Bring-Back-Powell

Agreed, it's definitely our area of weakness. We should've retained Garlett unless he wanted his career to be over. It pains me to say it but I'd say Corey Wagner looks the most ready for round 1, but hoping Pickett can show signs in the Marsh series as he clearly has the biggest upside of the group. Hopefully ANB can have a bounce back year as a small forward and kick his 25 like he did in 2018.

The only parallel i see between Hawthorn's 2009 and Melbourne's 2019 was that both sides missed the finals after making it the year before, and had off season surgeries. Hawthorn were in the hunt for finals all year in 2009 but lost to Essendon in the last round to just miss. Our season was over by round 3.

People forget that in 2018 we went an impressive 8-2 between rounds 16 - semi final (our best 2 months of footy in 12 years) and O Mac played in all those games without the services of Lever and May. He must have done something right in 2018.

A defense led by Oscar McDonald and Harry Petty looks tantalising on paper.

Apparently not training today according to the training thread, for the second consecutive session. Panic stations?

IN I agree with this comment (in bold) and I would take 11 wins, purely because it's a 6 win improvement on last year. That's how bad we were. Off season surgeries and injures explain a drop off, but they can't alone explain a 5-17 drop off. We are supporters can't excuse that. I think some posters are putting in amazingly high and lofty expectations on this side (eg - top 4) and have forgotten that we're the reigning second worst club in the AFL. Just making the 8 isn't a successful season in a broader sense, but us making the 8 off a 5 win season would be a very good achievement IMO.

We have to win 8 more games than we did last year just to clear that minor hurdle you refer to as finals footy. I genuinely don’t know if we have it in us.

Yeah agreed!

Kent’s 12 goals in 13 games probably would’ve won him a Bluey the way most of our player went about it last year. If Kent played a full season he would’ve kicked 25 odd goals which would’ve been enough to win the leading goal kicking award. So yes, he would’ve provide a valuable goal source if you think about it.

I’ll call making the finals this year a raging success. We were so very bad this year that you can’t just write it 100% down to injuries and surgeries. Not a lot of sides makes the finals off a 5 win season, so it would be a quite an achievement IMO if we make it.

Given it was a light session hopefully it was just a bit of maintenance for him. But yeah, panic stations if he’s not out there on Monday.

I prefer Hogan over May as Hogan actually provided good service to us and barely missed games (aside from 2014 and the last few weeks of 2018). Hopefully May has a full season this year.

In 2019 we could’ve done with Kent and Watts as goal kicking sources.

No it was a question rather than an opinion or gripe. Just wondering if there’s a contractual obligation that states we have to play there, or the AFL showing us a bit of good will by allowing us to play an annual game at Casey.

On a side note, is there a contractual agreement in place to play a pre-season game at Casey Fields every year? This year will be our 4th pre season game there in a row.

Sounds promising.

Thanks for the clarification. Though he was delisted after the 2014 season. He last played in round19 2014 against Brisbane in a horrid loss at Marvel, effectively making him the ultimate list clogger for the 2015 and 2016 seasons. I can recall Roos ripping into him at 3 quarter time of a GWS loss.

Probably didn’t helped that he and Terlich dressed up as Rolf Harris and his young ‘friend’ at Mad Monday. Both were sacked/delisted.

Correct.

I'll go with Pickett in round 1, provided he shows a little something in the Marsh Series.

Must admit the OP's comment about Goodwin also piqued my interest.

And same for 1991 when we played West Coast at Waverley. They finished first, we finished 5th so both finals should've been over there. Two gifts, two fails.

Thanks for the read above. 1988 was just before I started going to the footy so it was good to get a poster’s account of the series. I recall us being very good in 1990, particularly the first 8 weeks and the last 7 or so weeks. What on earth happened in the 1990 semi vs WC? Everything was on our side - WC had just played an extra final Via the drawn qualifying final v Collingwood, and we’d schooled WC twice in the season. Was it simply Gary Lyon missing the game or did we go in too cocky. 1991 semi final Vs WC - I assume we went in heavy underdogs against the minor premiers and played accordingly.

Everyone talks about the 1987 finals series and how special it was, but nobody talks about the 88 series. We beat WC in a thrilling finish at Waverley. We beat second place Collingwood in front of 88,000 at the G, by 13 points but we were in control all day. We also beat the reigning premiers Carlton by 22 points in the prelim to right the wrongs of the previous year's disaster to make our first GF in 23 years! Nobody ever refers to this game, but it must have been extremely satisfying at the time. We won 3 finals in 1988 which is the most ever in an MFC finals series since 1964. We haven’t replicated it since. IMO, everyone only thinks of 1988 as the GF disaster but we certainly had some memorable wins in the lead up.

Northey era > Daniher era. The only metric I'm interested in is the win-loss stat and Northey beat Daniher 53.8% to 48.4%. Plus, Northey has been the only coach post 1964 to deliver us 3 finals wins in the one finals series. Who can guess which year that was? Goodwin is on 46.4% after his disastrous 2019.