap about a 'bowl off' between Lyon and Ahmed. Lyon is better. Ahmed hasn't done nearly enough yet to be included. Selecting him on the back of one innings where he took a six-for is exactly the kind of haphazard selecting we shouldn't be engaging in).

Rogers has dropped the anchor, as they say, in the match against NSW. 26* off 127. White made 48 before getting out, Quiney just 6. Victoria now 4/100. Carberry opened with Cook in the England XI v Australia A game. 0/164. Bowlers include Jon Holland, who got hit around for 25 off his 4 overs. Silk and Cosgrove doing well to have Tasmania 0/109, against bowling including Ryan Harris. What rubbish. He's got nothing but a desire to be flashy and the ability to hit sixes. I couldn't imagine a worse number 3 choice, to be honest. Cowan has 'grit and a real fighting spirit'. So does Rogers. Warner is at the other end of the spectrum.

Some perspective on the good sides, courtesy of Tuesday Morning Quarterback: Undefeated Kansas City and stats-a-palooza Denver each have only one victory over a team with a winning record, in both cases shaky 5-4 Dallas. Cincinnati has a quality win over New England, but also three losses; Chicago has a quality win over Cincinnati, but also three losses; Green Bay is 1-3 against other winning teams; Detroit 2-2 against other winning teams. Seattle beat the 49ers but lost to Indianapolis, making the Seahawks 1-1 in authentic games. San Francisco 1-2 against top teams. New England has just one quality victory, over New Orleans, which in turn has just one victory over a winning team. For authentic accomplishments, so far Indianapolis is tops (3-0, having beaten SF, Seattle and Denver). Carolina is on a 4-0 streak -- over teams with a combined 6-27 record. The Chiefs haven't faced a starting quarterback since September. Opposition quarterbacks in Kansas City's past five games have been second string, second string, second string, third string and fourth string. ​

What I meant is that, if his back is playing up, the extra rest he'd get by batting at 5 would do him good.

Incredibly soft schedule. Eagles, Giants, Vikings, Falcons, Steelers don't pose a huge threat (though I guess Eagles in their Week 9 form might be a bit tougher). That just leaves games against the Lions, Cowboys and Bears, all of which are road games and much tougher assignments. Having said that, at 5-3 they'll need to pick up all those easy games to get 10 wins. Lions and Bears also have 5 wins each, so the competition in NFC North is definitely on.

If we're in the running to beat Carlton, Richmond and/or North Melbourne next year, then we'll be showing enormous signs of improvement and this board will be a much happier place. I don't think we can go from where we are now to that level in one year, but I do think that it's reasonable to suggest, with what we've got, that we can be challenging sides more around the WC, Adelaide, GC, Brisbane mark.

Not sure how long Rodgers is out for, but if he's out then Green Bay's playoff chances are surely in big trouble. With Stafford and Megatron in awesome form, winning NFC North is going to be tough (especially if the Bears can win games with McCown at QB). Today's result means that, if the playoffs were now, GB wouldn't be in them. Detroit wins NFC North, and Carolina beats out GB (and Chicago) in the tiebreaker for the second wild card (based on conference record). If we assume that Seattle/SF and Denver/KC make up the first WC in both conferences, the battles for the 6th and final playoff spot on both sides is really heating up. Going to be a massive finish to the season.

Is there anyone in Australia who can actually bat at 3? Watson can't. Smith can't. Khawaja cant. Clarke can, but shouldn't (back). I don't think Bailey can either. Maybe Doolan gets a game for this reason. 28 years old, so not as young as we might have hoped for, but still could get a decent few years out of him, and he is made for 3.

I take offence to this. Gin and tonics are fantastic drinks.

This part of your argument is where you fall apart. Any pick we would use to replace Blease or Tapscott would some late pick (I don't know, 60-something maybe). By the nature of a pick like that, the player we take will be just as likely to succeed as Blease/Tapscott would be. Your argument would be correct if the discussion was trading Blease for pick 30. But it's not. Stuie's point is valid. This is the first regime for both of these two to get the most out of themselves. If neither of them come on in 2014, the decision will be made. There's no need to replace them now, though, when all we'll get back is a 2-year commitment to someone who represents no greater chance of success than these two.

Summary of Part 2: Draft has good talent from 1-15 so we weren't worried about sliding from 2 to 9. Enough talent through the top 15 for us to get a quality midfielder at pick 9 When asked which players were most exciting, he said 'it's more across the board', it's about ensuring every player maximises potential. No pre-conceived ideas Looking forward to seeing how hard they work and train, and who the leaders are and who drives the group. We need to see improvement in every one of our players On the fixture, Roos says that as you get more experienced as a coach you stop caring about the draw as much, so he hasn't had a huge look at it. We have to gain some respect before we start caring about who we're playing. Whoever we play is going to be a tough game, we simply need to get better Every year the senior coaching role becomes more of a management role, important to have the right people with you and work with them well. You can't just fix all the problems by appointing a new senior coach Most exciting thing about coaching Melbourne? 'The worse it sounded, the more exciting it got'. He sees it as a senior coaching role but also a leadership role. Wants to drive the leaders and playing group. We'll cop whacks from the media and fans, but his job is to help the players get through it and build them up. The challenge is the exciting part. Hopefully we can win as many games as we can, but it's really about the leadership and the transformation of the club and its culture Says that win/loss focus are media and fan-driven. Obviously we want to win as many games as we can. Coaches can do so much, but there is an element up to the players: how will the react? Will they work hard to help the coaches implement their ideas? Too early to predict a number of wins. Says that, over the next 2-3 years he's 'extremely confident' we'll see a 'really competent' team, but he can't say much more until he works with the players. We'll put the best team on the park, we'll get them fit and disciplined, but then there's a bit up to the players to take it on and make it work.

If you can't understand how percentages work, don't be surprised if/when people start disregarding your posts.

Of course it is. The fact that a 6 game increase represents 400% highlights how awful we are. A 1 game increase for us is a 50% increase on our year. For the Gold Coast to increase by 50% they'd need to win another 4 games. It reflects the fact that GC is better than we are.

I never once said that. None of what you're saying is wrong of course, but the flip side is that we can't accept that it'd all be better if we'd simply picked different players.

That's the thing - I'm not trying to 'portion all the blame' (I'd have gone with Bailey over Neeld if I was going to do that anyway, if we're talking about Blease and Strauss). Never have. In fact, I'd argue it's a lot easier to blame Prendergast for everything than the coaches. When it all comes down to it, we had a poor recruiting team, but we also had two poor coaching teams. Neither the recruiters nor the coaches were very good at their jobs. So, we made some bad picks, but even when we made good picks, we didn't get the return we should have. It's not as simple as 'BP picked the wrong players'.

Looks as though Kubiak will be fine. Meanwhile the Colts came back from a 21-3 deficit to win the game, with the Texans' kicker missing a field goal on the final play of the game to force OT (his third missed FG of the game). Huge win for the Colts, keeps them two games clear of Tennessee (sounds ridiculous, but a loss would have only meant the Titans would be back one game!).

Putting a win-loss target on a season is pointless. We need to be more holistic. Just like a 2-win season doesn't accurately describe how insipid we were in 2013, we need to focus on the overall standard of our football in 2014. We need to be more competitive for longer at clearances, we need to apply something that resembles defensive pressure through the middle, we need to generate more scoring chains from the back 50, defend kick-outs better, use our own kick-outs better, all that stuff. That may not translate into 8 wins, or 7, or whatever, but we need to show, across a season, that our football is of a higher overall quality. Percentage is a more important measurement, as Roos said in the video today. Something around 85-90% would be good (GC this year finished on 91.73%, Brisbane on 89.65%, Bulldogs on 85.15%), but again, we need to end the year happy with what we showed overall in 2014.

I'm not throwing it away altogether. I'm merely noting that there absolutely is an element of our currently awful list that is down to development and culture and what we do with talent once it comes in the door. To put everything down to simply drafting is to assume that we were able to turn the talent we see at other clubs into what it is now, and that is something that I fundamentally cannot accept. I also do not accept that every pick we've made since 2007 has been an error, which some people seem to think (not necessarily you). There is undoubtedly a need to nail first round draft picks, I don't think anyone would suggest otherwise, but I don't subscribe to the view that we failed on every single pick, nor do I subscribe to the view that our drafting mistakes are the sole reason we're where we're at (or even the wholly dominant reason). For mine, there have been clear mistakes (Cook and Gysberts probably leading the charge there), but we just cannot know how a lot of the highly-rated and fairly drafted kids would have gone if they'd been drafted to other clubs. None of this has anything to do with my initial point which you cast aside as 'irrelevant rubbish', which is to say that, accepting Cook to be worthy of something more like pick 40 instead of 12, we still took a player objectively worth pick 40 and got 0 games from him. Take the erroneous use of pick 12 out of the debate, and you end up with Melbourne taking a second-round pick and getting nothing from him.

Provided we can call Melbourne a 'professional football team', this is fantastic. There's always reason to hope.

I've always been a fan of his. He's doing everything right. With Watson potentially out, that's two spots in the top six we need to fill. Bailey takes one, but the other one is up for grabs. Doolan's century helps him, as does Faulkner's ODI form. White needs to keep making runs, maybe with a wicket or two here or there, to ensure he stays in selectors' minds. At some point this Ashes questions are going to be asked about most of our top 6, spots may appear.

To call Scully a 'very ordinary player' is to reason with hindsight. The evidence and all the reviews prior to the draft were that Scully was a number 1 pick. If you think you knew otherwise, then good on you, but you were in a small minority at the time. Picking Scully was not something we should be complaining about. I don't disagree that we'd have been better off with those players, that wasn't my real point. I just wanted to make sure we don't just assume, in these drafting hindsight debates, that swapping Cook for Atley means the Atley currently running around at North. I've lost all faith in Tapscott, I just don't see what he brings. I'm with you on Trengove though, I feel he could be a real beneficiary of Roos (that starts with taking the captaincy off him though).

We can have the debate about Clark, but that doesn't change the fact that the Cook-Darling decision hasn't destroyed our club like some want to say. As for the second bit, in fact it's you who is spouting the 'irrelevant rubbish'. Clearly you couldn't be bothered thinking for a moment about what I was saying. I was not defending picking Cook at 12, and obviously we could have taken one of those kids instead. In fact, that feeds into my discussion a bit. But I'll go back to what I said originally - if Cook was worthy of a second round pick, like people are saying in this thread, then Melbourne still failed in taking a second-round pick and getting 0 games from him. Now, let's think about if we'd taken Smith/Darling/Smedts/Guthrie/Atley. Do you think that if we'd taken them, in their time at Melbourne they'd have necessarily reached the heights they've reached at their clubs? I'd say they'd be good (and clearly millions of times better than Cook, so don't try to mince my words), but they wouldn't be at the level they're at now, primarily due to Melbourne's development being a joke in comparison.