The Taciturn Demon

Good grief. Would have guessed 27. Really like him.

Goodness. So true.

I think that's right. But surely that depth should get used in a season like this.

Very good point. I think there is an enormous amount of wishful and magical thinking when it comes to player trading - in the media, among supporters and often within clubs. Some of it's cynical - click-bait stuff about a "mega trade" that the author or conceiver knows wouldn't happen in a million years. But some of it is earnest - "the market is a magical machine that conjures exquisitely fair transactions (all of which favour my preconceptions, biases and preferences)".

Yep. And as a ruckman, if you're not taking contested marks, you're not doing an extremely important part of your job.

This may be true. From what I know, this has never been a problem - at least during games. Instead, 2025 Oliver at top gear and 2021 Oliver at top gear are two completely different footballers.

This is a good defense of the area, but I think you'll find the hate is very much genuine.

I'll take "I hate Melbourne" over "I barrack for Melbourne, but they should merge".

Geeze, the St Kilda and Carlton games really broke a few people. And understandably so. But I was expecting this thread to be pretty up-beat. I think Culley was good. Yep, the opposition was poor, but he showed he can take a grab in a way very few of our midfielders can. And I'm very much in the @Trident22 boat with his kicking. He may fade away into obscurity, but I think he showed that when your season is over, you get a chance to experiment - and sometimes those experiments uncover something you weren't expecting.

There's a lot of depressing stuff in there, but nothing more deflating than the Keith Thomas thing.

He's played three VFL games. Ever. I reckon he's a really solid footballer.

This is the crux of it for me. It has nothing to do with medical negligence. We shouldn't need excuses to try new players and configurations at 6 and 13, and after an astonishingly bad previous two weeks. But if we DO need to find reasons for change, a bone fracture seems like a decent one.

Oh goodness - the Viney selection. What is going on?

This surprised me as well. It's so much fun.

I agree with this. It's not something a coach would ever say - and it can backfire if the new tactics and players just don't work - but if not now, when? That's why I'm so disappointed with just two changes. Yes, it'll be great to have a look at Culley, but why not Adams? (I keep wondering why did Gawn mention Adams as a certain debutant two weeks ago and we still haven't seen him.) Why not Brown? Why not look at Johnson again? Or Jefferson? And if not either, why not give Kentfield a taste? If the answer, as it seems to have been all year, is they're just nowhere near good enough, then we have perhaps the worst depth in the comp and so this idea that we're "in a hurry" to return to finals-capable footy is wishful thinking, if not a complete con. I want to win this game. I'm too scarred by the tanking years to say "I want to lose because it brings about something better". I have no doubt constantly losing affects the development of kids. But I don't want to win, as you said, doing roughly what we've done for the last 20 weeks.

No Gillard and no Colvin... very interesting to see what we do to stop taller forwards. Return to the Harris-as-a-defender experiment?

It's amazing. One of the most embarrassing losses I can remember and we fiddle at the fringes.

Well said.

What do you mean?

I said just that to my dad during the game: "We're playing OK here, but they're letting us do exactly what we want to do."

I can't stand Ross Lyon and I don't rate the St Kilda list at all, but it was an absolute all-timer. Monumental win. When you put aside the bitterness and shame of the loss (which I understand many are not ready to do), it's hard not to admit Wanganeen-Milera is an absolute joy to watch.

I thought his ruckwork on the weekend was very good - up to a point. I completely understand that it needed to change, and became way more conservative, in the final quarter. And that urgently needed to change when they got within five goals. This has been well argued elsewhere on the forum. But I'm not sold on him being an overrated tap ruckman. It may be true. Or he may be nothing more than slightly above average in this regard. But- my inkling has long been that he's a smart footballer whose larrikanism can be mistaken for dim-ness. Yes, his decision making with kicking and handballing can be really poor. I don't know if it extends to his ruckwork though. One of the most frustrating things about football for me in the last five or eight years has been this line, repeated so often, it's become a truism: "Max is so dominant that the opposition just rove to him." That may be true, but it's not inevitable and eternal. Surely, after coming to this conclusion, the job of everyone responsible for stoppage strategy at the Demons is to at the very least mitigate it. One of the many, many reasons I think it's time to find a new coach is that this mitigation has failed to happen to any great degree. I could be wrong, but my hypothesis is that Max is a well above average tap ruckman whose dominance has been poorly handled by everyone involved in the midfield system.

Sorry. Walked all over this post without reading it. My thoughts exactly.

That's a big call. I strongly agree that our system is broken and desperately needs to be changed. I'm not sure JVR would be a B+ in any system. I don't mind him - I don't necessarily think he's a bust - and I'd love to see what he and numerous other under 24s can do under a different regime. But I do wonder if expectations are unrealistically high.

Genuinely not having a go - interested in your reasoning. Why Langdon?