The Taciturn Demon

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?

Who would you go out of your way to trade out?

Super interesting. I've wondered for a long time what happens in post-game analysis sessions. Just out of general interest, but also after watching vaunted players make the same enormous errors or indulge in the same failures over and over again. It's been years now, but Jordan Lewis, sticks out in my mind. I haven't seen a player go to ground that much and leave the difficult defensive stuff to his colleagues since Under 14s. And yet it never changed. And he was praised repeatedly for his leadership. And he placed high in the B&F in his first year. I realise that a huge amount of coaching is being at peace with every player's limitations. And when you have a player like Viney, who can will you over the line with his courage and aggression, I'm sure there's way more forgiveness - way more willingness to accept the bad with the good. But, in the end, I agree with your comment. Some things are hard to get out of players' games. But when it's affecting entire seasons, it's the coaches' and players' responsibility to at least work on it.

This post is from almost exactly a year ago and remains shockingly relevant, even with Kozzie spending way more time in the middle.

I know the last moments were thrilling and grotesque. From a media perspective, they are morbidly fascinating and fun to pick through. I don't really blame anyone for concentrating on them. But I desperately, DESPERATELY hope the club doesn't focus on them alone. If they think the problem with that game was communication and logistics in the final fifteen seconds - or even the final fifteen minutes - they are pathologically deluded. The reason we had eight consecutive goals kicked against us in the final quarter of a game we thoroughly dominated is infinitely more important than how the ninth consecutive goal came about. The cartoon incompetence of the last fifteen seconds is sound and fury. Ok, it doesn't signify nothing. But it shouldn't distract us from something less eye-catching but way more important: the midfield that Goodwin has unwavering faith in going to water over and over again for long periods in games when we desperately need them to break even. EDIT: I should add, when I say "going to water" it sounds like I'm saying the only problem is these four or five players and their flaws. I don't mean that. At least not that alone. I mean that the entire midfield system has been broken for a very long time and showing cracks even BEFORE 2021. Individually, these are very good players - albeit three now a long way from their best. But the sum of the parts - the how of centre bounce tactics, craft and combination, not the who - hasn't been as good as it could be for ages. The extravganza that was the second half of the 2021 Grand Final has lived too long in too many memories of people who aren't paid to be nostalgic or sentimental.

Shocked his name doesn't come up more on here. I'm not close to the club, but every single thing I ever heard about him was that he was a man of enormous integrity, respected for far more than his footy. Did he leave the club on decent terms?

When there's close to zero pressure from the midfield, there's very little even the very best defenders can do.