Deenooos_

I saw the parts of the Gill interview and the comments sounded pretty disrespectful to be frank. ”I feel Melbourne are a bit oversold, frankly, uhh.. they’re the current premiership team.. what were they? 10-0. Everyone has their wobbles and clearly Geelong look great and I think Melbourne are a bit overdone.” Load of crap if you ask me. I [censored] hope we go back to back to prove everyone wrong and show them our generational team, I’m over the overarching negativity towards us!

Considering that that was in 2020 with 25% less game time he actually runs a lot more than 13.3km.. Very impressive.

Naaahhh dees clear favourites

I reckon a lot will be surprised how many turn up. Melbourne fans seem to view finals as a different ballgame to turn up for some reason 😂

We will crack it! In the ‘Age’, reports indicated 63,000 tickets had already been sold on Saturday morning with 70,000 expected. Hard to imagine only 7,000 will be added over the week, I think 75,000 at the MCG on friday is reasonable!

I think the reason our forward line was flooded last time had more to do with us than them. We moved the ball way too slow which allowed them to flood back in numbers. Probably due to fatigue. If you watch last year's finals you'll see that our transition play from d50 excellent. We switched the ball more often with the likes of Langdon but the key was our forwards sprinted the other way causing an outnumber up forward because the teams couldn't go with us. I may be wrong though and we aren't allowed this freedom now for whatever reason, but I'd like to hear what the boys on the pod think.

Wow they have already sold 65,000 tickets to our QF and could well reach 70k. Could the red and blue show up in droves like the 2018 finals? It seems as though. That would be a huge boost for the boys with the faithful behind them! And how good is it for Barassi, he has waited so long for this.

Yep. All we need to do is win on Friday and we'll either play Collingwood or Freo in the prelim and Geelong get the tigers or the swans. I still think playing Collingwood won't be as tough as the swans so just get the win and it'll set us up. You saw what happened to Richmond in 2018..

Yes yes but we are Melbourne remember, those stats don't apply to us.

Oh my bad didn't realise it was the same one.

Article on fox footy: https://t.co/MPsmDF5Uwt ”Luck of a black cat: The problem with finishing first, and who’s REALLY flag favourite” Looks like history is on our side.

I found @djr points about metres gained very interesting in the “Premiership metrics” thread and wanted to compare the MG metric of 2021 and 2022 to maybe get an idea of how much we benefit from the loading during the finals and to see if it directly correlates to our loading period and how it varies throughout the season. In this thought experiment I’m assuming MG is a direct indication of fitness, which it isn’t, but it makes way of understanding simple. Interestingly my analysis suggests we gain an extra 5-7.5% in physical performance from loading. I came to this conclusion simply by looking at the average MG from rounds 1-8 of both the 2021 and 2022 H&A season, in both seasons we had the highest MG at this time of the year. I'm using these rounds because you would assume that we are the fittest at the start of the season and hit the ground running from our work in the pre-season. I assume we can only maintain this peak fitness for about 8 weeks as from round 9 onwards it drops by roughly 3,5% which doesn’t sound like a lot but in a sport of inches it can have significant effects. The time of the drop off also coincides with the time period we think loading begins. We saw a slight uptick in MG from r20 onwards this year however not last year which is interesting. This may indicate that we truly only hit our peak a week after the H&A season and as many have said are aiming to peak on Prelim final day. The numbers are: 2021: r1-8 - 6167 MG 2022: r1-8 - 6269 MG 2021: r9-17 - 5956 MG 2022: r9-17 - 6022 MG 2021: r20-23 - 5823 MG 2022: r20-23 - 6149 MG In finals last year our average metres gained per match was about 6628 which is an increase of 7,5% on our early season MG, an increase of 13,5% from our last 4 rounds and an overall increase of 9% on the season as a whole. The extra 7,5% in performance goes along way in outrunning our opponents and what we did against the lions should be the norm throughout the entire finals series with maybe an extra few % come the first QF against the swans.

I'll be watching, like I always do, with my father in Hamburg on the watchafl.com website cast onto the Tv from my Laptop. Watched the grand final with one of my German mates last year and he loved it!

Absolute joke!

Wow: From the article: " HOW MANY FINALISTS YOUR TEAM HAD TO PLAY TWICE" 5: GWS 4: Essendon, Melbourne, St Kilda 3: Carlton, Port Adelaide, West Coast, Western Bulldogs 2: Gold Coast, Hawthorn, North Melbourne 1: Adelaide, Brisbane, Collingwood, Fremantle, Geelong, Sydney 0: Richmond

To each their own. You didn't have to respond to me but did, maybe don't respond if you don't like it. You should consider reading it and opening up to the idea. It may spare you of some of your MFCss that we have lost our "hunger" like it has mine and others. Just a suggestion though

You're clearly in denial. I admit I have no background in the field but have done a lot of reading and there have been so many intelligent posts by many posters in the "loading" thread explaining how significant this is especially for sports involving the amount of running that the AFL does, or specifically how dependent our gameplan is on gut running. The fact that you're still disputing the fact that loading has any significant impact on results simply tells me you are unwilling to accept it no matter the evidence. I'll be waiting for you to give me any reasonable explanation for the obvious drop off in our performances around either side of the bye this and last year that has nothing to do with fitness and why we looked a different team come finals than in the middle of the season.

Yep and on top of the elite field kicking their players are extremely athletically gifted. McRae has really found the perfect gamestyle for their ability and it's scary when they get going.

And you're ignorant. You think Collingwood has loaded the same way we have? No way.

Who are they to feel this confident. They haven't played this Melbourne side in finals lol

No I'm not and yes I agree but you can't compare our regime to theirs when they were 6-4 after 10 rounds and we were 10-0. I doubt they were doing anywhere near the amount of work that we were at the time. Anyway it was at a time where multiple players were banged up anyway especially our backline.

The only team that worries me in the finals is Collingwood, they have this enormous belief to win from anywhere. Carlton dominated the key stats even more so than we did when we played them and still lost, there's just something about the pies and I hate it. Hopefully we don't have to play them but part of me wants them to beat Geelong so we don't play them in a prelim and if it does come to it, we roll them in the GF.

You would think so. Where did the 65k fans come from in the 2018 finals series? Surely they're still out there somewhere. I reckon we'll get 70k with 50k our mob.

And, we were loading…

This must be his best year so far in his career. His two games he missed due to the thumb injury may just be the difference, I thought his game against the dogs doesn't count as you could clearly see the injury was still bothering him. In saying that, he has been so dominant in so many games that polling no votes in those games won't stop him from winning it. Plenty of 3 vote games this year!