Go Ds

He's had over two years at another club so why are you blaming our football department?!

So one team has 7 games at the G vs 9th, 11th, 12th, 14th, , 16th, 17th and 18th And another (also Melbourne -based) plays 9th in Perth and 10th in Adelaide as well as 1st, 2nd, 5th,6th and 8th That ain't fair. But it is plausible.

And if a team is 23-0 and lose the GF to 4th or 5th who finished the H&A season 14-9 is that a mockery too? What about the Bulldogs in 2016? Were there loud roars of laughter for months after? I think the majority of people were thrilled both that a side came from 7th and broke along premiership drought. Did people think Hawthorn were the better side that year, even though they were bundled out in straight sets? And I don't need to mention our two horror final seasons in 22-23. It's always been the case that you need to be good in the minor season but great in the finals. As per my above comment/scenario I have described a great finals series performance. You seem to be stuck on the 10th placing or the fact that that team won only half their games. Of course teams don't deliberately slack off and only aim at 10th, and it's very likely that bad luck has cruelled such a team's season until the final mont anyway. I wouldn't want a team say from 14th or 16th to win the whole thing. I just don't think tenth (winning the flag) is that embarrassing especially given bad, unlucky and unfair fixturing. I think such an amazing five weeks by a team deserves huge praise rather than scoffs (especially if they were a gun team who were having a nightmare season.) Anyway this isnt a big deal. I too doubt a team can win from 10th. But funnily enough sport does stuff where new records are broken, even after we had written off such feats as possible. (And gee, given the expectations of Melbourne this year .... And many decades of mainly frustration, it'd be so hilarious and so satisfying if we somehow scrape into tenth and do the impossible this year, and even win that Grand final at the MCG we've all hoped would just happen after Perth. 😂)

Wow! So you only do things that are "in fashion"? Oh, please! Youd be the most boring person on the planet if you're only doing really common things constantly. By the way afternoon television on free to air is awash with quiz shows. I'm pretty sure a huge number of pubs still have weekly trivia nights and I'd be surprised if there's not still a page with quizzes in the newspapers. I have no idea how quizzes rank on popularity scales. But seriously, Mr Vanilla, if you're not interested in something just jog on!

Roys? Dunstall kicking a couple of late goals meant Melbourne jumped Geelong....

So if , say, St Kilda are 5-6 this season and then beat 7th interstate, come back and beat 5th at the MCG, then beat 4th also interstate and then complete this five weeks stretch by beating first and second would you not suddenly think St Kilda might actually be the real deal? How about if instead this hypothetical team was Hawthorn? I don't know about you but I think a side beating five top eight sides in five weeks including the top two and including two interstate trips has as good as announced themselves. Now the thing is if instead of happening midyear a team did this in September, without that extra bye their opponents got, and always playing sudden death games and not once playing a team that, unlike mid year almost could have considered that matchup a dead rubber, now shouldn't be primed snd ready and have so much more at stake especially on grand final day - surely these five high-pressure victories would be incredibly impressive. I think any side winning against five of the best teams all in five weeks is almost guaranteed to be a deserving Premier. I certainly wouldn't want wildcards to be 14th or 16th on the later and I don't particularly love the idea of a team getting a wild card entry with 10 wins and 13 losses (thus I'm not incredibly eager about wildcards being added). But overall I can't see how the most impressive finals campaign ever should be scoffed at if tenth somehow beat every one and win the grand final. Short of almost all of the final eight teams copping horrendous injuries late in the season or having incredibly -Guinness book of records level -unlucky finals I really don't think it would be a mockery.

Agree with your first two paragraphs. We did go above and beyond in 18 and 21.

ESPECIALLY 1987. It so much fun following Melbourne in that last five or six weeks of that season culminating in somehow dad taking us the other side of town to see Melbourne beat the Bulldogs at their home. I was just thrilled to be sitting at the MCG and actually be watching our boys run out onto the field in an official final. But f*****g hell! Maybe I exaggerate but Todd Viney, who couldn't kick to save himself, kics an impressive goal probably in the first 25 seconds. The remaining 119 minutes almost felt like Melbourne were the Harlem Globetrotters for the day. To win a final by 118 points suddenly for the first time ever maybe, just maybe, our side really were the genuine deal!

@Macca 11 hours ago, Macca said: We were surprised finalists in '87, '98, '04, '18 (?) & '21 (?) . I reckon in exact order the latest was the most likely going all the way back to the least likely in 87. Have people forgotten how incredibly close we were to making finals in 2017 and 2020?! Seriously! We started 2020 in Perth away against West coast and played an hour after it was announced that the season was off indefinitely and perhaps would be cancelled. Then almost 3 months later we come back establish a five goal half time lead against Carlton and hold on for a point win. Instead of playing Essendon the week after we got a bye at the worst possible moment. We play Geelong the week after who incidentally had just lost to Carlton and here we were I'm sure wanting to resolve the fade out the previous game playing TWO WEEKS LATER against an eventual grand finalist who had just had two games compared to our one (twice as many) after the enforced three-month break. When eventually we needed a bye ,guess what, we were totally cooked. Remember those 5 or 6 days up in Cairns? If we just come off a bye I reckon we have one or two wins against those two lowly sides that embarrassed us. Instead we see Collingwood and Bulldogs just scrape ahead of us, even after a controversial decision to decided that bont had kicked a goal rather than a point against WC to give them an extra four premiership points. I was never going to bet my life-savings we would make the finals in 2021 but certainly I was more than quietly confident.

I dunno. But he was the guy who screamed out Eureka after he worked out how to measure the density of gold when he was in the bath. Maybe he'd find what is golden among our team and what is hollow .

I think the consensus is that it's hollow that a team in the bottom half of the ladder could still gets a final or two. Of course 9th and 10th will love it each year. I'm not sure that the goals change that much. Already teams that come 8th, maybe 5 wins behind the minor Premier, probably don't genuinely expect to win the flag. But it was and it was still be that every team knows that if they are very good in September say like Bulldogs back in 2016 then maybe a miracle can happen. Geez it'd be hilarious if if everything falls into place with King etc and we win ,say, six of our last seven games , scrape into 10th and some how from there win those five games and ,same as Bulldogs , do something people probably never thought could happen. 😂 We saw Hawthorn a year and a bit ago go from also-rans to arguably the third best team and of course our Dees did similar in 1987. It really would be possible that aside that got back players from injury and/or finally found its mojo in August , has a bit of luck in September, and if especially the training program or style of play or uninjured best 24 has them running rings around their opponents who knows maybe this would feel like the year in World War I where with only 4 teams the wooden Spooner also won the flag.

Don't forget Tracc only played half of 2024 and still almost kicked as many goals as he did in 2025. Apparently he dropped from 1.08 goals per game in 24 to 0.78 last year.

...and wasn't actually me who said this. 😂

Archimedes was taken.

It's so hard to know. And sorry for going over old ground here. But the article does discuss other teams too.

Each year Foxtel pick improvers and decliners based on the previous season's close results. Theyre reasonably good predictions normally and in a nutshell they're tipping Melbourne to go from really average to average. Fox SportsMoneyball theory reveals AFL teams to rise, fall this yea...Brutally unlucky team set to rise; warning signs finals duo will dip — AFL ladder verdictImprove This tip is a bit harder to defend because Pythagoras doesn’t know they traded out two million-dollar (former?) superstar midfielders. Christian Petracca was pretty good last year, and Clayton Oliver was fine, but their Demons got brutally unlucky in a series of close games. The overall record of 2-6 doesn’t sound historically bad, but did you actually see the games? Remember the two Collingwood losses, both King’s Birthday and the final-round collapse? Remember Lachie Keeffe, of all people, kicking the winner for GWS? Heck, remember The Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera Game, aka the greatest comeback from a three-quarter-time deficit in V/AFL history? The Demons were a properly bad team at the start of the season, but after their 0-5 start when Simon Goodwin and his coaching staff made some tweaks, they were simply average. They lost just three games by more than 20 points, and had some very solid wins including knocking off Brisbane in Brisbane. Now, how much does the fact that they were an OK team by the end of the season matter when you’re projecting forward? Well, that’s the impossible question to answer… but it feels unlikely losing Petracca and Oliver is going to make them immediately better. Just remember when you’re doing your predicted ladder that they weren’t what their record says they were; they’re not a seven-win team that’s getting worse, they’re a nine or 10-win team that’s likely taking another step backwards in their first year under a new coach."

Honestly I think there are still billions of good people out there. Admittedly some have been blinded by ambition, fear or frustration. And sometimes people lose perspective say by down playing the loss of a colleague or a pet. But overall people are good. I must admit I am reminded of the same era too. My second cousin inexplicably ran into traffic on Nepean highway on Grand final day 2001. Despite the church being full of 14-year-old classmates and the rest of us who were also as shocked with someone so young so suddenly dying the pastor went off on a tangent about the recent 9 11 attacks. It was really inappropriate. I can't do anything about my mother. She had a challenging but good life while I'm still upset I know she'd want me to be happy and move on from my grief. I reckon a lot of people born in Australia in the 1930s and 40s had incredibly good , lucky lives. Any way back to the footy.....

Was the numberplate Theo X? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 (The story was some Melbourne staffer didnt realise Schwarz's plate said The Ox.)

Very true. But if someone is getting 20% on their maths tests and then a tutor helps them get a 48% it's still a fail but nonetheless it's encouraging. Even better analogy ... Melbourne may never have been as bad as they were in 2013. While we were below average in 2014-5 I was happy with the progress that Roos helped bring. I still don't know what a pass mark is for this year. But 11th might be tolerable - especially in hindsight if next year or the year after that shows that amazing change was happening right now.

Big assumptions there! At some stage some club will 'crack the code' and find some new tactic that gets them a flag or two they otherwise wouldn't. No reason why this will be King's Melbourne. But I'd rather they try something new and it's away from other teams' spies. It might even mean they end up storming home and come 11th ..... better than 3 open sessions a week and 15th.

Some seasons I'm more excited to see where we're at. This is certainly one of them. It is a little weird because usually those seasons are where the general public think we might jump up to the final eight or final four. There's always people that have it worse off or have worse luck. Obviously your friend had it worse than you and her close loved ones also would have suffered more. That said you'd have every right to feel upset as well. Even the little things such as enjoying the rides to and from work accompanied , and getting one's work annoyances and problems out into the ether and halving them would be missed. It can also feel weird looking back in hindsight. My mum died just before Christmas. It wouldn't surprise me if it was only a few weeks earlier we had casually been discussing the less painful ways to die , including whether someone could die of a heart attack in their sleep and never know what hit them. She died of a heart attack on her couch; it's possible she just fell asleep and, like we theorized, perhaps she never woke up. (Of course she was 88 so there aren't really any complaints apart from her demise being so sudden.) Anyway life goes on; hopefully there'll be extra joy this season.

The consensus is that Carlton will also be well outside the 8. I'm excited about this year ( even though I know it could easily a third season of "what happened, 'recent' premiers?"). But a lot of what Melbourne, Carlton etc do in these clips is the equivalent of a slide night rather than proof of what's to come. BTW sorry to hear about your friend. That would have been terrible.

Honestly who knows? We didn't see blatantly poor mistakes. But that could even be the editing.

Yes, further what I was saying about taking into account "market accepted price" and factoring in other teams bids and potential bids , I bet there are times where a team has taken a player almost solely so the next team could not get him. I mean it wouldn't be every time but if a team's kind of like " we could use a new ruckman some time " they may pick someone two years prematurely solely because they know the next team in the draft list would have been the perfect fit for that player. I don't know I suspect there is a bit of that kind of foul play in drafts. Especially now we're really seeing this with father and son s elections and teams having to decide whether they will bid on another club's potential father son and know that if the other team declines they don't want to be stuck with someone they paid way over on. Obviously the same thing too with people from interstate.

The House Of Pain in effect, y'all I say the House Of Pain is in effect You know the House Of Pain is in effect y'all And anyone that steps up in gettin' wrecked