The Taciturn Demon

Good call. People immediately asked if he was worth it when it happened. Unless he falls of a cliff, it will seem like a totally unremarkable annual figure very soon.

Yes, I think I remember that. More recently it was Kingsley in an excerpt from an Amazon documentary. I'm the same as you - I don't see how that helps. And if it does, surely you can only use it once. If you're doing it again - especially if you're doing it to the same players - surely the joke's on you. You're the one picking the players you're now calling undisciplined, uncompetitive and untrustworthy. But apart from anything else it's just humiliating people in front of their mates. There's an idea that this works for some people - it might. But it would be very very few people. True about Steven King. I like the idea that he doesn't insult them by asking for effort. But what happens when the effort is demonstrably down. Does he bite his tongue and assume the professionals will have enough self-awareness to say - "I'm not giving it everything. I need to improve after half time."?

Found it very interesting in the footage from the lightning game that they showed him saying something like "I'm never going to ask you blokes to give me more effort. That's insulting to you." I like this a lot - but it's certainly a very different approach to screaming at Greene, Coniglio and Whatshisname that they're soft, lazy and undisciplined.

Speaking of Geelong, May had a bit of Matthew Scarlett about him. He didn't just negate forwards; he could completely dominate the backline. Some of his one-on-one stuff over many years was nothing short of miraculous. Great player.

After twelve years it'll be relocated to Carlton.

Yes. Definitely. The variety of the pre-2001 Brownlow was one of its greatest strengths.

Exactly. Sorry, but Tom Mitchell was never in the top few most influential players in the game. I say this because you can read number and get whatever you like out of them. And some of the the less basic stats are complicated by the fact the definition isn't always intuitive. Just as a bit of an experiment, if you watched the State of Origin a couple of weeks ago, do you remember who won the first centre clearance?

Definitely not. And we're nowhere near Gold Coast levels. But the North Melbourne final really worried me. It looked 7:1 from where I sat. I'd also add that both the Carlton and Collingwood women's teams have gone through some very lean times. We don't have the excuse of "Well, the women's team is just not much chop".

This sounds highly likely. I do understand that we are back to being a small club. We're now a long way past the riches that come from winning two flags and a McLelland Trophy in the space of 24 months. Our membership is poor and it sounds like sponsors aren't interested in us. That all means we don't have the same resources to spread around that many other clubs do, and the men's team obviously remains the priority. But I'm not sure that accounts for the seeming lack of enthusiasm for the women's side from the people at the top.

I really hope this is the case. My worry (and this is my own theory with no inside info) is the big decision makers have let us rest on our laurels with the women's team, assuming the brilliant punch-above-our-weight consistency just continues forever, without acknowledging it really came from the exceptional qualities of Stinear, Hore and for a long time (Daisy) Pearce and presumably several other quiet achievers like Sloane. This meant we were (and had a reputation for being) a great place to play footy and work. We could hold on to the very best players and bring in under-appreciated or out-of-favour guns like Maddie Gay, Liv Purcell and Tayla Harris. I know there were very particular circumstances with Eden Zanker, but her departure makes me a little bit nervous. The fact we don't have a coach three months after Stinear resigned makes me vervous. And what really worries me is the fact that we very often play among the best and most enjoyable-to-watch footy in the league and get fairly low crowds. It might be all we can hope for - simply a function of our supporter base's non-interest - but I think it's at least partly to do with promotion and how seriously the women's team is taken within the club. The fact we haven't had an update from the club on the coach in months is exhibit A. At my most pessimistic, I'm concerned we might have squandered all the good work we did from the time we instituted the exhibition matches all the way through to the Premiership.

The Brownlow should embrace its quaintness, which is waning already. It's an oddity in top-level sport to have umpires voting AND giving 3s, 2s and 1s AND doing it based on what they observed. In what other major sport could an ultra-consistent player who happens to be considered the fourth best player on the ground in every game get zero votes in the top award? In what other major sport is there no failsafe for a subjective opinion gone wild or just a howling mistake? I presume giving the umpires stats is an attempt to make sure the Brownlow "gets it right" every year. What rubbish. Let that be every other award. Give me Priddis, Cooney and Woewodin. Give me Scott Wynd and Tony Liberatore.

Holy [censored]. Only just saw this. That's madness.

Toby Greene fascinates me. I dislike him intensely. And because I'm not a rational creature, that dislike manifests in accentuating his negatives and ignoring his positives. Even still... ...when I watched Kingsley tear him apart in the half-time team meeting I was thinking each point, as blunt to the point of nastiness as each one, was correct. I can appreciate Greene is a good footballer, but he has never struck me as a captain and is defensively hugely questionable. I wouldn't have screamed his flaws at him in front of the entire playing group and I certainly wouldn't have released those criticisms publicly, but I can understand how frustrating they would be for a coach... ...and why they make him a LONG way from an A-grader. But, no, there is is every top 50 list... and has been for years. Is my contempt just blinding me or is the "Toby tax" actually the 25% extra credit he gets from Herald Sun and Fox Footy journalists for being a misunderstood tiprat-made-good, the perfect antidote to a world gone woke (where woke means preferring people don't spit on you)?

I wasn't there, so what would I know, but didn't several players kick goals from inside the centre square?

This article originally made no mention of monosodium glutamate. We have edited the article to include the statement from Damian Hardwick, that "None of Christian's recipes include MSG, which is widely known to be a method used by the Chinese Communist Party to implant microchips into the spinal fluid of consumers to create Manchurian Candidates." We apologise for the error.

Whoa. Windsor looked like he had 55 disposals based on those highlights. Loved the quick handballs. Something we rarely did well under Goodwin. Wonder if can Rooyen is enjoying playing on fringe AFL players or is going to prove me wrong and become a really solid big forward.

I think that's definitely true. Although Martin and Pendlebury, from my very uneducated perspective, look(ed) like technically very sound kicks, as well. I wouldn't say the same for James Hird - it was everything else that made his disposal so good.

My view, as a huge fan of his, was that he had modest disposal skills but at his best was underrated above his head and had a knack for using his speed and power to really good effect, especially in attack. He was also courageous. Much more discriminating footy watchers than me said when he became a centre bounce midfielder he was selfless and excellent at creating space for Petracca and Oliver. When his form began to slip, he looked like he was never running on top of the ground to me. The burst speed was gone. And that would have exacerbated his just-OK skills - without space he looked panicked. I remember watching him in the VFL, hoping he'd play well enough to get back in the team, and he'd get a lot of footy and do not much with it. I don't discount your impression, at all, though. I wonder sometimes whether disposal is as much about what happens before the kick or handball (not just decision making, but so much else) as it is about the technical elements that go into the actual disposal. I think a player can be both technically suspect and a reasonable or even good user of the footy.

One of my all-time faves. Hope he's OK.

The media's opinion doesn't worry me, either. And as @Bring-Back-Powell said, even if I did think there was a plethora of careful, rational analysts out there, what evidence would they have to suggest we were going to be finalists this season? The reason I think we need to show more than just the odd glimpse here and there in 2026 is because I get the sense the era of the AFL being broadly supportive of 10 Victorian teams, which began some time after 1996, may be slowly coming to an end. For a long time, I'd always thought we were a middle-sized club simply lacking the sustained success to cement that position. Straight after 2021, I thought my gut had been proved right. We suddenly had 70,000 members, were getting strong crowds (that's one area where I do worry about the media and think their continuation of a "fairweather" narrative that is rarely supported by simple numbers is dangerous), and seemed to be going OK financially. The crowds have remained OKish, but the rest has fallen away dramatically. The membership drop has been extraordinary, and the recent discussion on here about the club being of very little interest to potential sponsors is worrying. As St Kilda and North have shown, you could afford to be a Victorian club and go through really rough patches in the Demetriou and McLachlan years, probably in part because it would have been gross hypocrisy to say "North Melbourne, you haven't made a final in eight years and only 20,000 are turning up to games - you need to merge" and at the same time say "Gold Coast, you haven't made the finals ever in your 15-year history, and you only get 10,000 people to your games - here, have some more money". Can you still afford to be down in several areas - performance (and list management), membership, sponsorship, attendance - for a long period of time today? Maybe. I hope so, but I'm no longer sure. We need to go better than some expect to give the non-rusted-ons hope and, eventually, to give the AFL a reason to put us back in "prime time", which leads to more sponsor interest and more financial security. If we dip into a sustained period of below average performance, I don't just worry about losing, I worry about our existence.

Yep. I agree with you. "Goody loves the boys and the boys love Goody" became a kind of mantra, and while it might have been true in an abstract sense, it didn't make any obvious material difference. In fact, as you say, the whole club seemed constrained, sort of culturally and spiritually constipated.

Definitely. AMW looks like an obvious choice because of his agility and speed. Interesting to see if he has the defensive skills for it. I wonder if they also try Xavier Taylor in the role at some point. Much taller than AMW, and very good over his head, by the sounds, but Michael Hibberd did some superb lock down jobs as a 185 cm hybrid defender.

Bowey is a really bad injury for the team. He had a fantastic 2025 and seems ideally suited to a King game style that's all about creativity and run. I'm hopeful about Culley and would love to have seen him in Round 1 - sounds like that might be less likely now. The rest, though, doesn't concern me all that much apart from the fact it reduces our depth, which is never ideal. I've loved Viney and May's careers at Melbourne, but we're well past the obvious flag window, which means we're not carefully adjusting a proven formula - we're doing something new. I think it's important to see how a midfield functions without Viney and a backline without May. I'd be surprised and disappointed if their absences took as backwards further from the lows of 2024 and 2025. I think this is an important point. If we got to the end of the year and used this injury list as an excuse for a poor showing, I'd be disappointed. We're not Essendon of 2025.

That's remarkable. The whole thing seems completely broken. Ramshackle doesn't even begin to describe what a mess it is. I understand that it's all about saving money, and for a long time the decision-makers thought you could save money by improvising. But surely it's now so many layers of makeshift elements attached to makeshift elements that starting again and simplifying the whole system would lead to what every rationalist craves: efficiency.

People rely far too heavily on stats.