Chook

Another thing I noticed from the post match interview with Neeld was when he said something along the lines of "we missed 4 almost-certain goals, which Richmond turned around and kicked themselves." He went on to say that while it was disappointing, Neeld said it means (direct quotes) "I can coach now." The Neeld haters will probably pay out on that as a weak statement, but to me it gave a real insight into what these past 18 months have been like. I think our players are at times so poor and disinterested that its impossible for a coach to fix the zillions of errors they make. After a game in which our effort was right up there, most of the inexcusable (and inherently uncoachable) problems are gone; now we can actually get down to the business of explaining the specifics of what players should be doing. This is in line with what Chris Dawes has been saying; that no coach should ever have to tell his players to provide effort. Once that obstacle is out of the way, we can get down to actually coaching professional footballers. Just my take on it.

I could see Chris Dawes becoming a senior coach in about 10 years time. He's a great communicator, a great leader and seems to have a very good understanding of the game. I understand he has coaching ambitions, so it would be great to see it. Who was the last Melbourne player to become a senior coach, by the way?

Fair enough, and yeah I did. I guess I can't blame you for not quoting something I hadn't said yet.

I also said that every body is different, and so I can't really judge how bad his injury was. Feel free to ignore that part if you want, but whatever. I stick by what I said - all of it. If you want to pull out only one bit of it and quote me on it, that's your call.

It's what got us into this deplorable mess in the first place. I would think ALL Melbourne supporters would have figured that out by now.

Isn't there some stat about how we play on the most in the comp or something? Or did I imagine that?

Read my post again, in which I pretty much said I have no idea how it might have felt.

I think I might have to agree with Benson here. I've had some very severe ankle injuries in the past, and I never reacted anything like that. It was reminiscent of the Gary Lyon stretcher incident (not least because they look a little alike). But that's a good point the Master has to make about Clark, who I would not ever call soft. The human body is such a weird device that you can never be certain how it will react to different (but seemingly similar) injuries.

Tagging is about more than being a good tackler. There are all these little body movements and pushes you need to master in order to be an effective tagger. McKenzie is better at this than most everyone else on our list. He's no great shakes, but he's good enough to get a game in our team at the moment...which is an indictment on our team I know. I thought he absolutely had to be dropped after the last two weeks, and after this game not even Neeld would keep him in the side (surely!) Bail played fairly well earlier in the year, but has been getting worse every game for about a month now. Get him into the VFL ASAP!!!

It is at the moment, but as you say Clark is not in the side (and of course neither is young Hogan, who I refuse to talk about on grounds of suspicion and jinxes and various other voodoo nonsense).

Obviously I'm no doctor, and some of the worst injuries can be very innocuous, but it looked like he didn't handle a very simple injury very well. I have been developing an idea about Jimmy Toumpas over the past eight weeks, and that incident played right into what I suspect might be the case with him. I'm not willing to write such a young guy off right now, but it does not appear that he has what it takes.

We're bad because we have no targets 50-80 metres out from goal. We need to either recruit a rich man's Brad Miller, or transform one of our many promising tall forwards into that kind of player. We consistently fall down in this area, and it kills us every time. I'm now convinced that this is the reason we're so bad. In fact, this might be the perfect role for Jack Watts. He has good endurance, can take a mark and has a great kick. Get it done Neeldy!

Not anymore after the last few weeks. He'll have to do a lot to bring me back onside, that's for sure.

These two get no respect, and it's a shame. They are clearly not AFL standard, but they possess qualities we lack and until someone decides to start beating down the door at VFL level, these two will be in the side more often than not. It's a pity we have to play them, but that's the way it is right now.

We need a strong target to kick to on the 80-50 metre area of the ground. I've started to think that's an even weaker area for us than our midfield. If we could find someone in that area to kick to, we'd be a much better side. Also, does anyone else think it was no coincidence that our high conversion rate inside fifty coincided with Sylvia being out of the side? I've said for weeks that he burns us so many times with his overzealous disposal into our forward line. Lo and behold, the week he's out we actually manage to hit some targets in there. I don't rate the way Sylvia plays, and this week has done nothing to change that opinion. Obviously we have to keep him because he's a great player. We just need to use him more effectively.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Sylvia being out is part of the reason why our forward 50 entries have been so much better. Now that Moloney is gone, he is the King of the up-an-under kick to no-one.

It's a bizarre feeling not to be completely out of the game at 3 quarter time. We won't win of course, but you know what I mean.

F%^k you Jack Riewoldt!!!!!

I ran across this clip on youtube of David Schwarz on SEN last week. He was honest and harshly critical, but the one thing I loved to hear was his attitude that no longer can we afford make easy decisions for the sake of "stability" or mateship. To his mind ours is a club that is dying, and to hear him say that some hard decisions need to be made was a great sign that he might be a very good administrator for us if he had the opportunity.

Just because we suck at employing it, doesn't mean the game plan itself sucks. I'm not defending anything or anyone; I just thought at the time (Geelong were almost six goals down) that it was worth mentioning.

Ablett didn't rip us a new one despite his millions of touches, so you've got to credit Dunn and McKenzie for that. In addition, McKenzie kept Harbrow almost possessionless when he played on him. Dawes and Tapscott provided a lot of defensive pressure, with Dawes involved in four of our goals. McKenzie was involved in two of our goals, and Dunn often provided the punch over the point line that stopped a mark from being taken on the goal-line. His timely fists allowed us to rebound from defense, and would certainly have resulted in a number of scoring opportunities if the players up the ground had kicked the ball better. Dawes led well all day, and although he wasn't rewarded very often he still involved himself in almost half our score. Tapscott manned his mark very well and forced his opponent to kick to 50/50 or worse contests time after time. He also layed a number of tackles and caused four or five turnovers on the day. There was a passage of play in (I think) the third quarter where he made about four efforts on his own to win the ball off two Suns opponents with no-one else anywhere near him. He deserves to be recognised for that effort alone, and it most certainly was not his only one of that kind last week. Sellar came 12th in my rankings, though it was so close that you'd be welcome to put him higher than Dunn and McKenzie if you'd like. There are 22 players in a team. That's plenty of room to be out of the Bests and still not be anywhere near the Worsts. Don't call me biased, because that's one thing I'm not.

Just on the other game, Michael Johnson really screwed me by not kicking that behind. Seriously, one more point and my Fremantle tip would have looked like a genius move. Oh well...

Two awesome games of footy tonight!

For what it's worth, the Cats are currently being beaten by a competent team employing the current Melbourne gameplan.

Merge? Just kidding.