Mel Bourne

I’ve thought about this for a while, and I can’t think of one time I’ve come away from watching a sports-related press conference/interview and thinking I’d gained some useful knowledge.

Marks get paid a little more liberally in wet weather. Visibility is low and efforts are rewarded a little more than usual.

Trac’s head getting taken out was an appalling thing for the umpires to miss, but every game has a couple of them. And that boundary throw-in at the end was comically-awful. There was a razor-thin window of opportunity at that stoppage, but that umpire decided to close it. But generally I thought the umpiring was pretty standard. Maybe “standard” is the problem?

McVee ✌️

Pretty much entirely agree with this. It’s just missing a paragraph about Fritsch. JVR will get a chat, but I don’t agree with the people calling to drop him (not that you are). He needs games drilled into him, and he needs to learn the only way. He’ll be feeling rubbish for giving that free away, as he should. But rubbing his nose in it at Casey doesn’t serve the team well. Especially when you look at our ghostly forward line at present. Koz has enough moments of brilliance to distract us from the fact that he is still an incomplete footballer. But even by his own patchy-standards, he was very poor tonight. He just seems selective about when he chooses to take the game on. I’m watching Eddie Betts on the broadcast now, and thinking about how he would just hunt for the heart of the match and always be a massive presence. Maybe it’s how he’s being coached, but Koz is just not taking these recent games on. TMac is the random object you use when you’ve lost a Monopoly piece. He’s become a barometer for me about where our best 22 is at. If he’s in, someone better is injured. Hoping Ben Brown is ready to come back now, and determined to play his best football. May was great. Hibbo has become crucial. Lever’s intercept marks were sadly missed. Trac and Oliver were brilliant at times, but Trac’s first half was one of his worst in recent times. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, and thinking it would have been tough conditions for an iffy ankle. Oliver’s chaos didn’t pay off enough times. Gawn was well and truly taken out of the game. The only thing that can fix that is coaching, but nothing stuck. ANB, Chandler, Spargo and Koz couldn’t seem to get near the ball, which in a game of wet weather football is unacceptable from our smalls. But I’m not despairing after that loss. Horrible conditions and easily the most hostile away-game arena. We don’t fold now, and this is a huge thing that was missing for so long.

He’s been working hard at reducing his height but it’s been a struggle.

My best mate is a Roos supporter. I am getting RSI from feeling sorry for him.

I’m also keen to see what Joel can bring, and yes, much more curious to see him around our goals than the opposition’s. I do have memories of Joel flying for everything and getting in the way more than “being the way” at times, but his hunger to prove himself must be stronger than ever these days.

I’m merely advocating for adhering to the beauty. And with hand on heart, I firmly believe that some small part of that beauty is the inherent danger the game presents. Without it, it loses a degree of it’s attraction to me. Not all of it’s attraction, (hopefully) obviously. But if the AFL becomes a sport where players are expected to not risk serious injury, or to risk inflicting injury on others at all stages, I’m not sure if I’d want to watch it. Sorry.

I do. I’m really not a fan of this burgeoning mindset that people should be able to enter things without taking any risks. Aspiring AFL players should know that they’re signing up for a physically-fierce competition, and that serious injury is a potential factor. Don’t like the sound of that? Don’t play.

Targeting such a young player seems to be a very transparent move by the AFL to phase-in AFL Lite™️. Suspend a player in their late-twenties line this and they’d probably just seek out a new career That, or attempt to un-learn years of training. The AFL likely see 19 year-old as capable of re-learning their style of play It all makes depressing sense, given how Australia is sleepwalking into one of the more risk-averse societies in the developed world.

On the Reddit AFL page there are 248 comments from supporters of all clubs. After scrolling through I saw maybe four that were pro-suspension, and the rest were all completely appalled by the decision. I can’t remember the last time a suspension was so unpopular amongst fans of the game. If the AFL have any sense of this they’re obliged to make it right, not just to Jacob and the Demons supporters, but AFL supporters at large.

Completely agree. Just a dumb joke.

I’ll sheepishly put my hand up here, WCW. A flippant gag, but I didn’t actually mean any disrespect. I genuinely thought there was something bothering him mentally last night. He just seemed rattled and distant, and though I could have worded without the gallows-humour, my comment was actually intended to defend his poor performance.

And this is the other factor contributing to the clusterf$&k… Who owns the rights to the audio coming out of the microphone being passed around? The AFL? Or the Herald-Sun/Age/SEN/3AW etc etc. The reason you see all those mics in front of an interviewer with all the various news logos on them, is because once the presser is done, whatever audio that went into each of those microphones belongs to their respective companies for them to broadcast at a later stage. It’s totally boring, but every little thing that hits a microphone for broadcast, needs to have a corresponding owner of the rights to that thing. It seems the easiest way to navigate such an intellectual-property headache is to do nothing about it.

Not impossible, but again, surprisingly difficult. Any questions would obviously need to be audible to any would-be transcribers, who would more than likely need to be operating from within the broadcast control-room. So again, you’d need microphones everywhere conveying that information. Or, you put the transcriber on a laptop in the conference room, and just hope that they can hear everything well enough to transcribe to air in real-time. Again, very challenging.

I do a lot of recording with mics, and I can tell you that mic-ing up a room full of journalists who are asking questions from random areas around the room, is not as easy as you think. Long story short, if you were to open all the mics needed to uniformly-record a space this large, you’d also be opening up a buttload of very undesirable ambient noise (the ABC occasionally try this and it always produces a poor result). The only feasible way to get the kind of audio you’re hoping for, is to have an organised press gang who take turns with a couple of dedicated microphones (similar to what you see in National Press Club broadcasts). Unfortunately though, “order and courtesy” are not huge considerations amongst the press these days.

If we’re playing “badly” and still winning matches, I would suggest this sentence is highly inaccurate.

Umpiring was what it was. We got away with a few things in that last quarter.

I’d say let the adrenaline wear off a bit more, DeeSpencer. This is hyperbole.

Ugly win, but thank Jehovah for our core players. I can only assume Fritsch got dumped by his girlfriend this morning, or one of his pets died. Was Langdon tagged? Again, May not playing great, but again, posters here talking about him like he’s the worst player in the league. At least he was getting to the ball, unlike Lever, Fritsch and Ed. The dearth of centre-clearances continues to astonish. Having said that Rowell and Anderson are both extremely good midfielders. But there’s no point raving about Gawndy if there’s no connection.

This is peak “gameday thread”.

Bizarre Game. Fritsch, Langdon and Lever are nowhere to be seen. If they can enter the match we should do some damage. If they can’t, this is going to the wire.

Are Langdon and Fritsch wearing camouflage?

Fritsch was named this week, yeah?