The Taciturn Demon

Yeah, having said what I said, we might be one of the few clubs who would consider it. Mainly because I wonder if 7 and 8 are no-man's-land picks in this draft - high enough to make everyone think you should be getting a very good player, but not high enough to gurantee that very good player from a shallow pool. Does 16 give a recruiter more freedom to have a swing at a bit of a smokey, rather than feel obligated to pick a sure thing (who becomes a C grade, 125-game plodder)? Maybe it's moot when it comes to Jason Taylor, whose selection of Pickett, Jackson, Windsor and Tholstrup suggest he couldn't give a stuff about what others think. It's also moot if Taylor is confident he can get two beauties at 7 and 8. If it's not, I don't mind the idea of banking picks for next year before Tassie really messes up the top of the draft. And it is fun to think about Adelaide going full 2023 Fremantle next year.

Interesting (if true, which is always an important caveat with the Herald Sun). Not sure they have a lot to work with to trade up. Their finals series was awful, but they didn't fluke the minor premiership, so I'm not sure if clubs will be rubbing their hands together for future picks.

This is exactly the term that came to mind when I watched highlights: project player. A player you'd be happy to work on for three or four years after using a late pick on them or taking them as a Rookie. Extraordinary that he's being talked of as a clear first rounder and the best KPP behind Dean. I reckon recruiting teams will be earning their money this year.

ChaserJ is wonderful. Was a must-read on Twitter before The Collapse.

People like Richard Goyder?

This was one of his great strengths. He should always be commended for this. But by the end he was deep inside a delusion.

Goodness. This rings painfully true to me.

Made it blatantly clear that we were not, as Goodwin said, "so close".

Could they get any more adorable?

I feel phantom drafts go from "what do clubs need?" in October to "which recruiters like which players?" in November.

I also don't think we should just assume the Suns will finish top four. They might. But progress, as we got told a lot before 2021, is rarely "linear".

Run those names by me. Obviously we've got the guy who talks about Chandler's meridian well above everyone else. Who's on the next tier down?

Ah yeah. That's why I'm so bad at understanding the game. I hold on to my six-year-old curiosity - "Dad, why are the butchers waving flags now?" - rather than who's playing where and why.

You're right. The season has gone quicker, and the injury list shrunk faster, than I realised. I reckon Denby Taylor is a bit unlucky to be out of the team at the moment.

In the women's game they've trialled making holding the ball interpretation much stricter, by giving less prior opportunity leeway. I thought it was a good idea. It just hasn't worked. The umpires are not the best of the best and they really struggle to be consistent. I have much less problem with changing the rules than most. The game changes so quickly that a governing body would be completely negligent if it said "We're not changing any rules for X years". The problem I do have is changing the rules in a way that makes umpiring harder.

You've never seen a goal umpire step forward and give the full back and full forward a little hurry up?

Depends if he's already had prior opportunity. I understand the thinking behind this, although I'm almost certain some umpires were already treating a shrug and a fend of equally previously. There's a huge difference between a typical Charlie Spargo or Nick Watson shrug, which is all about free kick seeking, and a shrug that lets you slip under a tackle and continue with the football. I hope they go really hard on the former next year.

I like that you add this. I think it's healthy. Just want to say I find your insights extremely helpful and interesting.

Very interesting to see how Viney responds. I suspect one of the many reasons King was eager to get rid of (or at least didn't stand in the way of the departure of) Petracca and Oliver was the problem of old dogs being unable to learn new tricks. Arguably, Viney was the player most unable to adjust to the shift in Goodwin's game style when it became clear slamming it on the boot no longer worked.

I agree with this. Something shifted in my mind after that game. Losing to Collingwood was nothing to be ashamed of. Losing to Carlton was unforgivable. For me, that shift was mostly about how I viewed Goodwin and his team. A sign of things to come for sure.

If the need for someone, anyone, was so urgent, why didn't Schache come on?

I've said on here before that you can extract anything you want to out of stats, so I'm being a bit hypocritical here, but if you look at centre bounce attendance in 2023, Grundy was in the centre more than Max in Round 1. In Round 2 Max got injured early. Grundy did 75% of the ruckwork that day and then was our main ruck for the next three weeks. (Perhaps because of the fitness you mentioned, in that shport period, he never got to the 90% centre bounce attendance that Max often does.) When Max returned, they had close to 50/50 centre bounce attendance until the bye - eight games. After the bye, Grundy did less, but was still spending good periods as the centre bounce ruck. He was dropped before Round 18 and that was the end. I'm perfectly willing to accept that Gawn let his ego get in the way and ruined the chance for this combination to work. But, as I asked earlier, when? Was it at the start of the season? If so, did Goodwin and the FD seriously intend to make Grundy our primary ruck and play Gawn as a 75% forward? If so - bizarre strategy. As I said in a previous post, Gawn has never kicked more than 16 goals in a season. Was the idea that the captain and one of the best ruck of modern times would play as a decoy? Was it somewhere near the bye? This is plausible, and would warrant the "big ego", "[censored] leader" calls IF Grundy was playing well. He was not. Apart from the period when Gawn was out, where Grundy had one exceptional game and a couple of good ones, I remember Grundy being very mediocre wherever he played at Melbourne. Was it near finals, leading to Grundy being ignored and Schache being named as sub in the famous semi? It could have been, but is the claim that Max knew Grundy in the ruck and him forward had a chance of working but let his own selfishness get in the way? Max, presumably doesn't have such an outsize influence he can literally influence gameday coaching strategy. So why, if we were so desperate for a tall to supplement a barely moving Tom McDonald, did Goodwin leave Schache as un unused sub against Carlton? Let's say that Gawn DID let his ego get in the way and quietly campaigned for the FD to give Grundy a lesser role or drop him. The idea that if that hadn't happened - that if he had swallowed his pride and played as a near-permanent forward - we would have been a better team has just never rung true to me. But to me, the far far more likely scenario is that the FD had a harebrained idea when it became clear Grundy was gettable. They never properly thought it through. They saw a big name and didn't spend anywhere near enough time working out how that big name would fit into a team that already had his one and only position well and truly covered. They got to halfway through the year and realised just that - they'd [censored] up. They dropped him. That's it.

Whoa. Who do you consider the top five or six kicks in the AFL?

So the theory is that Gawn agreed to play more time as a forward to accommodate Grundy and then reneged... when?

Absolute shocker. Far too often shrugged away with "worth a try". They either had to do something genuinely strategically groundbreaking or it was never going to work. Max is one of the best, defense-oriented contested marking rucks of the last 25 - maybe 50 - years and has never kicked more than 16 goals in a season. Grundy can't mark above his head and has never kicked more than 12.