Bring-Back-Powell

Our master mind of a coach has ruled out Hibberd and Melksham. Both far too underdone. Steve May participated in full training and will play provided he wakes up well tomorrow and the day after.

Agreed. I'd be quite comfortable putting that side on the park on Saturday aside from Preuss. And who's idea was it to play a 215cm giraffe at full forward in a tropical monsoon? Not sure which Cairns debacle was worse. The Freo or the Sydney?

Salem played a full game against Richmond and played well. Not concerned about him. Hibberd, Brayshaw, Melksham and Kozzie could be risky and costly selections given their interrupted pre season. They’ll have to risk a couple of these as we had a lot of non performers against the Dogs.

An interesting stat: Aside from GC Suns, we have the longest drought with regards to winning a final in back to back years. That occurred between 1987- 1991 and the drought cannot be rectified this year. I believe Carlton is the next worst - 1999-2001. #onlymelbournefc

Did you get a follow up SMS from ticketek after you booked it? I'm still waiting for mine but I'm assuming you can access the ticket via email.

Who’s going to use injures as an excuse if we get done considering Freo are missing their forward fire power in Walters and Lobbe as well as a few other best 22 players?

27 degrees and sunny on Saturday. Hope this suits our apparent fitness under Burgess. Still have painful memories of round 1 2019 when it was about 32 degrees.

The actual trade we did stacks up. Got a first rounder for a talented but wayward forward and spent it on a top 3 full back in the competition that's well and truly committed to excellence after a shaky first year. But yeah, our immediate succession plan failed in recruiting a replacement until BBB. They (and we) were seduced by a 4 week T Mac-Weid sample space from round 22 2018 to week 2 finals. The sample space didn't extend to the 5th week when both players were diabolical in the 2018 prelim.

Good point. They could move to the game to Adelaide Oval on Sunday week?

Do you have any confidence he'll be able to play more than 2 quarters of "AFL home and away footy" before he runs out of gas? If he can't then he can't be selected.

I’m hoping Jordon can grow into the “non Landon” wing. Has a bit of outside run about him. Id also like to see Tomlinson given another shot at the wing. After the 2020 season restart Tomlinson played wing and he played ok against Carlton but average in the MCG games against Geelong and Richmond (as was Langdon). Then he was dropped for a few weeks. So you could argue he wasn’t given a massive amount of opportunity to cement his wing spot. And remember Tomlinson jagged a BOG 34 performance on the wing against Hawthorn in a 2020 practice match.

I know fairy tails only happen to the Bulldogs and Richmonds of this world but wouldn’t it be nice if this fella can have a major break out season after the adversity he’s been through. We gave a Bennell a chance, it didn’t work out. Hopefully we’re due some good karma with this one.

Your team is fine except that I don’t think Daw is AFL match fit ready, therefore T Mac reluctantly gets into the 22.

Yeah agreed that Trac should be at least 50/50. Hopefully an Oliver, Brayshaw, Harmes and Petracca midfield should be good enough to get the job done.

You’d imagine Brayshaw is an absolute certainty next week given he’s had two VFL hit outs. Hopefully he has the match fitness to play major minutes inside the centre with the absence of Viney, where he plays his best footy.

Could Bowey do an Angus Brayshaw of 2015? Little exposure in the pre season comp but hit the ground running in round 1. Just have a gut feel he could slot in straight away and contribute.

He actually is. He’s a reliable set shot for goal and go back and watch his winning set shot for goal against Carlton in 2019 - 52 mtr set shot. Or the 3 goals from 50 he kicked in round 18 last year. Or the 75 mtr torpedo he kicked against Adelaide in 2017. Or the accurate 21.10 he kicked in 2019 for a career total of 41.20.

Good to see Brayshaw and Pickett amongst the early goals, and Hibberd out there.

Yeah I heard speculation that the crowds are going to be lower than expected. Perhaps a hangover from lockdown and people are gun shy from attending public events for the time being.

Fair enough but it annoys me when for example a Troy Chaplin gets interviewed on SEN with Dwayne Russell on Monday and declares Salem a near certain starter for round 1 and that he would've played Vs the Dogs had it been a home and away game.

Thanks PF. Hopefully Salem is taking it easy this week and will fully train next week. If he's done a genuine hammy then the club should be upfront and rule him our for round 1 rather than the misleading line of hamstring awareness/tightness. Perhaps May is not allowed to train under the new protocols until day 5 or 6?? Sounds like a lot of players are going to miss games this year through concussion.

Agree that we need Hunt's explosiveness across half back and it will pay off at times. However he is such a low possession gatherer and compare that to another half back flanker in Jayden Short from Richmond who got about 40 touches other night. Hunt doesn't get involved enough in the game. Not sure what happened since 2016/2017 as he was way more involved back then. So I'm thinking a 7 possession 2 goal game at half forward is of more value to the team than a 13 possession game at half back with only a couple of decent carries of the ball. I agree with your last point in that our forward line functioned as well as it could Vs Richmond considering we had Brown, Weid, Melksham and Kozzie missing.

That night was a little 186ish. We went from a prelim finalist to getting schooled by a woeful Freo on our home turf half a season later.

Any chance we can throw Hunt back into the forward line? Is a natural goal kicker coming off a 4 goal game versus Essendon and blind Freddy can see that our fwd line aside from Fritsch can’t kick a goal to save themselves.

And continued into the first month of 2020.