titan_uranus

I imagine it could be Brown for Hibberd, with Petty back to defence, or Jordon for Hibberd with Brown missing out.

Very happy to walk away from that with a 10 goal win and form into players like TMac. That’s two road trips out of the way in the first month of the season, and a 3-1 scoreline from the Dogs, Brisbane, Sydney and West Coast is IMO a good result.

Essendon have had, I think, the softest opening four matches of anyone, making St Kilda’s draw look taxing. Hawthorn, GC, St Kilda, GWS. Like St Kilda, all four games in Melbourne.

Fremantle’s first four games have been terrible. They likely would be 0-4 if West Coast had had a bench to rotate last week. I’ll give them the Dogs win but the Dogs in Round 2 were all over the place, absolutely nothing like their more recent fortnight. But Fremantle, Essendon and Gold Coast haven’t exactly set the world on fire so far. It’s been a soft fixture, no matter how much you like St Kilda or are concerned about them beating us. Agree. They’re undefeated but with room to improve, if I were a Carlton fan I’d be pretty happy with that.

Yes Jordon played well last week, but if he was better than Sparrow it was marginally at best. Sparrow didn’t deserve to be dropped either, so there was no easy way to get Pickett back in. I sincerely hope Jordon is the sub though. Deserves that spot far more than Melksham does.

Very un-Sydney like to let Port back into the game in the fourth. The last kick will hurt but they never should have been behind at all. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to seeing if St Kilda can produce this football against a reasonable side. An opening month of Fremantle, the Dogs, Essendon and GC, all in Melbourne, and three straight Saturday night games, is not exactly taxing. IMO jury remains out, but beat Collingwood next week (or at least play them well) and that will change.

Objectively we should belt West Coast into oblivion given the talent level of the two sides in 2023 and then given West Coast are missing a stack of first-choice players. But wins should never be taken for granted, and who knows whether West Coast's fringe players will approach the game differently to the injured veterans who are perhaps harder to get to transition to a more 2023 appropriate style of football.

Other than COVID, I think the only change has been the drop time, which used to be 5pm but was moved to 6.20pm to allow Channel 7 to announce the teams "first" during their news bulletin. During COVID teams were announced the day prior, which was in part at least because we were playing games mid-week to make sure we had a complete season.

Very little was surer than Collingwood losing a game despite the AFL media's "how do you beat them?" rhetoric, than the AFL media asking if they've been "worked out" now that they've lost. Brisbane applied great pressure and Collingwood wilted. It was also at the Gabba where Brisbane is on a streak of something like 39-7 over the last 4 years. Collingwood can be exposed with the way they press their defence up the ground, but it requires strong pressure and strength at contest to avoid them playing in their front half.

As they've done for decades, all teams are announced on Thursday but for Sunday games extended squads are named. The final 22 is trimmed on Friday, and the sub named on game-day as usual. Turner isn't named in the squad. If Hibberd is going to be withdrawn, it will be Tomlinson.

I get it, but there aren’t any obvious contenders to be dropped instead of him.

West Coast lose Cripps, Ryan, Shuey, Sheed, Witherden and McGovern. They regain Yeo and then...well...yeah.

Based on the extended bench, if TMac replaces Brown, then it's Jordon, Rivers or Chandler who will be dropped for Pickett.

In: Pickett, McDonald, Dunstan, Tomlinson Out: Brown (injured) Bench: Melksham, Tomlinson, Jordon, Rivers, McDonald, Dunstan, Pickett, Chandler

No it's not. We've been given two home games against West Coast since Round 2, 2014. There was no requirement in our NT contract that West Coast had to be the side we played in Darwin or Alice Springs, so the AFL had that choice. It's utterly ridiculous that we are going to hit 10 years without playing West Coast in Melbourne. Also remember that we have drawn West Coast away in every season since 2012, other than 2015 (i.e. in 2019 we had a return game against West Coast in Perth).

Hickey and Reid. Reid on average no better than Amartey or McDonald.

Two responses to the bolded point: Other than Collingwood, who out there is likely to be better at that sort of football than Sydney? I don't have the figures but our pressure was right up yesterday, which is a significant reason Sydney couldn't hit their short kicks. Blakey was constantly trying to hit tough kicks into the corridor but he was being chased/tackled a lot, and we were sweating on his intended targets

IMO well above 60/40 in our favour. Perhaps on TV you see heaps more of the Shane Warne stand and not as much of the Northern Stand. The Northern, particularly the members, was heavily Melbourne dominant. Being at the ground you hear the noise. Our crowd was properly louder, as you would want. No idea how you can generalise and conclude Melbourne supporters aren’t Grand Prix fans and wouldn’t have gone, or stayed home/gone out to watch it. It’s a one-off world class event. It will absolutely have taken people away from the G. And as to numbers, scroll back up and have a look at the data. As a proportion of our membership, in 2022 we drew bigger crowds than all other Victorian clubs. That doesn’t support your argument.

How do some of our players feel about this stuff? Like how does Tomlinson feel having missed out on finals whilst Lever played with a stress fracture?

I understand why some will argue for resting/managing players. But we’re one week gone from this board being supremely confident leading into a 40-point fourth quarter deficit to Brisbane. Yes, West Coast just suffered a ridiculous amount of injuries, but let’s perhaps pare back the over-confidence a touch.

6 - Oliver 5 - Grundy 4 - Lever 3 - Rivers 2 - Langdon 1 - Petracca

Barring unknown injuries or suspensions, I imagine there's one change coming and it's Pickett for someone. I see a few options for how we might approach this. The first is Brown, given we went on a scoring rampage when he was subbed off and given he may be a bit sore. Whilst it can work, the risk is we'll be going into a game with Petty and JVR as the two tall forwards, with a combined 3 games' experience of being forwards at AFL level. I personally didn't think Petty was fantastic today and I don't think we can go into a game with just those two as forwards, particularly when one has to relief ruck. So if we want to keep Brown in for balance, we can either swap out a mid/forward type player, or a defensive player. Whilst Hibberd or Bowey perhaps weren't our absolute best today, moving out a defender throws the balance out as well, unless we send Petty back into the backline. Otherwise it's a mid/forward. But I don't think any of them were poor enough to be dropped. I thought Sparrow's centre clearance work in the second half helped us get back on top. I think Spargo and ANB are playing their roles just how the coaches want them, and they are criminally underrated on here. I think Chandler's doing enough in his role and we're not dropping Fritsch. Meanwhile I thought Jordon's game was great and though it could have been a coincidence, maybe his rotations with Langdon/Hunter helped them both play well. A hard call, but I expect it to be Chandler or a defender (Bowey, McVee or Hibberd).

Where's Sam McClure now? He said he expected 40,000 (before moving the needle to 42,500 after speaking with Richo). We drew a few dozen short of 42,500 on the same day 130,000+ people went to the Grand Prix. Would love to hear him say "good on Melbourne supporters" but no doubt we'll either hear nothing, some sort of clip that it still wasn't enough, or another snow joke.

Hands down our best performance since the Grand Final. In the third quarter they were all over us in all facets of the game. The way we responded, and turned the game on its head, is incredibly impressive. It would have been against any side but to do it against IMO the best side other than Collingwood, a side who has the wood over us and would have had fond memories of running over the top of us in the QF last year, and who were Hickey short of full strength (Reid wouldn't be getting a game in front of McDonald or Amartey right now), is huge. And we did it without Gawn, Pickett and Salem. And we did it with new faces and players in new/tweaked roles. I thought Oliver was outstanding all day. Grundy's game got better as the day went on, albeit without much opposition. Lever continued his strong start to the year and I loved the way we rotated Jordon through the wings and perhaps helped bring the best out of both Hunter and Langdon. I found it interesting that we were 0-6 in centre clearances in the first quarter but 5 goals up. Last week we were leaking goals from stoppage. I suspect we gave that area a bit more focus. I'm sure having May back contributed to it too. I also find it interesting that we're the highest scoring side in the competition so far, but not even in the top 8 for average points against. This is a bit of a new Melbourne, perhaps, although we've probably had a tougher first three weeks than most other top 8 sides. We've clearly acknowledged the need for us to have different "looks", both positionally and within games. We're seeing changed centre bounce combinations (Rivers was in there today, is that a first?) and we're now seeing things like Petty forward. This is a flexibility and willingness to change that is new to Goodwin. The fact we're now winning more based on our ability to score and less on our ability to hold opponents to ridiculously low scores is probably also testament to our new-found changes.