The Taciturn Demon

Good effort. I just worry that if we want to seriously contend this year, we can't let quarters like that last one happen. I think a team like North would just steamroll us.

Great to see Pisano getting involved. Haven't seen much to be hopeful about so far, but this has been a lot more encouraging.

I'm the same. I think the best we can hope for is about the same but with much less nervous nowhere handballing.

It's been frustrating, but I don't put him in the same category as Schache, Billings or Hunter. He's clearly highly talented and we took a punt; it hasn't paid off. I much prefer that approach to squeezing the last drops out of C+-grade known quantities at the end of their careers and then wondering why we don't improve when they come into the team.

Spot on. A lot of emphasis on the Andrews game. Very little on the Wilkie, Ratugolea, etc games. The speccies, attempts at super-high-degree-of-difficulty goals, lack of pressure and recidivism on the over-the-nine 50 metre penalty made me question whether I was watching a different player to other supporters.

Very funny and not a bad effort. St Kilda and Fremantle absolutely the correct champion and runner up. Seems like they've given a lot of weight to the Colliwobbles that nobody under 70 was alive to witness in full.

Oof. I fear it's a decent comparison, but it hurts. Lewis was an absolute shell of his former self when he came to us.

My thoughts as well. A brilliant piece of recruiting and exceptional for a long time for us - at some points clearly our best player. But the time comes for everyone and while I'm sad it didn't end in a slightly different way, I'm not disappointed. A sensible decision. I still think this is a Robbie Tarrant-style play for other clubs. Hoping he can wind the clock back when everything suggests he's very close to the end.

Your obstetrician is doing a TERRIBLE job if you manage to get a grade 5 spleen laceration, break four ribs and puncture your lung giving birth.

Interesting question. Doesn't the fact that we have 18 on the field and 22 in a game dilute a single player's ability to change an entire game? Baseball, where a single moment can drastically affect a game, seems like a sport where correlation may be closer to causation when it comes to players affecting outcomes. Not sure that would be true for Australian rules. But maths isn't my strong suit.

I find the frustrating as well - it makes a mockery of the equalising power of the draft. But... I don't hear many Melbourne supporters complaining about Jake Lever. Left after the same number of years and roughly the same number of games as Jackson.

Thanks. Really good explanation. I've always wondered about the very high total player payment floor. I have no doubt lowering it would create unintended consequences, but it does seem counterintuitive that West Coast can choose to pay only 5 percent less in total than, say, Brisbane or Geelong. The only other thing I would point out, which is stating the bleeding obvious, is that you can trade your way to significant improvement... but you can also trade your way into a list disaster. I completely agree that if the system tilts everything towards inequality, it should be changed. But I do question whether more trading options leads inexorably to more equality. Some of the boldest trading in the last 20 years has led to an abject lack of success. To put it another way, the trading system can't stop Essendon from repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.

Which sort of ones? When I think international sport, I think mostly of extravagant inequality.

And even this is iffy. I asked a chatbot the other day to tell me how many finals Melbourne had won in the last 20 years. That's not quite "Are rucks tall?", but it's not far off. I thought it would be easier than me going to a website with the info and sifting, then counting. It told me the answer was one. I realised it thought "finals" meant "grand finals". I changed the question. Still one. I explained in detail that finals are like playoffs, and I wanted to know how many games the club had won in playoff series between 2005 and 2024. Still wrong. Eventually I wrote a prompt so elaborate there was no way it could get the answer wrong. I finally got the answer, but had taken much more time than I would have if I'd counted on a stats site.

If it was just about any other player I'd say "No - too old." But Mihocek is such an honest footballer. I really like him. No Mihocek and Melksham in the same forward line makes sense. For me, Mihocek every single day of the week.

The insularity of the Foxtel boys' club is deeply embarrassing for everyone involved.

Didn't Jason Taylor desperately try to find a way to get the pick to take Bailey Humphrey in the Jefferson draft? Probably a never-trade from the Suns' point of view, I imagine.

Oh, Chris Johnson for sure! ENORMOUS expectations.

Wow. I thought Chris Sullivan's career pre-dated the mainstream internet.

I'm sure there are many reasons why people think he could make it, but one that stands out on this forum is an outstanding pre-season game he played (possibly the same one in which he did his knee). Instead of seeing that as evidence of progress after a reasonable couple of senior games the year before - and hoping it might translate into better perfomances in 2025 - some supporters extrapolated on that game alone...wildly. The result: instead of Moniz-Wakefield being a potentially useful depth player making reasonable progress, he was suddenly a clear best-22 player whose near-certain breakout season had been cruelly denied.

Wouldn't this appointment need to be made reasonably soon?

I had always thought State of Origin had a long, venerable tradition. It's silly in retrospect, but I had imagined the aura it commanded in the 80s and early 90s had existed for decades previously. Nope. I knew it had faded badly by the mid to late 1990s, but I'd never realised until today that it only started in 1977. Just a small thing really. But, like others have said, I find the whole return uninspiring, and any wistfulness is further diminished now that I realise it was only a big thing for a dozen or so years.

I very often am. I hope that I am once again.

Yep, and assistant coaches would know better than me. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but it I just can't see it being anything other than mediocre. I think there's a good argument it's worse than that. The so-close-in-so-many-games argument has got a good run on here. I'm not totally convinced by it. One of those under 13 losses was against half of Carlton's best 22. One was comfortably one of the worst losses I've seen in 35 years (St Kilda). The main problem, though, is that in the season itself, even the 'good' close losses (Collingwood, Adelaide, Brisbane, the Dogs) weren't indicators we were returning to form. We rarely lost narrowly and then won. We were off and on all year - not with the bizarre lurching from good to abysmal like in 2024, but still inconsistent. After the amazing Brisbane in Brisbane win and the Sydney hammering, we never looked like building momentum. I think I said something similar at the start of this year on a thread about expectations: it's not a disastrous list, but SO much has to go right for it to make finals. I definitely underestimated how quickly Petracca would return and how effective he would be after that horrible injury. He didn't get back to his 2021 best by any means, but he was far better than I thought he'd be. I think it's fair to be hopeful he can be better again in 26, but I'd be surprised if he had a Jack Gunston-style resurgence. With Oliver - I WANT to believe those glimpses towards the end of this year were meaningful. Again, maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, but I can't. I've been watching the finals closely, and the best midfielders in the biggest games simply don't cough the ball up like Oliver has been doing for a while now. Even when he looks like he's not labouring (which is shockingly infrequently from my observations), he's so panicked with his disposal. I can see a 2026 in which King gets more out of Oliver; but I find it so difficult to envision a 2026 where Oliver is really humming again. I'm even less optimistic about Lever and May. May has had a phenomenal career and has been extremely good at Melbourne, but I think he's almost certainly at the very end. If we're relying on him, we have even bigger problems than I assume. Lever is younger and his slowing down may be more to do with specific injuries rather than age catching up, but I don't have him as a clear top 10 player as I once did. I also worry that our cohort of younger players is overrated - not individually, but as a group that is obviously better than other clubs' under 23s. Langford looks excellent. I have possibly even higher hopes for Lindsay. I really like Windsor and Turner. Bowey is still youngish and I'm quietly confident about Culley. Don't know if that's way better than the numerous others clubs who've gone to the draft recently. And the depth - yep, poor sums it up. I'm really eager to see how King changes the way we play and how giving players more attacking license manifests. I'm hopeful that what we see next year will be mostly encouraging and enjoyable, but I think finals is a highly ambitious target for a list with so many question marks and so many holes.