Engorged Onion

What we will learn, is how we played against Essendon on the 11th of April, that's about it...

You can’t win a premiership with Mitch Morton 😂...matter of fact you can. Here's the team... not one single player (including Max) has been immune from critique on here..and lets not talk about Goodwin, Chaplin or Stafford... 14 Michael Hibberd 1 Steven May 8 Jake Lever HB: 24 Trent Rivers 35 Harrison Petty 3 Christian Salem C: 10 Angus Brayshaw 5 Christian Petracca 15 Ed Langdon HF: 30 Alex Neal-Bullen 25 Tom McDonald 32 Tom Sparrow F: 9 Charlie Spargo 50 Ben Brown 31 Bayley Fritsch Foll: 11 Max Gawn 13 Clayton Oliver 7 Jack Viney Int: 4 James Harmes 6 Luke Jackson 17 Jake Bowey 36 Kysaiah Pickett 23 James Jordon (medi-sub)

Do you mean not drafting them? In which case you may not have a premiership. Pretty sure you/we all were lauding Petracca, Oliver and Viney during that period of time despite their shortcomings... thank god for Ben Brown's long arms...

Maybe, just maybe, the gameplan was reversed engineered to accommodate for the limitations of the players.... as in.. rather astute coaching. The downgrading of Goodwin/Viney/Tracc and Clarry, in terms of their skill sets - who has given most of us the happiest days of our sporting lives - beggars belief. By the way... every supporter believes they're in for a dynasty when their team wins a GF... rarely happens...and when it doesn't.. the narrative is that FD has failed the supporters 🤔

What's Toby Greene doing at a Dead Kennedy's Concert? Possibly a Selwood Brother and Zach Merrett in attendance also...

Well, not really, it is question around existence and mortality isn't it... When sport has been your entire sense of self since childhood, and you start bumping up against mortality ...of the career, of relevance/legacy...that's not something an investment portfolio resolves.

GC so far are first with Goals to scoring shot accuracy 60% - we are 7th at 50% and Geelong last at 36% The spread for the previous 3 seasons '25 53% best-43% worst '24 56%-42% '23 52%-44% for fun...'21 was 52%-43% and we were 45.6%

oooohh, so close with the thread title search here @rpfc - you've had a key word in the body of your text...so I reckon it was sitting in your subconscious! 'Then we just free jazz from there. If you can kick a floating chip to your cousin you do that. If you want to go across goal for Culley to ‘do something with’ you do that." Anyway, great post - I think there is a broader conversation around system versus flexibility (which is rather binary) , if we are to contrast a Goodwin coached team versus what we are seeing early on with King. But also, with the personnel that we have/had through the years with Goodwin (midfield bull's/extractors versus outside silky skills)... we are now moving in that direction for a number of reasons. It is probably unfair... but every methodology crumbles and the exponents of those methodolgies (Cripps/Oliver) also go by the wayside... Viva la velocidad, la destreza y el arte de dar en el blanco!

Best ‘feel good’ recruit since the magnificent Bernie Vince. ❤️💙

That's just scuttlebutt 😂

Hey @binman - the basketball and soccer examples really resonate... It's not just the kids who plateau that lose out. The whole environment that made development possible gets hollowed out. I wanted to say that where it gets complicated -is what happens when you take the same logic into elite sport . Because suddenly the whole frame flips. Maybe what JVR was subtly acknowledging between Goodwin v King. The same logic should apply just as clearly in elite sport. But somehow it doesn't. Elite sport culture is still largely running on pretty archaic ideas about how to get performance out of people. Fear is still the default tool. Getting dropped. Shame, The coach's look. And honestly? It works. Short term, fear drives compliance, effort, showing up. The culture sees the results and reinforces it. We dress it up as toughness and move on. And anyone who questions it gets told they don't understand what it takes at that level. The nervous system doesn't really care what level you're playing at though . Sustained threat (perceived) is expensive. Look at how JVR's career arguably has plateaued. So when you're under 'threat' it costs you attentionally, physically and emotionally. And what the research keeps showing is that the capacities elite performance actually depends on... reading the play, adapting in real time, making good decisions when it matters.. those are exactly the things that start to go quiet under pressure that the brain perceives or experiences (not just in game, but the entire FD ecosystem). You end up with athletes who are physically capable, but cant execute... Not because they lack character. Because the environment has been teaching them over and over, that mistakes carry a cost.... Look at the beautiful Fages and Brisvegas (sure there are other narratives there re: concessions etc). The indigenous AFL point deserves its own conversation. That's a real and profound loss. And I'd guess the same thread runs through it... somewhere along the way, the environment stopped feeling safe as an overall (well, arguably it never has)...

Notably, the article says, welfare staff weren't included in the conversation.

A registered health professional doing this would face a formal AHPRA investigation. The regulatory framework may differ here, but the ethical breach is the same

Best motivator in the world is 'fear' (getting dropped, shame from teammates coach etc etc) it works, but only short term, its too fatiguing... I'm about to record a podcast on Norway at the Winter Olympics - some similarities... Q1. Norway bans scorekeeping until 12 and then embarrasses countries ten times their size on an Olympic medal table. What’s going on there? It only looks like a contradiction if you think development is driven by pressure. It isn’t. The logic is quite straightforward: remove the scoreboard, and you remove the sense of threat. Remove the threat, and children can actually pay attention to what they’re doing. They learn movement, coordination, and how to deal with difficulty... not just how to cope with being evaluated. In Norway, around 93% of children take part in organised sport. The guiding idea is simple: sport should be enjoyable. That’s the priority. Compare that with Australia, where many children lose interest early, and a significant number stop playing altogether by their mid-teens. Despite strong facilities, good weather, and a deep sporting culture, participation still drops off. The difference isn’t resources. It’s timing. Norway delays competition until children are ready for it. They give them years to build skills, confidence, and enjoyment first...without unnecessary pressure. Later, the results speak for themselves. A small country performs well above its size on the Olympic stage, not because it pushed harder early on, but because it didn’t. It’s a long-term approach. Calm, patient, and difficult for most systems to stick with and effective.

On that, aside from the Premiership - one of Simon's great skills after inheriting the team from Roos, Neeld, Bailey, was to reduce the bad quarters/patches, from bad 3 months and 6 month periods as per Reverend Daniher during '98-07 🫠

That was very good... been working on it for a while? 😘

Ahhhhh, the self anointed 'voice of reason' 😘

Gosh, I hope we're not banking on the meaning and the context of two players to provide 'extra' motivation to do the basics... that would be an indictment on the individuals that operate like this and more so the Football Department as a whole, if they're perpetuating that.

Did you see AK’s ‘spray’ video this week? I assume he’ll pull that out - It’s like it’s 1985 and super punitive as a motivational tool-‘that’ll work long term 😂 [censored]…

I solemnly stand corrected ☺️ Great references 🙌🏼🤓

— <- that there is a ChatGPT tell - please attribute writing sources 😁 xo, or at a minimum, replace with your own - , or even ... 😇 How would I know? Well... 😅

I am getting emotional. 2 very strong beers in at a local pub and personally, a heavy few years full of transition. Sometimes I can't really cope anymore. Not suicidal, just nihilistic. None of this actually matters, not. one. bit. Not even this post on this forum. But gee... Tom McDonald... what a career, one of of re-invention, of adaptation, and as M.Turnbull would call it -' agility'. In terms of role, capacity, and breadth of skill. Holding down a backline post with J Frawley in 2011 at the 186 at Geelong (I was there...) to the reincarnation via Paul Roos' years, and Goodwin to being a dead eye [censored] dick (straight shooter) in front of goal. Very few players would have had a career as tumultuous as his. Severely underrated and extracted every little bit of himself - which speaks of professionalism, desire, high IQ and EQ , and will never get the kudos from the very average punter... (probs as he likes it eh)... [censored] minted gold legend.

Thanks @Willmoy1947 - ill be up in Cairns later this week I'll either hit https://www.flamingostikibar.com.au/ or https://macalisterbrewingcompany.com.au/ to watch the game :) Maybe see you there!

I keep coming back to this… Longmuir’s a good reference point. He’s worn plenty over the last couple of years - labelled dour, questioned around whether he could get the best out of a talented list. Even 2 weeks ago, up 7 goals against Geelong… and still lost. That gets remembered "hard "for the next 6 days...and then quickly forgotten And yet now, the narrative shifts… and suddenly he’s “meeting expectations.” Which probably says more about how quickly we/the media move the story than anything else. More broadly though... context matters... It's like some of us forget it. We’re two games into a new coach, a new system, a different way of playing. It’s going to be uneven. That’s not a flaw... it’s part of the process. Add in younger players, lack of team cohesion under pressure, load management , learning under pressure… it’s rarely going to look polished early. We are trying to judge something that’s still forming. Humans are not great at sitting in the in-between. We like binary, the brain wants clarity/certainty - a clean read on whether something is working or not. It settles us (and gives us relief because we don't have to get disappointed). But development doesn’t really work like that. Is the consensus on here that we are developing? If so, then, how we performed last night was appropriate.

Wasn’t sure where to post this, so thought I’d start a thread that folk can add to Footyology | We have the game covered.Footy looks fun again for revitalised Demons | Footyology