titan_uranus

Watts is as close to the bottom of the worry-list as anything else. He is developing nicely. It's not his fault his idiot of a coach keeps putting him loose in defence.

I'd be flabbergasted if this was true.

Understand your argument, but still feel that Stynes and Schwab have had overall positive influences on this club. It's easy for us to point the finger at them for being at the top of the hierarchy but the fact remains that if it wasn't for those two, this club might not exist right now. I'd take a shitty existence like this over no existence at all.

I knew this would be a problem... Surely we set a record today for biggest combined losing margin for an AFL side and its VFL affiliate. 300-odd points.

The Good: I don't have Foxtel so I didn't watch it. The Bad: That JMac was the only player to remotely have a half-decent game. The Ugly: EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT THIS GAME

Just thinking: names I want to see include Tom McDonald, Tom McNamara, Sam Blease (why was he dropped in the first place?) and Lucas Cook. Just play them FFS. Especially the two TMacs. The original TMac has done OK at Casey in the middle. Why not give him a run? He can't be worse than Maric. Or Gybserts. Or Dunn. Or the other 19 players.

I'll do the same and put my hand up to say I thought Green was the right choice. He clearly isn't. He has no clue. Agree. If I could, I'd remove all positions of leadership from the players, drop Green, and tell the rest that positions in the leadership group for 2011 are ready to be taken by the scruff of the neck. Green is sure as hell not going to captain us next year, so if you want it, prove to us you can do it, and LEAD US!

See you later then. Sure, it stinks right now to be a Melbourne supporter. Once again, we are the laughing stock of the AFL. Our future looks worse now than it did at the start of the year. Your hypocrisy is startling. You complain about our players giving up, yet that is exactly what you're doing. Don't just walk away now. The last thing this club needs is for its fans to desert it. We might feel like walking away, but that achieves nothing, and it's getting through the pains like today that make the eventual success, whenever it comes, that much sweeter. But if you wanna give up now, fine. Just don't come back.

What does it matter who the caretaker is? If Bailey goes (and he should, IMO), we will put in a caretaker to see out the year. Definition of a caretaker. Then we will (hopefully) do the right thing and suss out who is available (experienced or not), and do the diligence required to get the best available. If that's Roos (which I strongly doubt), then that's fine. It might be Malthouse, or Clarkson. Or it might be Hinkley, Sanderson, Burns or Cameron.

I fail to see how Stynes or Schwab have been anything but beneficial to this club. Leave them out of it. Connolly and Prendergast come under more pressure because of their closer connections to our on-field performances. I still remain in the 'hindsight is wonderful' camp when it comes to recruiting. Yes, Morton, Strauss, Blease and Maric have been poor picks. In hindsight. But at the time no one was whinging about those calls, so I struggle to blame recruitment. I blame coaching. I blame Bailey, and his assistants, and our team that work with the players. They have taken talented youth and failed to get them to reach their potential. Of course, part of the blame has to go to the players themselves, but the coaching simply hasn't been good enough.

I want to drop half the side, but who comes in? Casey got beaten by 120. Welcome back.

Surely after all this time the coaches have to take responsibility for not being able to get our leaders to lead? It's not entirely their fault, sure, but there has to be some element of fault on the part of the coaches. We get no inspiration from our leaders. I doubt we're getting much from our coaches either.

The following records were broken/set: It was Geelong's second-highest score, the fourth-highest of all time, and the highest since quarters were shortened to 20 minutes in 1994. It was Geelong's highest ever winning margin, our second largest losing margin, and the second-largest losing margin of all time. Geelong's second quarter (12.1.73) was their second-best ever, and the highest score we've ever conceded. The half time margin of 114 was the second-higest of all time. Geelong's half time score of 20.4.124 was their second-highest of all time, and the highest we've ever conceded.

Well I agree with that, he's a dud who isn't going to make it. But I don't see how, after losing by 31 goals with 0 winners on the ground, we need to single out Maric. I don't like him and I don't rate him, but he doesn't deserve that. We had 22 players plus a stack of coaches and other associated on-field teams who are all responsible, and who all have let us, themselves, and the club, down.

Thanks QueenC, that's exactly what I was getting at. Nice to know someone else out there can see that! And I agree too, even though I don't think the club will act tonight (or this week), I think a performance like this could be sufficient grounds to terminate his contract. Maybe today will be the day we look back on in a couple of years. Maybe today will be the day we actually turned this club around. Or maybe today shows that the gap between our actual and our potential is a lot bigger than many of us are giving it credit. Maybe today shows that we have been lulled into thinking we are going to make it with this list. What remains to be seen is how we deal with this disaster. We've done well so far this year in turning bad performances into good ones, but previously our bad performances were 10 goals, not 30.

Care to elaborate? I felt my question was legitimate: wanted to know what people thought as to wether or not one game could be enough to make the club make a call, a la Adelaide with Neil Craig (yes, he resigned, but surely that was pressured). I don't see why that is not a legitimate question, given most (not all, but most) people before today felt that we would wait until the end of the year, or at least until after the West Coast game, to see where we were at.

I can't say I see the point in singling out one player out of this.

They need to score 20 more points to record the highest EVER score in the AFL/VFL history. PS: Where did my poll go?

Embarrassing. I don't care that it's Geelong in Geelong, to concede 20 goals in one half of football is pathetic. No team should ever concede that many goals. Our youth/inexperience/whatever is no excuse for a performance this inept. What's the bet we come under immense scrutiny this week, and then put in a half-decent performance against Carlton, thereby removing from people's minds how bad we are right now?

Maric hasn't had a good game this year. He played OK against Port, but that's Port. Nothing special there. Maric is crap.

Positives: pace, skills Negatives: strength, courage, workrate, involvement in the play, body language He has the offensive capabilities but needs to work a lot on his effort and intensity to make it. At the moment he doesn't work anywhere near hard enough and as a result, doesn't get enough of the ball.

Collingwood, on a Friday night. Would be nice to be a feature game in Round 1. Although it would also be nice to win in Round 1 for the first time since 2005. In which case, GWS.

1) We were most definitely as bad as some are making out. We were horrendous. 2) Who's doubting the coaches are aiming to beat whoever we are playing? I haven't seen anyone say we're not trying. That would be tanking. Let's not go back there... The problem isn't that we're not trying, it's that we're not good enough. Try as hard as we want, we're not going to beat Geelong this weekend. Does that make Bailey a crap coach? No. 3) Anyone can win, sure, but the likelihood of Port Adelaide beating Collingwood if they played this week is about 0.0001%.

No, the argument being put forward by some people is that Bailey sucks because we haven't beaten many Victorian sides. This is a different argument to the one you're putting forward, which is that we can't beat sides that are above us on the ladder, or in the top 4/8, or whatever. There are people out there who can't stand the fact we continue to lose to Collingwood, Carlton, Hawthorn, St Kilda, Geelong, the Bulldogs and North Melbourne, irrespective of the fact that, North aside, they're all much better than us. The fact we can't beat the better sides is something else. It may well come down to poor coaching, but at the same time, we started out in 2008 as undoubtedly the worst side in the comp, and it's not that easy to just pick up a list like we had and start beating top 4 sides. The majority of losses incurred by the top 4/5 sides are inflicted by the other top 4/5 sides. Even top 8 sides. Not sides like us. (And yes, I did say majority. Yes, Essendon beat Geelong.) In the end, would it not be fair to say of a coach that he's doing a good job because he's beating the sides that we should be beating? Conversely, wouldn't you be more angry if we were losing to the sides we should be beating, and getting the occasional win against the good sides?

Jim Stynes used to run past my house regularly back in the 90s. As a kid I used to be able to see his head bobbing up and down as he ran past our (tall) fence.