The Taciturn Demon

It was shocking. I just don't think we were good enough to win that game, but going in to three quarter time just two goals down would have made them nervous.

I definitely fell into this trap, mainly because I saw decent turnarounds in form from individual players. But it turns out we're the team I thought we might be at the start of the season: below average even at full strength and fairly easy to play against.

I'm with you on the consistency, but I don't put it down to steel. If we were capable of building ourselves for the odd game, there's no way we would have lost five in a row at the start of the year. We'd have responded after the North debacle and beaten the Suns. I think we're a below average, but not terrible, team, which means when a day or an opposition style happens to suit us, we can look OK - sometimes really good. But when a team has our measure, we're not good enough to course correct mid-game and bring the arm wrestle back in our favour. I didn't watch the Port game and think we were sagging after a big effort the week before. I thought that, yet again, our opponent was too quick, moved the ball far better than us and took their chances. We had no response.

There's no way he's going. The interesting thing is how the bloke who puts so much store in his relationship with players deals with the list at the end of the year. He talked in the press conference about having changed a lot recently. He was talking about the way we play. But what the club hasn't changed a lot is the list. We've traded up in the draft really effectively, and brought in some good young players, but we haven't made big shifts. We've managed the list like we think it's capable of playing in prelims. Surely we have to disabuse ourselves of that notion now. But... ...it also seems like the draft is one you wouldn't want to trade into. It's not a draft where you can confidently rub your hands together with a pick in the teens. So what will he do? (I know he's not responsible for the list, but he would have a huge say in whether we say goodbye to big names.) It seems several of the players that have made his tenure successful are now incapable of playing in the same team and giving us a chance to be consistently hard to beat. Some of them still have years and years left on their contracts. Will he continue to attempt a miracle in teaching his old dogs new tricks?

Maybe the only bigger gap is between supporters' memory of his best and worst. Close to the most senior player at the club endlessly taking the [censored].

Yep. We [censored] so hard today, we blasted a hole in the bricks.

I was quite looking forward to that game. Didn't know if we'd win, but thought we'd go OK. We did not. In any way. Go OK.

Devil's advocate... sort of. Would any team give up much for Langdon?

I think the problem with their list is how mediocre it is in almost every area. (West Coast have a worst list if you're just looking at who they field as a best 22 tomorrow; St Kilda's ranks below them if you look at building towards a list that can make prelims.) They have a lot of good ordinary sloggers. Those kind of teams just need a sniff and they're competitive. We gave them more than a sniff in the NT. Didn't help that one of their few very good players - Wanganeen-Milera - basically did as he pleased.

Phenomenal that this steaming dog**** has been published for close to a decade.

Saw him do that to Turner on Monday. Loving, ''aggressive' series of pushes to say "that was your goal - your intercept position created that".

Interesting looking at that provisional team and wondering who might come out if Viney gets up. Seems like only a few weeks ago there were so many players in horrendous form, you could have chosen ten. Not now. I like the idea of Viney spending much more time forward, so it may be Tholstrup.

Absolutely convinced St Kilda have the worst list in the league.

Yep. Also puts free agency out of the picture. Imagine Kozzie continues to steadily improve and clearly becomes a top ten player in the comp, then he exercises his free agency right in 2027 and we get pick 10 or 12 or 14 or some [censored] in compensation.

The only person who says they know what May said has a patchy history with facts. He suggested it was something extremely tepid - along the lines of "Did you think you had less time than you had?"

Leigh Fisher, who played for St Kilda, has umpired more than 250 games.

Good lord! They poached him after three seasons. The [censored] gall.

It should be in the Constitution that you have to call him this.

What a legend. Get her back to the Demons as soon as possible.

Interesting watching Kozzie when under pressure and forced to quick quickly yesterday always opt for the low mongrel. I get that sometimes you just need to turn and dump it, but like you say the big garryowens aren't working.

This is an important point. Saying "Whoa! Look. Players yelled at each other! What a story!" is fine in a vacuum. In the context of elite level sport, it's a preposterous thing to give more than five seconds of attention to. It pales into the palest insignificance when you put it against the things that would be said behind closed doors - even, or maybe especially, the things said without aggression or in the heat of the moment. Imagine working for years and years to become an AFL footballer, getting drafted, doing brutal pre-seasons and then being taken into a room at the end of your third season, without having played a game, and told "You're not good enough. We're delisting you. We hope you can find another club, but we doubt it." Or imagine being at the centre of one those ridiculous "honesty sessions" that were big a few years ago, but were nothing more than soviet struggle sessions dressed up in idiotic corporate language? Just being told "you're soft and nobody trusts you" in front of 40 peers. Or imagine being told you need to harden up and get back on the ground even though your ribs are broken. But no. Let's find a sixth camera angle of May saying "What the [censored] was that kick?" and Max telling him to "[censored] off".

Well put. There was a lot of genuinely interesting stuff to talk about after that game. Parts of the footy media have, yet again, decided to put a spotlight on something superficial and barely notewothy, then frame it as sensational 'drama'. It's A Current Affair level 'reporting': assuming the audience are bordering on vegetative.

I used to think it was stubborness. I'm coming round to the idea he has very few other options. He's slowly getting the team to move the ball a different way and lower eyes when kicking inside fifty. It's still not happening as often as we'd like (and even when it does start happening, every team kicks long and high at some stages during a game). For that reason, you need someone who can stand and grapple and make contests. As many others have noted, Petty isn't great at it. But who on the list would be better? I think many of us thought, or at least hoped, it would be van Rooyen now and for many years to come. It may still happen, but he looks a mile off at the moment. Turner looks a conssumate key back to me. He's in terrific form. Why would we want to change it? Jefferson? I haven't drawn a line through him like others, but I think he NEEDS that proper key forward beside him to excel. He can't be the one. Johnson? Maybe. But now? It's a lot to ask of a bloke with six months of experience on an AFL list. Kentfield? Good size but coming from a long way back. Fullarton? I was hopeful when we got him. But no. I would much prefer it if Petty was playing down back. I would be really disappointed if he was playing forward in 2026. For now, I understand why he's playing forward.

Some of the most obviously terrible umpiring I've seen for a long while on Monday (the Melksham shepherd/tunnel one on the member's wing was breathtakingly horrible), but I don't see any conspiracy or feel that umpiring has clearly got worse recently. I absolutely understand that umpires are pressured by crowds but even then, it doesn't explain the Bulldogs getting an extraordinary run (going simply by frees for and against) over multiple decades and Richmond getting the opposite. What I know for sure is the game has got much harder to umpire. The equation an umpire has to do in their head to determine holding the ball, for example, is now a complete absurdity. And while I agree that better facilities and generally more care from the AFL would help, I don't think an umpire working full time in the best facilities tutored by the best coach could consistently get holding the ball right at the moment. I loathe the idea that the umpires are in any way responsible for the look of the game. The idea that an umpire should err on the side of "letting them play" or making the game "flow" is ludicrous. The game should never be made harder to umpire in the pursuit of "a better product". That's clearly happening with holding the ball, where excellent tackles go unrewarded because after a seemignly endless amount of time the ball is jarred free. Making the rules more black and white would cause some frustration among fans initially but the angst would soon turn into acceptance and then the job would be easier and, presumably, the umpiring more consistent. I don't really like the last touch out of bounds rule (as used in the women's comp), but it's preferable to a discretionary rule encouraging blatant inconsistency like we saw yesterday. Hands in the back is another one. Yes, the strict interpretation from a few years back was frustrating. I think it may be preferable to the huge spectrum we have at the moment: all the way from rucks jamming an opponent into the second row but it being fine because he kicks a goal to a gentle nudge followed by a sprawling performance getting whistled. I quite like the new concept of a small push being OK unless the pusher then fails to touch the ball, but that happened yesterday (Elliot, if I recall) and went unpunished. Umpiring like yesterday's makes my blood boil, but I can't help feel sympathy and even grudging admiration for umpires who do a naturally hard and high-pressured job that's made all-the-more-difficult by rule interpretations that become progressively more complex.

The very end of his 21 season was poor, but up until then he was superb. Your point still stands, though. No need to play him forward. I'm not sure we even need to play him back. Fantastic season to date, and extremely unlucky to be pushed out, but he's 34 and has talked openly about his clanking body. We need to plan for the future now.