Go Ds

He might end up one of the recruits of the year

Yep. It's no surprise that midfielders do so well in awards. They connect up either end of the ground , and if a team's midfield is being dominated by their counterparts it almost doesn't matter that their teammates are controlling the other zones. Such games would be played in the opposition's forward half and eventually the dam wall would break. It's very exciting to dream about what these 4 will do. If in 10 years time we're saying that 3 of them are an even better midfield than Tracc , Clarrie and Viney (and maybe the 4th is the new Langdon or Salem) then wow!

Remember that players all spend time on the bench. I guess at times he could replace players in the forward line, midfield, perhaps defence and maybe the wing.

Wouldn't any player improving significantly this year do this? Even if the improvement is just 4 more marks or kicks or clearances per game, but they still play in the same manner, this will improve the sum total of Melbourne's output/success, yes?

Indeed! Go back decades and me and others would have things we wanted to share with only close friends, if it all , even back then. No reasonable person wants to cause drama and having to deal with an angry parent , as one takes a sneaky pic, or their kids suffering needlessly later due to oversharing is not cool. I'm still amazed what people share online. It's bad enough people announcing on Facebook they'll be away next week leaving an empty house - too bad if some of their Facebook 'friends' aren't trustworthy. (Some people add complete strangers, and good luck having the police go thru 100s of friends for a lead!) wow! A few days back some random FB asked ppl to share the names of their grandparents. Many did! 🙄

Red 11 35 1 17 5 3 6 20 19 15 8 13 2( Rooey absolutely killing it) 31 37 26 21 disco( no number) 7 32 Gawn petty may bowey Tracc Salem Windsor Lindsay Langford Langdon Lever clarrie Jvr Fritsch Chandler Adams Jefferson Disco Viney Sparrow VS Mentha Petty (again?) Johnson Fullarton Verrall Sharp(too good) Spargo Johnson Campbell woewodin TMac Sestan howes Roy George Adams.... Grey 39 (forward) 35 42 33 28 30 (too good!!!) 9 42 29 40 25 38 22 Roy George 26 and someone I didn’t recognise probs Casey

Yeah, that'll 'loin' me. 🙂 BTW there's a thread on here as well as Melbourne's official website listing the numbers. It would be better just to read the names but still.

Kids are full of enthusiasm - often for sport - and it's nice to have them around. I'm not sure how a pic of silhouettes could backfire. But even for one's own kids it's best to err on the side of caution with pics and info.

Umm, T Mac was starring in the forward line as far back as 2017. Remember that winning goal he kicked in the goal square away against West Coast, at the time?

I suspect that we took the foot off the pedal against Essendon (which is not recommended). If we'd only gotten 3 goals up, with the expected scores being closer to the actual ones, our eventual winning margin may still have been the same

Yeah, one should have taken a left at Albuquerque and ended up at the Port Adelaide training session!

Seriously though coaches just have to do this PR stuff. At times they're not in the mood or its time they'd rather spend elsewhere and they soooo don't wanna say the wrong thing. But the AFL and the fans want the 'fluff'. Thankfully sometimes they do say something interesting.

Surely! If the club, players or supporters are unhappy enough the coach will have to. What's the saying about there being only two types of coaches? (Those that have been sacked and those that haven't been sacked yet.)

I'm pretty certain I saw the expected scores had Collingwood beating us by a single-figure margin. We lost to them by an actual margin again in the last game too. So I'm sure they were a better team than we were, especially the team in freefall after the first Freo game.

But how did they work them out? Melbourne had a poor pre-season and maybe that was a big reason the prediction was 5 less wins. But if Petracca hadn't been injured we quite feasibly win a couple more games, making 13 instead of 11 look like a 'meh' tip They had Hawthorn doubling thier number of wins. Maybe if their percentage was 101 among teams with much worse percentages I'd guess they had lost many close games making the prediction look reasonable. But they jumped from 80 on % in 2023 to 118.5 (which was probably 130 ignoring their first 7 or so games) And premier Collingwood going from 18 to 11.8 wins?! Why??? I can accept the Swans tip. But otherwise I want to see calculations rather than assuming these weren't flukes. The ABC article also has the effect of our player retirements in the 6 teams most weakened going into this season? How??? Brayshaw, Ben Brown and Hunter hardly played a game combined (and weren't effective in the few they did have!)

So much of what happens in one zone affects the others, especially the forward and back lines.

Sky, light, navy, cobalt or electric?

I reckon every boy dreamed of playing for his favourite team. (Probably girls now too!)

Damn! I was hoping his answers would save me a trip to a urologist! :(

This is why teams often go the long way to get to goal. When a team is one point down with a minute to go it's well worth the risk of kicking down the middle in an all-or-nothing attempt at a winning goal. Defence is always connected to attack until a goal is inevitable. There are so many times where a risky pass is not attempted in case the ball is turned over, especially when it looks like the opposition has players loose ready to achieve a good inside-50.

I can't help but think footy will keep changing and evolving. If a coach some time finds a way to restrict oppositions to under 50 that steals their team a premiership they will (and their fans will readily accept the game plan as the wins roll in). If Goody happens to be this coach in 25 and we're 15-0 midyear no one's gonna care about the previous few grand finalists. (Admittedly this is all IF IF IF) Off on a tangent for years I've heard that good defence wins premierships. Maybe sometime a coach will turn every game into a shootout confident that when the opposition kicks 17 goals that they'll kick 20, blowing the contention re defence out of the water.

For better or worse winning football is more important than exciting football. Certainly when in the finals only a few teams are left neutral supporters are more likely to choose the exciting team over the boring team as their finals team. But regardless of whether a coach's brilliant new strategy has their team kicking higher scores or conceding lower scores history's not gonna care.

The corridor entries make a lot of sense. But are there are stats for how disadvantaged the forward team is when the opposition wins back possession in the corridor compared to in the pockets? Also it's much easier to get the ball over the boundary line if the ball's contested in the pocket. If there are actual stats showing the chances are much higher for rebound goals from corridor entries then I can see why we go round the boundary.

I'd LOVE our forward line to improve. But if this year's average 'for' is 68 and the 'against' is 56 and our percentage is round 120 we could easily be a contender. The team and individual players will be looking at improving. Hopefully there won't be any passengers realising that but regardless wherever improvement surfaces surely we'll take it. (And if that's somewhere else on the ground and we still have games where we kick 11.24 or 7.7 so be it. The main thing is improvement.)

Well, yes .... Hence why we lost in 22 and 23 Not percentage. We were third in 21 and then 2nd in that stat the next 2 years. Especially by the end of 22 we were losing games and the two grand finalists had long winning streaks by then and at least Geelong were better than a knocked up Melbourne running on empty. Then in 23 we were well set for September but losing one of very best in the first few minutes of the Collingwood final plus missed shots then, and especially against Carlton put paid to that. No club can plan for players being benched the whole game. A couple more accurate kicks at goal and quite possibly we win the 23 flag. Anyway a team can improve via any of a better backline or midfield or forward line. If any section had played better in those final especially the close ones could have had winning instead. See above. If we had got a couple of trades in those years that happened to have All Australian years we would have done better despite the same forward deficiencies. Never said that Umm, every finals team would love to do this. Most don't obviously. It's probably due to everything falling into place. Maybe that includes much better accuracy for 4 weeks. But I doubt it's just suddenly the forward line connections gelling after 23 games of working on it.