Watson11

You make good points re young mids but the dual eagles rucks helped them win a flag. In the last 2 finals they came up against the 2 dominant ruckman in the game and completely did them over. In the GF, both WC rucks were on the ground for over 20% of the time, and in that time Vardy kicked a crucial goal and had a hand in a couple of others. And if we think we can play Max for as many minutes in 2019 as he did in 2018 then he’ll be cooked by September again. We would have to use the rotations in a similar way to WC, and not just park Preuss forward. And it is a rotation that is super hard to match up on. Petracca rotating to the middle, Preuss to the ruck, Gawn forward creates an imbalance. One of our big issues in big games was lots of inside 50s resulting in no goals. Part of the issue was not lowering our eyes, but a bigger issue was not providing genuine marking contests with long bombs. When games unfold with lots of pressure and forward space is closed down, there will be lots of long balls and being able to isolate the third defender creates opportunity. I’m also hoping Wied becomes our tackling machine. He has the right attitude.

Yes his disposal can improve, but inside type players hardly ever end up with elite efficiency. Around 70% efficiency by hand and foot is ok and AVB is just below that. Oliver is slightly better than that. His disposal was better than nearly all of his teammates in that final.

Yes your mum knows nothing about footy. AVB was one of the few who stood up and handled the footy properly in the prelim.

Those soft culture days are slowly being totally wiped out of MFC. The last 5 years, it seems everyone at the club is on the same page and building a hard culture both on and off the field. It pervades everything, all the way down to list management, drafting, and selection. In the past I doubt we would have traded former number 1 draft picks or dropped obvious walk up selections. It came together in the elimination final where you could see exactly the hard edged culture MFC has been trying to build. Any setbacks won’t be because of a soft culture.

I agree. If you look at differentials they were 15th on CP and 18th in clearances. Even GC were better than them. A case could be made that Fremantle have a better midfield than Richmond. I’ll be really interested to see how Richmond go this year with 6-6-6. They relied on pressure and defensive intercepts last year. Rance looks like a superstar when he can play loose and intercept rushed kicks. Looks VFL B grade when he needs to be accountable one on one. If they are 18th again for clearance differential they won’t finish top 4.

http://m.afl.com.au/news/2019-01-12/who-has-the-best-onballers-we-rank-every-club Understandable Collingwood ranked first. Happy for Richmond to be overated at 2nd! According to afl.com Richmond have the best defence, best forwards, and second best mids.

Nat Fyfe came back too early from his broken leg and broke it again 7 months later which effectively wrecked 2 seasons. Both times against Hawthorn. It sounds like Fyfes leg wasn’t as serious as Mitchell’s double break.

Agree. If you want to look to a premiership team with a forgettable forward line the eagles in 2006 were full of poor to average. But dominant mids and strong defence got them a flag.

http://m.afl.com.au/news/2019-01-05/who-has-the-best-forwards-we-rank-every-club Not sure how they worked out our 2018 average scoring as follows 2299/22=94 (instead of 104.5).

I would have Harmes breakout season in front of the other 9. I suspect Joel Selwood, Rory Sloane, and Josh Kelly agree with me.

Infinity should step up to be the BOJ sponsor? Roy Morgan produce research each year about car sponsorship of AFL, as the automakers get good ROI from it. Seems cheap for a car manufacturer to not be a major sponsor. If Infinity don’t want it then Pert has history signing sponsorships with car manufacturers.

If Tmac/Weids are injured, the next key forward will be a role player and we’ll be looking for goals elsewhere. The role will be to provide a contest, bring the ball to ground, tackle, pressure, etc. Those stats are the stats Goody would be interested in, not the fact Pedersen averaged 2 goals a game at Casey. Smith averaged 6 tackles a game in his limited opportunities.

Yes thats wrong. We were 79.5 points against including finals. Not sure how journos can be so clueless. There were 4 of them writing this article.

Where would Perty find all of those ex members. I suspect he would be doing the rounds of aged care facilities followed by cemetery’s for most of them ?

For unknown reasons, players that do an ACL at less than 18 are a very high chance of redoing the same ACL (almost 40%). Maybe the fact they are still growing makes it weak. The second ACL injury repair is usually a lot stronger. So here’s hoping it is like Max who also did his first one at 17 and second at 20.

How true. If players were traded whenever they considered a move home then Gaff, Sloane, and Kelly would be playing at different clubs.

The value of a 208cm forward target in a full on pressure final was shown by Cox when he wiped Richmond in the first half of the prelim, and Gawn is 5x better than Cox. When forward Max can take big grabs, and with 10 or 11 goals enough to win a close GF a few goals from Max/Preuss when forward could be the difference. Just having Max fresh in September will be huge. I love that the footy department are just leaving nothing to chance, and don’t have the “ain’t broke don’t fix it mentality.” Even if we win every game and the flag in 2019, we should still be looking to improve.

Maybe but I’ll back Max and Preuss to lay more forward 50 tackles than Hogan did last year.

Judging by the number of photos posted in the last 4 weeks of Preuss versus May there is no way that Goody isn’t locked in on Preuss spending time forward as the 3rd tall. Hopefully it works well all season. Will be really valuable in low scoring finals.

Just like Preuss has been handcuffed to Max.

SWYL, I seem to recall you have a tv industry background. Any interaction with Pert when he was MD of channel 9 in Melbourne? @rpfc, you sound like an old melbournian upset at losing guaranteed board seats whenever you wanted them. I’m happy those days are gone. I personally think the board and Bartlett have been excellent. He was spot on when he labelled MFC soft on and off the field in his first speech 5 years ago. MFC is no longer soft in either. Everything done by MFC in the last 5 years has been about losing that soft gentlemen club tag, game style, list management, player trades. I can’t imagine prior boards approving tough decisions like trading Watts. For me the Pert appointment is just another decision where the soft option would have been an internal appointment. Only time will tell if Pert delivers which will be almost entirely measured by delivering a facility in the MCG precinct, which he is uniquely qualified to do.

Hawthorn have won 13 premierships in 50 years by being arrogant. Hawthorns leaders like Matthews, Scott, Brereton, Dipper, Lewis, Hodge etc all got suspended, all gave away 50m penalties, all could be called undisciplined. I’m happy to take the occasional “undisciplined act” to get some of that culture into Melbourne, and hope Lewis gets his 5th flag. Even if he doesn’t, he is sure helping by turning up in peak condition and showing the list what it takes to take the next step.

Geez I liked Melbourne 20 years ago. Less congestion, could afford a decent house, less crime, less traffic. Is Adelaide really that good? I’ll have to visit.

Bit rough calling Puopolo an out the back player. But your point is spot on. Forwards who can’t create turnovers are now a liability. If Jeff wants to play 22 games he doesn’t need 40 goals, he needs 100 tackles. He has never done that in a season and hasn’t been close since his first year at Melbourne. Puopolo and Rioli pretty much did it every year at Hawthorn. Jeff goes into this year a bit like Bugg went into 2018. He’s on his absolute last chance. One poor defensive game and that is his career done.

Haha. Maybe you and other Luddites can package that up and sell it to the footy department. Who knows, maybe they are predicting improvements in players based on age and games played. I wouldn’t know. Big data and machine learning is being applied everywhere whether you think it works or not. Champion data can never predict injuries, but big European and US teams are measuring every training session and game and have been applying big data and machine learning to non contact injury prevention for several years. They don’t publish much for obvious reasons, but BarcelonaFC recently published 2014 data that showed they can predict 60% of non contact injuries and thus can prevent them. I’m sure that has improved in the last 4 years. They have huge budgets and are way ahead of the AFL. Maybe this is also happening in the AFL. Point that started all of this is despite your opinion and comments on the CD list rating they have no user bias in the analysis of the data at all. It is just data and unbiased processing of it, with all of its limitations ie garbage in garbage out. I personally think it is pretty good in, pretty good out. It’s not perfect. Time to move on.