Rab D Nesbitt

You'd think there would have been a little ceremony at training dropped on the club website if Daniel Turner was going to debut this week. Unless it's too early with our game being on the Monday.

Piggy for Hunt is likely to be the only change I think. Disco looks like he must be close to stepping up which will be great for our backline options.

Nice to see Max put all the conjecture and misinformation to bed once and for all. It's Melky, not milkshake.

As good as H is I don't think he's our next Earl Spalding. Not yet anyway.

I ran it with four good friends during the back half of the 80's and start of the 90's. We came up with the idea to have stencils for the letters and made to measure scarlet coloured sheets of paper to ensure each and every one was uniform as well as spaced and balanced evenly on the run through (nobody called them banners). I got an engineer that I used to work with to design the 30ft aluminium poles with slot in steel inserts and lugs at the top to attach ropes to. Something that nobody else had done at that time. Two of us would design the caricatures we sometimes made, I used to draw them on large squares sketched out on butcher paper whilst the other person could draw freehand. We'd then either paint in the colours or use different colours of crepe paper. Today I think they stick a large photocopied picture onto a crepe backing. We had in excess of 20 floggers made from navy and scarlet coloured plastic which made them waterproof. Even back then Coke gave us $10k in sponsorship annually, again unheard of at that time. We played cheer squad football games wearing the players training gear, slept overnight in the changing rooms at the Junction Oval on Friday run through nights then would help pack all of our gear into the property stewards truck to go to the game early on Saturday morning, usually arriving at the ground by 9am. I had Jim Stynes calling me at work and at home at one point trying to get a blown up picture of his 100th game run through. We started making the crepe paper backings (30ft x 60ft) a month before the season to get a head start. This would buy us time late in the season to start work on finals run throughs as they were usually a bit more intricate. We organised interstate travel and hotel accommodation for other supporters and followed the side to all corners of the country. We wrote what we wanted on the run throughs and ended up in the Sunday papers on many an occasion, usually ending with the club asking for an explanation on the Monday morning. It was probably the halcyon days of the cheer squad looking back and many of the kids I knew then are still good friends today. I acknowledge that things are different now and the age demographic is probably a lot higher but the amount of work and time these people give up to represent the club and it's supporters in general would easily outstrip anyone writing posts on a football forum. The one thing that I think would make for a better game day experience would have been to keep the cheer squad seats in our members area next to where our race used to be when they were offered them instead of choosing to sit behind the goals at the Punt Road end. This would have placed them front and centre with all our members and prevented them being heckled by idiots looking to cause trouble from the opposition team.

I've been in noisier libraries.

Was asked why M Brown got the spot over Weid: "he's playing better footy". Weid has to play "a big man's role". Was actually kinda brutal about this, I thought Suburban cricketer masquerading as an AFL footballer.

Geez, North aside we must have the least intimidating home ground support of all the Melbourne based sides.

I think I’m just going to let Binman work out what happened tonight when I listen to the podcast on my Monday night run.

I reckon there’s 15k here tops.

I was at that game at Windy Hill too Forky. Unfortunately it was down the other end of the ground that it all kicked off. Jacko was about the only entertainment we had as Dees fans back then.

There's nothing wrong with a nemesis in sport but taking it too far can eat you up and poison other parts of your life if you're not careful. I'd rather eat my own vomit than watch or read anything about Celtic but I'd never abuse someone who has the misfortune of supporting them. That's what their priests are for.

Hi D4L. There's a very small group that stand in the concourse under the Olympic Stand at the Punt Road end that fit your description to a tee. I know a couple of them and they were responsible for the fight that broke out on the terraces down at Geelong the other year. Thankfully people like them make up a very small minority of our supporter base.

Is his nickname based on Bill Lawrie or Bill Bailey, or both?

If the Gold Coast Suns had a 10 year licence to prove themselves they'd be gone by now.

Very happy with this. Not concerned about Salo as he completed the entire pre-season and by all accounts most of our training sessions are as hard as the real thing anyway. Roll on Saturday night.

The Casey game will probably start at 4.35pm then. This gives our supporter base the double excuse of this game starting too late and the seniors finishing too late to turn up and watch either of them.

Just got home and turned on Kayo. Looks like there's a vermin infestation at the MCG today.

There's enough empty seats in the N53 section on level 2 of the Olympic Stand right now that a few of us that have dispersed reserved seats can sit together which is great. Queues for beers and the loos are short and getting in and out of the ground takes 5 minutes. It's not all bad having a flakey supporter base.

Just on my first coffee of the morning and was about to post what I thought about yesterday but you've done that for me Titan. We also had three posters in that last quarter as well as Nibbler pooping the bed when he should have just kicked for goal. I forget who it was but we also should have centred the ball to an unmarked Weeds in front of goal instead of kicking to a marked Browny in the pocket. I'm confident we'll reverse that result when we play them in Perth in a few weeks. We really do need to stop acting like millionaires when kicking for goal though.

Someone at Jolimont station said that Trac was throwing up in the last quarter and it looked like Vines had a shoulder problem.

The better we get the more sparse the crowd is. Weird.

Love it. Suck on that Richmond. Was that a 50m if he kicked it into row Z after the siren?

I think we've gone a bit early on opening our Grand Final day thread. Oops, sorry... just noticed it's the 2022 one. My bad. Please continue.

Not as confident now that T-Mac will miss. Freo are no mugs and we will have to be at our best.