FlashInThePan

Everyone is busy just selling the narrative that suits them. 'You have to be able to dominate weaker teams', 'Defence wins premierships', 'The Dees can't score enough to win finals' In the end the only score you need is one point more than your opponent kicks. Everything else is just a narrative that we all apply after the fact to pretend that we knew all along it was going to happen a particular way. As for where we will finish on the ladder, not only is your statement negative and defeatist @Dr.D it has absolutely no grounding in fact. If you are actually a Dees supporter I just feel sorry for you. Even after we have beaten every top 8 team we have faced and lost to none, you still can't get a little excited and believe in the boys. Poor you.

I don’t think there is any sensible way to compare teams across eras. Styles change so much and some of the teams we are comparing current players and teams to were actually amateurs with day jobs. That 2000 team was never going to win the granny. Essendon were utterly dominant that year. Prior to that we could never seem to get everyone on the ground at the same time, Lyon, Ox, Jackovitch, etc were always injured. And so their form fluctuate significantly. This team, so far, has done what no other Melbourne team has been able to do for 50 odd years. I think this could be our best team ever (compared to the other teams it faces) but let’s have this conversation after September, there is only one real measure of a team’s greatness.

I think it is having a whinge about people having a whinge ?

To the letter of the law he needs to contest the mark. In practice, as long as the blocker doesn’t take his eyes off the ball and is in a realistic position to contest, they don’t pay it.

Yes one of Kozzie, Spargo, ANB or Melk needs to lock down on Daniel. He is their distributor out of the back line. Whoever is playing the distribution role out of the centre needs to be shut down similarly, usually Macrae and Bont rotating.

Absolutely agree with the sentiment of your post. Just out of interest though, what is your definition of A+ ? He is currently ranked 2 in coaches votes, he is ranked 8 in Supercoach for midfielders. I think most of us would rate him as one of the best midfielders Melbourne has ever had.

I don’t get the Brayshaw critics. He is absolutely playing to the role he has been given. Motoring up and down the wing, super clean with his ground ball and hard in when he needs to be. His first half disposals last week were immaculate. He has a couple of clangers in the second half but they were under very heavy pressure.

Totally agree SWYL, we were all messed up structurally, the effort and execution with ball in hand was okay. It was clearly very disruptive to lose Viney right before the game and then Tommo straight away. It just reinforces how big an impact our system and understanding your role is having.

Just watching the replay. One thing I didn't get the significance of in the live game was how clean Gus was in his ground ball gets. He was absolutely pristine in his pick ups, I particularly noted it in the second quarter when the rain was flooding down. He is really settling into his role on the opposite wing to Langdon. I'm starting to really love this structure and believing in Gus as something other than an inside midfielder. I'm on board with what a few others have already noted in this thread. How good was the 2019 draft for us?! Hats off to Taylor and the team. Jackson, I have seriously never seen a 19yo ruck play like he can play, he could be anything. Kossie is a complete excitement machine. But Rivers, take a bow lad, that was quite a game you just played, positioning, desperation, kicking, clarity of role. Who would guess this is only his second year?

There is no doubt that standing up to their pressure and applying our own will be a key aspect. But Sydney showed very clearly how to score against Richmond and it has nothing to do with tall forwards. We have to assume that this is why Fritsch is in for M Brown. We need speed in the forward area and to spread their defence so they can’t roll off their direct opponent and help each other out... kicking straight would help too ?

I couldn’t be happier if this turns out to be true. I just don’t want us to be collateral damage on another fixture problem due to COVID and end up paying multiple games under a 4 day break.

I agree with most of this, I just don’t think we were flat and listless though. Our defensive structures were broken in the first quarter and better but with fumbles in the second. Probably not surprising when we lose both may and Jetta but it wasn’t just the back 6, we weren’t folding back quickly enough and they were able to link and kick without a lot of pressure.

We need to remember that he is only a second year player. I can’t think of a second year ruck playing like Jackson, ever!

Jake Lever is the only reason we were still in the game at three quarter time. Our defensive structures were completely broken in the first half and petty looked like a serious liability. Jake was marking or spoiling everything. Things got sorted in the second half and Petty seemed to settle and did some really good things. Our biggest problem seemed to be centre clearances. When Max kicked that goal from fifty the stadium lit up! We never looked back from there. The hawks just couldn’t stay with us once we shifted gears. Great game but we really should have buried them in the third, we need to start kicking goals and not points

I’m thinking yze and his knowledge of Clarkson and the hawthorn system will be a big advantage today. We have historically been out coached by him even when we have been the better team. I’m looking forward to this, as others have noted, it will tell us something important about this team. go dees ❤️?

Fritsch’s tackling and pressure acts have really improved this season. His kicking is his only liability now. If he is playing 3rd tall then it is like also having another small in the forward line maintaining tackle pressure.

Well this is going to be tough now that we seemed to have found more than one way to win. Time was I could just watch the clearance and contested possession count, that was the only metric that really mattered since if we didn’t win it at the contest we had no hope of winning. Now we can intercept at half back and play a rebound game, lag off the clearance and pick off the first possessor, we can play tempo footy as well as fast movement. Most of all we don’t look slow, even against a team known for their speed. I am so sick of hearing that. Obviously Clarry and Trac were awesome but there is improvement coming from everywhere. Players like ANB who have historically been serious liabilities in many aspects of their game have really taken big steps this summer. I am not one to post negative stuff as a general rule but ANB has had me screaming a few times. I have always loved his running and can see why he gets a game, but he has really cleaned up his finishing this year, lets hope my praise doesn’t put the mozz on him :) There is up and coming talent everywhere and finally they have solid senior team members to lean on and learn from so that they can develop properly without having to carry the team. Rivers, Kossie and Jackson are all great examples and we haven’t even had to blood Bowie, Laurie or Rosman. Finally our kids can develop in the 2s and really be ready when they get thrown in. Nice to start the year with some hope, lets keep this thing going!

Problem is that is the Milkshake of 2018, not the version we got in 2019 and 2020. In 2020, he had only 10 goal assists and 15 goals for the 17 games he played. That is less than 1 goal and around 0.6 goal assists per game. I think we need to do better than that.

I haven’t heard any facts to dispute that the club controls their sales channels just a vague ‘I thought that...’. The club clearly controls the non-online sales such as phone sales, telemarketing and sales at the ground, I see no reason why online sales would be any different but it is likely the AFL provide the generic ticket master option. I am suggesting that they invest in something better because it is very important to the clubs growth. Many people are comfortable with monthly direct debit but many people are also not comfortable with it. Selling in volume is about removing real and perceived obstacles. If 80000 people visit the membership page, losing even 1% of them due to something you can control means a very big drop in revenue - 800 sales. Lastly, companies like ticket master that have a reputation for dropping transactions and having site outages during high volume periods such as selling finals tickets ( see the news for what happened during the 2018 finals series) are not where I feel comfortable putting my financial details. The reason it is different to say your power bill is that you have a choice, it is discretionary spend and there are other options; pay at the gate, watch on TV and go to less games, or even choose another club if you are not a dedicated supporter already. The reason I am critical of the administration (not the club as a whole) is that everything I have mentioned is well understood and basic 101 in online sales. If we aspire to being a powerhouse club we need to not only get it right on the field, we need to understand how to market and sell effectively as well. And for that, the online channel is absolutely key.

I’m not being a drama Queen, I’m just explaining how online selling works. I make no criticism of the people on the phones, they are usually very nice. The fact remains that if people can’t easily buy online using a payment method that they are comfortable with a percentage of them will drop off and not purchase. This is not an opinion by the way, this is one of the most heavily researched and documented subjects in online sales and marketing. I’m sure that Covid is a very big factor this year, both for the inability to get to games and the effect on many people’s finances. I am saying that the purchasing experience is also a factor and not just this year. Our incredibly aspirational membership goal will need every little thing to line up in order to be realised, and a user friendly online purchase of membership is a big part of that. But hey, you go ahead and stick your head in the sand and resort to name calling, that is quite a common approach here.

Yes, my point is that many people want to have control over their finances and so don’t want automatic debit. Others are naturally cautious that a company that can barely keep their website up to sell finals tickets is not to be trusted even if they are comfortable with automatic debit. Lastly, as so many businesses have discovered, the least bit of friction in online sales can cause people to reevaluate their purchase. This will absolutely lead to a loss of revenue. Of course we loyal few will find a way to sign up and give the club our money anyway but that is not how you grow a business. The idea that we could formulate such an aggressive growth strategy as a club and not have online sales as our number one priority makes me seriously question our administration. It would be generous to call their approach amateurish. You can’t wish your way to 70+ thousand members, even huge onfield performance will struggle to convert into financial success if this is not dealt with.

I'm going to put it out there that a big part of our membership drop is club incompetence. I have rarely experienced a poorer purchasing experience than for my club membership. Every year I buy a family membership, I do not want them to store my credit card, I work in IT and I have had a fair bit to do with ticket master, i wouldn't trust them to hold my beer much less my credit card deets. Every year I try to buy online and am unable to purchase without going on a payment plan which involves ticket master storing my details. Every year I end up calling the club and asking why they don't have a simple purchasing experience and why I am forced to call them in order to buy. Every year they say they will look into it, blah, blah, blah. this year you can't seem to even get through to the club so how are you going to buy? How I feel is not really relevant but the above hurdle alone will likely drop about 10% of applicants. I have done a fair bit of shopping cart optimisation over the years and payment method is massive source of cart abandonment, 10% for this kind of thing is conservative. For a target of 50,000 members that is 5,000 lost memberships. Some people will be loyal or keen enough to follow up on the phone but a fair whack will not, for a $230 membership the full 5000 lost memberships is about $1.1m in lost revenue. Wake up demon administration!

A phone call? I don’t normally bother getting on my high horse but seriously, WTF?! Are you trying to suggest that if a girl gives a guy her phone number she is just getting what she deserves if he sends her pictures of himself jerking off?

I went to a talk by the Richmond mindfulness coach, Emma Murray a couple of years ago and it was very interesting to hear her talk about their approach to breaking out of negative self talk and mid game slumps. Unless she was BS’ing the conference delegates, it is definitely mindfulness techniques but vastly simplified to help an AFL player remember and be able to execute it on the field. They use focus change (both physical and mental) and re-orientation back to the hear and now. This is classic mindfulness but they really bought into it as a group and worked both in group sessions and 1-1 to train it in and reinforce. Obviously she would have somewhat of a bias about it’s contribution to their success but it sounded like the whole club has attributed a great deal of their turn around to mindfulness and their ability to arrest mid-game form slumps and negativity.

All in all the narrative generally follows the performance. Very few people see it coming, they use perfect 20/20 hind sight to tell the story of how Hardwick or Clarkson, or whoever, was always a genius. If Goody coaches us to a flag everyone will say how they saw the seeds of brilliance even in the dark times of 2019. If he flops, well that is another story entirely. People are already warming up that narrative. As for me, I can see a definite game plan based around winning the ball at the contest and pushing forward aggressively. We had problems with getting spread from the point of contest and we seem to have addressed that now. We were leaking goals due to some poor positioning and an overly aggressive press. We have addressed that too, our back 6 are starting to gel and seem to know where to be. I think May and Lever are a big part of that, they both know how to organise. Our forward structure and entries have been a big factor in our losses. I don’t think that is news to Goody or the tactical geniuses on DL. A really big part of that has been confidence though. Fritsch couldn’t miss in 2018 from within the 50 meter arc. With his confidence down and pressure on him to be the major goal kicker he could barely put it through from directly in front during 2019 and to a lesser extent in 2020. Another factor has been forward half pressure. It seemed like when we eased the press our system didn’t adjust to keep the ball locked in the forward half with reduced numbers. Back to that confidence problem, that played out across the whole field in 2020. Suddenly we were making basic skill errors and turning the ball over way more. I think that was mostly between the ears. This team needs to notch up some wins and get some swagger going. We need to stop worrying about drinking our own bath water and embrace a healthy arrogance, and not give a toss what the media says. I am one who believes we do have the people do get the job done. I see talent everywhere and with quite a few, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. Kossie, Jackson and rivers all have a ton of development in them. I’m watching Baker carefully next season, he has had flashes of real brilliance but let’s see. Brown was the piece we absolutely needed, the competition between him, Weid and TMac will be very healthy. I see Jackson as something completely different and I’m really keen to see him develop. To say we don’t have a game plan or a recognisable style is just wrong. Sure, it is a work in progress, and sometimes we go to pieces or make a string of basic blunders, but I for one can see what Goody and the coaching group are trying to put together. If they tune it and get results they will be hailed as geniuses, if not well, let’s just wait and see. There is plenty of time to get the knives out and carve into our own when and if that happens.