The Cult of Disco Turner

Melbourne-based Swans supporters make us look like an incredibly blue collar team by comparison. They’re next level posh.

Boy, the sport gets a lot easier when you can just sprint 30 meters into the goal…

Nah I’ve lived down here for several years as my partner is from Melbourne but I try to get to a game or two at Lambeau (wearing my cheesehead, of course) when I visit family. The Packers are genuinely like a religion for Wisconsin—the roads are completely empty and some businesses even shut down during the games. If the Packers lose the entire state on Monday morning has a very similar vibe to post-loss Demonland. But one of the many, many things I love about living here and supporting the Dees is that I never have to ask myself “do you love this team enough to go sit on a concrete bench for 4 hours when it’s -20C and snowing?” (I will shut up now and we can go back to talking the Sydney game, everyone)

Yeah, my family has had Packers season tickets since the 60s and Brett Favre has been an [censored] for years but the CTE is certainly making it worse. My non-evidence based take as someone who grew up around and played American football as a lineman is that the hard helmets can and often do make things worse via a false sense of security and the brutal impact that one hard helmet has when it hits another. Some players in the NFL have started wearing an additional soft “guardian cap” on top of the helmet which looks an awful lot like the soft helmets used in AFL and NRL. The NFL, of course, does not really care about player safety and has been working to protect itself from these lawsuits for years. But at the same time, there is only so much you can do in a sport where the objective is to repeatedly line up and crash into each other at full speed.

Has been the same story for us a number of times—gotta take advantage of your chances. 17 behinds is brutal. But at the same time…frees being 26-12 is just appalling. And I reckon if you look at where/when those frees were paid it was just as appalling.

I’m here to complain about the umps.

Yeah I think you’re right that the winning is definitely the lion’s share of it—you win a few and suddenly the vultures start looking elsewhere. And I could absolutely be full of [censored] with the rest of it…maybe I’m just so excited to have good vibes back that I am giving a bit too much credit. But at the very least there’s finally been some positive momentum recently both on and off the field and we haven’t ruined it with unforced errors which, given all the nonsense off the field in recent years, feels like a Herculean accomplishment worthy of some praise.

From a PR/media standpoint it feels like we are on the front foot for the first time in a long time. I’ve been frustrated with the club for some time over this as some of their behaviour in the recent past has been flat out weird and not at all best practices. At some level PR is made easier through winning, but also: -Goody has done a really good job steadying the ship in recent pressers and media appearances by providing a good level of transparency into what’s happening while also ensuring they keep closed ranks. -We seem to be sending a clear message that we won’t be screwed with by teams like Freo anymore by floating our own rumours right back at them (come on back Luke). -We’ve actively got our players beyond Max doing relatively polished appearances—Trac’s presser, Koz’s interview with his dad, Langford’s appearance on Demonland pod and XL on the other podcast. There seems to be a really authentic love of the club conveyed in many of these appearances too. It’s not all perfect and we will never be a media juggernaut club who can keep themselves out of the spotlight regardless of the size or scope of a scandal, but this is a helluva lot better than the silence or the “nothing to see here!” we got when everything was so chaotic late last year. Kudos to the PR/Media staff.

I have no idea how we’ll go in the actual game but I am desperately hoping the “mature age bullocking psycho” gets a chance to stay in the side and give our regards to that blockheaded goon Maynard in a few weeks.

WELL WELL WELL

This is gonna hurt so [censored] bad.

I started posting fairly recently but for the last several days I have been debating just deleting my account. I joined and started posted because I thought having this community was very cool and talking Dees is great fun—especially for someone like me who doesn’t have many other Dees supporters to talk to in their life. But Ghostwriter is right—I’ve come to really hate the constant negativity—especially when directed at people trying to be positive or at least not so cynical. I get that we’re not winning and that’s unpleasant for all of us, but that’s not why I don’t want to engage anymore—in fact, losing kind of makes me want to engage/discuss with the community even more. I still love the training reports from Ghostwriter and others and love the actual analysis from Adam the God, Binman and several others. But the number of people who come here to be angry and incessantly negative and shout down anyone who doesn’t feel the same way is pretty unpleasant. When I come here I often leave feeling wayyy more negative about the MFC and that’s a weird feeling to get when talking to folks who are supposed to love this club.

Goody said he thought Clarry did an outstanding job… Haven’t you also been hypercritical of Clarry many many times for months? Now he’s suddenly back to being so incredible that he can’t tag in one game?

it being a development year yet there being no such thing as an honourable loss in your eyes is kind of contradictory, no? Development often requires losing in order to learn and grow. This loss—in which we were the better side for the majority of the game despite the umpiring—against a side who I think is top 6 and won’t last long in finals but MAYBE could be top 4 is far better than the early season losses. There’s clear growth, progress, and learning. For a team that’s developing and not competing to win a grand final this year, that’s absolutely an honourable way to lose.

Kade Chandler, Jake Bowey, Daniel Turner, Harrison Petty. Langford and Lindsay already developing remarkably well in year one. In terms of who still gets categorised as being a good young player we are developing even if not so far better than last year—Windsor, McVee, Rivers.

Look I don’t mean to sound flippant but can you explain to me what your expectations are for this team this season? I genuinely cannot figure it out. I feel like I’ve seen you say many times that we don’t have the list to make a run this year. But then you and so many others still seem enraged when we don’t win and there are shortcomings on our list. So is it not better to be pleased by the fact that we played better than a likely top 6 (maybe 4) team for much of the game and, with better umpiring, likely would’ve been up by quite a bit coming into the 4th? I don’t expect to win a premiership this year. I expect us to play fairly well in spurts. And we did that today.

Nobody knows more about having bad takes than you so I’m genuinely honoured that you’ve finally passed on the title to me 😢—thanks chief. I’d like to take this opportunity to also thank myself for seeing the many many positives in our game instead of being a bitter angry poster who shows up on this forum solely to week after week say our team and half the players on it suck.

We absolutely were the better team. But you are right that the key forwards are a problem. We dominated for 3 quarters in nearly every aspect of the game except once we had to do something with it inside 50.

I know we weren’t accurate but I genuinely think if you pull together all the outcomes that were changed by absolutely shocking umpiring, we win that game. Or at the very most we lose by a goal. We were the better team today. They’ll finish 6th and go out in the first round of finals.

Lost when the gambling industry got its hooks into the sport.

I agree our goalkicking was atrocious and we were generally sloppy but with better umpiring we’re up by 2+ goals at half and we are absolutely not tied at 3q time.

I left. Couldn’t keep my temper. No point in staying to watch the umps hand them the game over and over.

Look we haven’t been accurate kicking for goal but at this point the umpires are genuinely keeping them in it

It won’t be because it happened to us and not a popular club, but that blatant trip with umpires standing right there watching should be all over the footy shows and media this week to show how horrific the umpiring continues to be.

He’s got an all time case of napoleon syndrome.