Rab D Nesbitt

20+ years of being hopeless appears to have turned Carlton supporters into insufferable, foam at the mouth flogs. I hope they get pumped today.

I'd like to finish top so we are guaranteed to be wearing our home guernsey throughout the finals. The main contenders predominantly wear dark colours like ourselves and I don't want us being told by the AFL that we have to wear our royal blue version, as much as I think it's ok as an away game option.

There were a lot of Brisroy Bears supporters at a private function upstairs at the Tippler pre game. Some of them looked old enough to have been watching them when they were called the Gorillas. I was a little surprised to see the crowd number when it appeared on the screen as level 2 in the Olympic Stand was half empty again. The noise level was ok though. It wasn't exactly Ibrox on a european night but ok for us.

That was a 20 goal win masquerading as a 10 goal win. Vines off the chain. If we’re still loading then good luck to the rest of the comp.

Geez. You'd be tempted to name Tommo as the sub considering our defensive woes this year.

He'd look after the wealthiest 2% of the competition which after the sale of the Bentleigh Club and all our GF merch would probably include us these days. We might even get a free car park thrown in for the new training facility at Gosch's.

If Collingwood really have pulled their contract offer then I'd expect St Kilda and Essendon to be all over him like flies on a chocolate otter.

LOL. Don't say that faulty, that's my daily 'go to' paper to read about what's happening in the UK and Europe. The Times has a subscription fee and no self respecting Scot would ever read the Daily Torygraph.

This must be what it's like reading the Herald Sun. 58 pages in and still no actual news.

Schache is the poor man's Weideman.

Apparently the reason the goalposts at one end of Giants Stadium are much further from the boundary is because it was previously used for baseball and that end of the ground is pointier.

Hilarious that the Water Closet Eagles are level with the Cats at the break. They will surely get run over in the second half but at least it won't be a % booster for Geelong.

I wonder what his life might be like post football when he has no guardrails at all.

I'm torn as to which pack of these tip rats I want to win.

With the bye coming up best case scenario is two games missed by Max which will give him time to get over his other ailments where ordinarily he would have played through them. Weid back in will allow for sharing of the ruck duties with Dogga.

Wow. Slim pickings by the look. I've never fancied the Ponsford Stand at the best of times so Q1-6 at the Punt Road end it is I guess. Thanks Beardy!

It's never a pleasant experience being the away side at the G against this mob. Actually considered watching this one on the box for all of 5 minutes. Does anyone know where the general admission areas will be down at the Punt Road end of the ground today as I want to have as few of these soap dodgers around me as possible?

Stringer should probably be called the suspect package.

Big opportunity for the Bombers to go 2 games clear in......16th place.

She couldn't be far off her sell by date surely. I miss reading Martin Flanagan's articles in the weekend broadsheet.

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.