Chook

lol Paddy Dangerfield is a one-man band. First 1-player team in history to win the flag?

My Port Adelaide supporting cousin is over to visit. I'm lucky she has her priorities in order. She's only minorly devastated. I'd be going mental if it were me.

I hate WCE but they're a proud footy club.

Adelaide is dead to me this finals series. In fact now that I think about it, footy is pretty much dead to me for the rest of this year.

I was on board until he said "I'm probably gonna go for a run today v I'm no pro sportsman, but even I go for a run every day.

Lucky they'll never play a game.

I think every different player had a different mindset, and that's what cost us. Goodwin said "We didn't talk about finals." Well we should have; especially with such a young team. People need to talk about what matters, and finals matters to us. If we pretended Round 23 was just like any other, we were fools. 17 people have coached the Melbourne Football Club since Norm Smith. None have won the flag. All have thought that history means nothing. We must embrace our history. Every chance to smash a hoodoo, we should let our players know about it. And then we'll smash it. Embrace the failure. Embrace the history. Embrace the opportunity for redemption. And then embrace the success.

I'll mail you mine. Do you want my leftover Chinese food too? It'd be easy to send in the same putrid pile of junkmail.

I was going to burn mine but got convinced to keep it by someone I live with who just doesn't get it.

I too have now received my invitation to Finals. Too bad the players didn't get one.

I wonder if they understand that performing well in finals is a really good way of getting paid a shiteload of money in your next contract.

I don't mind the sledge. I mind that we pathetically couldn't back it up.

Our young players ARE the leaders. When we were 7 goals down, it was Petracca and ANB and Hunt and Oliver who got us back into the game. None of our leadership group did that.

This has been a very difficult year for many of our players. We had a first-year coach who did a lot right but failed on several key occasions. Others will talk about the players, so I want to talk about Goodwin. I never talked about Neeld because his flaws were many and obvious. Goodwin has only a few things wrong with the way he does things. I'm going to name 2 in particular. The way he treated the Bugg social media stuff The self-professed approach of not talking about finals in the lead up to the game that would decide whether we were in or not. On the first point, I don't have much issue with his response; that we want to be respectful and professional. My problem is that he distanced himself from his players by saying "That's foreign to me." If it's foreign, fine; but as a senior coach its Goodwin's job to understand his players and what interests them. That's the only way to motivate people — by understanding what gets them going. By chastising our players after one of our best performances of the year against the Bulldogs while simultaneously saying he didn't understand social media, Goodwin undermined his credibility and badly damaged our players' confidence. On that note, Tomas Bugg is a very important player to the fabric of our football club. I hope he is given the credit he deserves for our strongest month of footy this year. On the lack of talk about finals, I think this was a terrible mistake to make with a team so young. Almost every player on our list has never played in a final before; we had to talk about it because they were all thinking about it. That we didn't talk about it meant that they all had to work it out for themselves what they were feeling and how they would approach Round 23. It wasn't until our match against Collingwood was almost over that we seemed to finally get on the same page and approach the game in a unified way. Failure to communicate is just not acceptable as a senior coach.

Only now do I begin to truly understand the pain of those who witnessed 1987.

Story of our season. Had it, and then lost it one more time.

Darling takes a ripper in the square and surely they're in now. Wish we'd picked him if only for that.

Aaand we're out again. 4:48 on the clock.

Holy [censored] we're in the 8 right now.

9 minutes. 1 point behind.

Just a goal in it. I don't even want to think about it though. I've accepted whatever happens.

Adelaide will want to hope they can just switch on their form come September or they could be out in straight sets.

West Coast out to 30 points ahead now. Adelaide will probably put the cue in the rack from here. Horrible way to finish the year, but we had it all on our plate yesterday and didn't want it.

Jenkins is getting absolutely manhandled.

This margin is on an absolute knife-edge. It's excruciating.