Rodney (Balls) Grinter

Something I think people may be under valuing at the moment is what the speed of Sam Frost brings to our backline. I can't remember if it was Buddy himself who said it or a comentator, but Buddy knew he couldn't try to burst away from Frost and that helped to significantly contain Buddy. In our last game against St Kilda (less Frost), they burst away from us out the back on a number occasions into huge open space, where if Frost had have played, he probably would have caught them. Whist we need a good team defensive effort as well, I think having Frost down back does give us some good defensive cover that few other bring. He has been in pretty decent form most of the year and I think he can be a part of a good win for us on Saturday and remain an important part of our backline as the season progresses.

Without being disrespectful to Lewis, I think you have it the nail on the head with the above. That said, if we can squeeze a few more good games out of Lewis whilst we dig ourselves out of a bit of a patch of poor form and down a fee key troops, I'd be happy with that too. On the leadership thing, Lewis wasn't a backman most of his career, so it's not like he should have anything too special to add to that part of the ground. Realistically, guys like May, Hibberd, Jetta and even Lever/Salem should have enough experience and leadership potential between them to steer the ship post Lewis. Likewise enough leaders and experience in other parts of the ground - we need them to stand up to really take the team forward. There was a time that Lewis was in the same shoes as our emerging leaders. It will be interesting to see if Lewis takes relligation to the two's as well as Bernie did and if he can play a good developmental role with our young guys comming through. One thing I've been a little suprised and perhaps disappointed with is the lack of presence on match day that Lewis has had while injured, but perhaps there are several reasons for that and it would be interesting to know what his contribution from a leadership/mentoring perspective has been behind the scenes at training etc.

With Oscar dropped, Josh Wagner has been promoted to No.1 whipping boy. With his confidence and form as bad as it had been, just about anyone would have been better than Oscar the past month. One thing I'm quite comfortable that Wagner will give is 100% effort, commitment to the football and create a contest. Conversly, I'm struggling with all the instantaneous love for Jeffy after soo many here completely [censored] canned him most of last season. Quite happy for a desperate Jeffy to absolutely bang the door down at Casey, get rested in the last quarter and come in fresh against Richmond.

The whole team has gone back to what it was before Weid had his breakout game, but I know where you are comming from. It's so much easier to be a good player in a dominant side. It's probably because we don't have much else to replace him with now, but I've still seen some good signs from Weid that he is making a valuable contribution and I'm backing him to keep improving. Highlights from him for me from Thursday night were: * That vision and switch into the centre in the second(third?) quarter which cleared the way for us to use the corridor and resulted in a goal; * Classy 50 goal under pressure at the start of the last quarter which really steadied us; * Thought he generally got more involved in the last quarter, perhaps taking a few solid grabs for us comming out of defense, a few deft knocks to the advantacge of our players and thought he tackled/harassed and showed good desperateration to win.

Pedersen was a pretty decent pack and high mark at times. I think we are also missing Hannan's marking ability. Although I feel he doesn't pull down nearly enough of the high marks he jumps for, he has a good knack of either getting on a lead and racking them up that way, or reading the flight of the ball well, positioning himself well and taking those sneaky marks that elude the main pack. The other aspect to all this is how well the ball is kicked in to the forwardline, either as bombs, poorly executed passes or alternately as well weighted kicks to the advantage of our player - Melksham and probably a few others are exelent proponents of the latter. Makes such a difference. I think this is one area that we improved at times last year and have somewhat fallen away at this year so far. We could have got so much more milage out of big Preuss on Thursday night if we had have kicked it to him better. Even kicking to a man mountain like Preuss, we can (and mostly were) kicking it to a position and in a way that it was too easy to spoil.

A semi random thought regarding May and Lever - it kind of depends on how our key backs settle and build form over the next few weeks and it might be a bit old school, but personally I'd be in favor of bringing back both lever and May through the twos. Let their bodies build back into a fully match fit state for the rigors of compeditive senior footy and let them build some confidence with the ball as well. Steven May hasn't looked in great nick reading and finding the ball for his entire injury interupted preseason and Lever took at least half a dozen games to find form with us at the start of last season and he has missed practically an entire season of compeditive footy since then. I want these guys back in the side as much as anyone, but I want them in and firing, not struggling to get back into the game.

Any further word on how Preuss's shoulder has pulled up?

Off the bottom, now what second/third bottom - meh, who cares. I only care what we have achieved at the end of the season. If we beat St Kilda next week, we will be in pretty much the same win/loss position as the same time last year. The key difference will be that I think our draw from there on will get harder rather than easier, but if we can't raise our game to the point where we can consistently beat the better sides, then what's the point of making finals anyway. I think our fortunes from here will largely rest on how we recover injury wise. If we can get back some of our guns like Lever, May, AVB, Hannan etc, without losing too many other quality players, our back half of the year could be pretty dam impressive.

I don't know if it would be quite the same as 6-6-6 (I don't even fully understand the full technicalities of the rule), but I do see some potential for say requiring a certain number of player from each side to be behind the centre of the ground opposite the position of play at all stoppages such as kick in's, ball ups and boundary throw in's. I hate the current congested look and feel of the game. That said, I want a MFC premiership more than I care about the look of the game right now. It's fairly clear that we have recruited and developed a game style that works reasonably well within the current rules. To change those rules dramatically and suddenly now could be a huge and quite unfair disadvantage to us, so I'd want any new rules to be bought in slowly and within a reasonably distant timeline. Further reducing the number of interchanges is another rule I believe the AFL could tinker with to good effect and it could be done realitively slowly, with small increments.

I'm very glad to hear that. I'd know what's happened to him the last couple of seasons. The way many of our own supporters have turned on him quite frankly disgusts me. Jeffy has produced several 40 odd goal seasons when we were a way below par team. I'd love to see what he can do for us when both he and the team are really on.

Sigh

BT might carry on like one, but I don't even think the upper middle class bogans would appreciate the way he calls the game. I actually quite liked BT when he was first on the footy show and I have actually grown to like and respect Richo alot more in his post playing days - he actually seems like a genuine good knock about bloke. But your last line really characterizes how they come across when they call the game. Yes you want some degree of rapport between the comentators and probably also the occational wise crack or atmospheric comment but they go so far over the top it's unbearable. My thoughts are that a lot of these ex-players that end up in the media feel like they have to build and keep building themselves up as a personality to stay in the business, but in the end it just detracts more than it attracts people to them. The game itself generally has enough drama and entertainment value without needing much of contribution from some of the clowns that position themselves around it and leach off it.

His multiple endless rants during the game about the Melbourne players having dinner at Lever's place during the game the other night. BT "I've got conections" - wooooo, for real, give me a break FFS.

ABC radio always do a pretty good job, why can't we just get good straight callers like them on the TV? For special comments, I actually quite like David Parkin's style. Knows what he's on about without being full of himself.

After the past three weeks, as a MFC I was actually thinking along the same lines as the comentators. I wouldn’t have felt this way at stages last year when we were up and going, but our confidence and system has been so bad to this point, that I felt the game could have turned very quickly on us and it wasn't until late in the last, when we had nailed the door shut that I felt I could relax. At the time, their comments were on the money, but in retrospect, it was actually a moderately dominant performance by us.

What gets right up my goat is when Brian & Co get totally side tracked when calling the game and start drivaling on about completely irrelevant rubbish - just shut the f#@* up already.

Intentional? Or Natural?

With the way Oscar is playing at the moment I agree, but I think Oscar is capable of playing much better than he is right now. He could be quite capable if a third tall was needed to play along side Lever and May. Incidentally, I thought it was very poor that no-one got over and got in the face and flew the flag against Franklin after he ironed out Oscar like that. Whilst it wasn't particularly dirty, it was unnessacery and that we just tolerated it I think demonstrated weakness and that we prepared to stand back and let a team mate be physically doninated.

My thoughts to this point were that Hore had been underwhelming in preseason games and I didn't think he had done enough to warent his inclusion in the team - was glad for him to prove me wrong. Based on what I have seen to date, his kicking is still the main question mark for me, but I think it's hard to make too many judgements right now. With the low confidence levels generally evident throughout the whole team, I think many players are guilty of hesitant and error prone kicking, with exception of the classy ball users like Salem, Freitch and Melksham. For me Sam Frost has been our best performed key back all year in a backline under siege. Yes he has had his moments, but for the most part, I think he has played his role and when the rest of the team is defensively doing their part, I think he is well up to the standard required. He had one clanger kick early in the game last night, but after that his ball use was pretty good. I thought his defensive effort against Franklin was admirable without being brilliant. My take was that he kept Franklin contained sufficiently that he didn't rip us a new one as he would have done playing on Oscar, but that Frost's effectiveness was somewhat flattered by Franklin's poor-average goal kicking. I did really like Preuss's game, but it was somewhat tempered by the dominant defensive role that Aliir Aliir was able to provide playing off him. I'm not solely blaming Preuss for that though. Pruess is what he is - an immoble lumbering beast of a man. If he is to be most effective in our forward line, we should be kicking it to him more directly and not bombing it randomly into our forward line i.e. bomb it long to Pruess as a semi stationary target, not into space away from where he is occupying - if we can achieve that I think he can definitely become a weapon.

Really need to look at performance over the course of the season to make any sense of it. I think it's entirely reasonable for teams and individuals to have confidence and form slumps at various points in time, they are humans we are talking about. Personally I'm neither a lover or hater, of any of our players. I'd rather see all of them individually and particularly the team succeed. If that means players like Oscar McDonald are ultimately not in our theiritical best 22, then so be it, but I still think such players can play a role if they can be of sufficient quality to provide good depth when called upon. Oscar is clearly down on confidence right at the moment and not playing anywhere near as well as he is capable of. The question is will his confidence and/or the confidence of others like Petty best served by demoting/promoting them to the reserves right now?

I've thought that Jack Viney's impact on games this season to date had been pretty low by his standards, but thought that his game last night indicated he is starting to get back the sort of form that will make our midfeild dangerous. He laid 9 tackles last night and many of them we big hard crunching ones that had a real impact. He also started to win some good clearances and that goal he kicked in the second quarter was very timely. Whilst Jack had a good impact on the two finals we won last year, I've felt that we haven't really seen him at his most damaging best since mid 2017 in that game against West Coast where he almost single handedly carried our midfeild to help deliver us an unlikely victory, to some extent to his detriment, because I think he was also playing injured at the time and has struggled to reach that level since.

I like the Wagner bros, but I didn't think they played to their potential tonight by any means. Thought they gave great effort, went in hard, got to pleanty of contests and scrapped well, which is really their strong suit. But I didn't think their ball use by foot was as clean as they are capable of. Cory in particular just hacked it forward to no one in particular on alot of occasions, but that said the times he did it, it was actually mostly effective and came off to our advantage. I'd really like these guys to improve their game just that little bit further to the point they could be at the level to justify holding down a regular spot in the team - guys like Nev and Hibbo are somewhat getting on in years and it would be good to have depth options to cover their absence when the time comes.

Glad to see some of our out of form players like Jonesy, Viney, Trac and Hunt return to form tonight, even T & O Mac I thought started looking better as the game went on (though both were comming off a pretty low base). Also good to see good games from emerging players Preuss and Hore, who I thought was pretty important for us. I thought the Weid was pretty quite and had minor impact for most of the game, but did some really good stuff for us in the last quarter when it was there to be won. That 50m goal was a sensational kick for goal under pressure and I thought he also did alot of other little things like tackles, a few good marks and knock on's in the last quarter. Harmes was really good early when we were struggling a bit, as was Jones, who went on to play a great captains game, along with Viney to some degree.

6. Jones 5. Gawn 4. Viney 3. Hunt 2. Frost 1. Hore Unlucky Patracca, Preuss, Oliver, Harmes

You just need to understand grunting, it's pretty much how Preuss the cave man comunicates.