titan_uranus

Yep, we definitely needed another thread to discuss this.

Rubbish. Martin is hopeless. What a stupid, anti-Melbourne/Neeld/our current situation comment. Jamar is almost identical in form, ability and type to Ivan Maric, and everybody loves him (my vote for most-over-rated player in the competition, btw). The difference is Maric has decent midfielders at his feet, ready to do the hard work of actually going to get his hit outs. Jamar palms the ball down, our players grab it, and are tackled, failing to get it away. There is, or used to be, a statistic called 'first touch', which was players getting their hands on the ball at a stoppage first, but not necessarily being the player to get the clearance. I wouldn't be surprised if our 'first touches' were high-ish on Sunday, but we continually had the ball stripped away or stolen from errant handpasses, to give Port the clearances.

What a Sunday! Nice to see the AFL scheduling some big games for Sundays this year, rather than consistently putting dud games on Sundays. Match of the round - for general spectacle-ness, Collingwood-Carlton. For the actual match, Geelong-North Melbourne. Thrashing of the round - Essendon-Melbourne; for something a little different, Sydney-Gold Coast (second-week blues, I'm predicting). Potential upset of the round - North Melbourne over Geelong, if that's enough of an 'upset'. They're good, those Kangas.

Couldn't agree more.

Another pointless RR thread. Not sure RR has ever started a thread worth reading. Our financial situation and our administration has SFA to do with our current problem. We could be rolling in millions of dollars of profits, with 75,000 members. That wouldn't change the fact that our coach, our coaching team, and our players, are all struggling.

Thanks for that. The loose man is one tactic that Neeld simply has to do away with. It continually hurts us more than it helps us. Also, Dunn is insipid.

There's a thread for this already. As much as the discussion is fantastic, we don't need new threads for every post.

^ This is the position I'm beginning to take.

A couple of interesting things on FC tonight. 1) Lloyd pulling out some vision showing our lack of effort, and our pathetic 'zoning'. Disgraceful. 2) Lloyd pulling out some vision of Viney giving third/fourth efforts. The kid is a gun. Could not be more pleased with him. 3) Lloyd reiterating what some/many on here have been putting forward as a counter to the 'we've drafted poorly' argument: that we could have that many first round draft picks fail on us speaks not of the players we chose, but of the system we brought them into. Morton, Watts, Scully, Trengove, Gysberts, they were all highly rated and deserved to be picked where we picked them. Lloyd's argument is that they came to a club with sub-standard training, sub-standard development, sub-standard leadership, and were asked to be the saviours.

Understand the frustration, but really, what do you want them to say? 'Look, we're all useless AFL footballers, and we're wondering whether Neeldy even knows what the f**k he's doing'. Sure. Who cares what they say? They can say whatever they want, provided they try on Saturday.

Whether he does or not, that's a pathetic response. He should know that, as an AFL player, people are going to express emotion at your, or the team's, performance. His analogy to going to someone else's workplace isn't fair, as 'regular' people don't get paid what AFL players get paid (yes, Magner's a rookie, but in general), and it's quite freaking obvious that part of being an AFL player is dealing with limelight, criticism, media focuses, and general public commentary. I understand his frustration, and in fact I enjoy knowing that he's passionate about defending the club and Jones/Bail. But he could have done that in a remotely intellectual way, rather than just mouthing off.

I don't mean to be childish here (or maybe I do), but Dunn has to go, and to all those who wanted him in for Round 1 - I told you so. He's completely useless and the fact he's played 100 games is a reflection of where this club's at right now. From the parts of the game I've seen, I can't see the addition Pedersen gives to the side, and if Dawes is fit, surely that's a direct swap. Hopefully McDonald can take Gillies' place (no idea how Gillies played, but McDonald walks into our side and sounds like Gillies wasn't that good anyway). Davey in as a wingman maybe? Blease to play a full game? Anything to give us more run. Although run can't be the only thing, since it seems Nicholson, one of our quickest, turned it over a lot. Tapscott's likely to become our next Matt Bate - looks the type physically, shows promise early, but stagnates badly and goes nowhere over the course of 2-3 years. Thought Terlich did enough pre-season to get a game, so maybe that's a swap too.

I wouldn't be writing them off, after just one game against Geelong. I'd agree, though, that if they can't get a flag this year, or next, and they start to wane, then that will be a fail for them. They were lucky to win it in 2008 anyway.

No sh!t. You needed a poll to tell you that?

Meanwhile... Wtf Hawthorn. 30 points up at one stage, now 21 down.

Nick McCallum, the famous one, works for Channel 7 and 3AW, and has done the pre-game spiels that we used to do at our home games (remember the 'grand old flag' disaster?). He is a proud MFC supporter. He didn't write that, though.

True. Still is a reflection of where our club's at, though, that he did it at all.

It's a situation that raises as many worrying issues as it does provide us with hope. It's great to see JV has the leadership potential, and the balls, to stand up after one game (or, at the least, be good enough to warrant being asked) in front of the whole team. It's also great to see that someone actually cares. However, it's not really earth-shattering to ask, if a debutant 18-year-old has to do this, what the hell is wrong with the rest of them? It's somewhat laughable that the youngest member of the team is the one leading.

I agree that plenty of the decision to sack Bailey comes from Schwab and the Board's situation at the time. That doesn't mean Bailey wasn't a bad coach. Those defensive statistics surprise me somewhat - are you using points against? Our defence was always OK under Bailey, and in fact is still OK. The problem was that the midfield had no defensive capabilities, the same issue that we have now. Saying that Hinkley has showed a new clear direction is a bit ridiculous - they've played one game, against us. What if they come out next week and get belted? As for the others, Lyon took over a team that, injuries aside, would have been playing finals anyway, Sanderson took over a team led by Neil Craig, meaning that if they were nothing, they were at least a fit and developed list, and McCartney also had a year of completely sucking, just like Neeld, and thus didn't show anything within his six months, or at the very least, showed no more than Neeld. I accept that Neeld is struggling; no one denies that. But the fundamental difference between us and those other clubs is that our list had no stars, had no fitness base, had no game plan, and had no structure to it. To ask someone to come in and overhaul us is a big job. Yes, he is struggling, and there are plenty of things we could be doing better aside from merely pushing up the ladder, and yes, I'm disappointed in Neeld to date. But I do not agree that his job is comparable to any other coach's.

Thank f**k he's going to be OK, it seems, for Saturday. If all 22 played like he does, we'd be fine.

I'm a bit the same. I think effort has to be prioritised at the moment, though, so he stays, but when Jordie McKenzie is one of your best midfielders, you're never going to be a good AFL side

It's not going to happen now, so let's not worry about it. If 2013 goes the same way as 2012, revisit this discussion in late-August/September.

Because he was one of the worst things to happen to this club. As a club, we went nowhere whilst he was here. Chalking up meaningless wins in 2010 doesn't change that. He coached our players to be a bunch of downhill skiiers - sometimes this ended up with us winning by 10 goals, but the general problem was that we didn't have defensiveness. We were drastically unfit under his leadership. We didn't play like a team, and we didn't have any plan B, or C, or D. Dean Bailey was not a good coach, and pointing to his win-loss record as being better than Mark Neeld's is ridiculous. Neeld is clearly struggling. He's taken that list, flawed and all, and not been able to make much improvement to it. We're still not a team. We're still not fit. We still don't have a plan B, or C. But those are things which Neeld did not create. They're things which he has failed to fix.

From what I understood from the radio, they had Paul Stewart tagging him, and we spent a lot of the match trying to get Watts freed up to play loose. As a result, our defenders kept having to look after Stewart because Watts wasn't bothering to do so. Is that how you saw it? Either way, the fact is, Watts had a shocker, didn't do what he was asked to do (either play on Stewart or have an influence loose).

The sad thing is, work ethic should be the one thing he can get going from day 1. I can understand a game plan not coming together at the start, and needing a season, maybe two, to get it right. But the least negotiable of all the non-negotiables should be our work ethic, and it should have been his highest priority over the pre-season to make sure we lived up to his original promise of making us hard to coach against.