William

I agree with @binman. There is an undercurrent on this forum against CarolIne Wilson’s journalism that is unhealthy and obsessive. I have detected the same bias against Kellie Underwood, who may not be everyone’s cup of tea but is a pioneer and very knowledgeable. Both women have carved a path in a shockingly male-dominated sport and environment to their credit. They also expose the deficiencies of many of the male commentators and journalists in our sport.

An interesting red and blue situation has arisen in Newcastle. 'Why would we bother?' Knights coach shock as candidate w...The early withdrawal has thrown a spanner in the Knights' coach search.Basically, for those without subscriptions to the Herald, the story is that the Newcastle Knights sacked their coach recently after a series of poor performances. First resonance with MFC. Then the preferred candidate who is proving to be very successful in the UK league is being forced to undergo a ‘process’ where a series of current assistant coaches are also being interviewed. The well-performed senior coach who has the inside running has now indicated to the Knights more or less that it is insulting to make him compete against unproven assistants and that he will not consider the position. The pressure is then on the Knights to truncate the process and just announce him already. Second parallel with MFC maybe.

Yes, it is a first world problem at the top of those type. But you missed my point which was about relativities when choices are available. Irrespective of the remuneration, if a person has a choice between inner city location or Casey as their workplace, they will be biased to the inner city location, other things equal. So MFC is disadvantaged by the Casey arrangement in my view. It also doesn’t help our women’s team who are forced to play there.

His point was not about the current list. His point really bears on the mismanagement of our club by the Board. I wonder how many of DL people have tried to drive to Casey in the morning and back again in the evening or midday from anywhere towards Melbourne? I regularly drive that route to further destinations and it can sometimes take 2.5 hours just from the airport to Cranbourne. And then at the sports ground it is always windy and pretty unappealing. If a person had a choice then a club that insisted (for various reasons) on going out to that wilderness several times a week would not be chosen. MFC Board should immediately abandon Casey and move its operations back to the City while they work out a better outcome.

I have been one that wanted the senior coach to leave although I have always said it should be done in a way that preserves dignity and respect. I am not sure the way it has happened meets those requirements. I doubt it. But in any organisation where outcomes are team efforts and it is hard to individually assign productivity, the person at the top must take responsibility and that person is the senior coach in a football team. In that vein, the senior coach has overseen a trend decline over 2-4 years (it is difficult to trace the beginning of the decline) and the team is nowhere near contending. In a performance-based (win over loss) environment that is unacceptable and the top of the tree has to go. However, I also think the Board have reacted now to cover their own appalling failures. And, apropos of the quoted contribution above, the decision to part with the senior coach was probably made when the club worked out how many more members they were going to lose. And when the membership starts tanking so do the sponsors and the Board members might then get a bit uncomfortable while sipping their wines in the warm viewing areas on game day.

He is one of the most overrated ‘guns’ going round. Another SW unfortunately.

The best teams in the Newcastle (NSW) District League would be ahead of Melbourne if they were playing them today.

I E-mailed Membership yesterday as I have not received the recent E-mail Letters from the President and I wondered why. I had been receiving all game day information about ticketing for away games etc. I also indicated I will be assessing my Trident membership status at the end of the season, but that is not what this comment is about. Membership replied today (I have found the office staff are always excellent in dealing with queries) after they had investigated the reason for missing the President's communications. The answer was that I had (quote) "opted out of all marketing". That statement is true and reflects my antipathy towards relentless marketing and consumerism. However the point I am making here is that our footy club - the MFC - considers information from the President to the Membership about policy and/or performance (especially when responding to a crisis as now) to be MARKETING. That revelation set me back for a second and I think it reflects the way the senior officials see us plebs in the membership. Appalling.

I have not supported the appointment of the current senior coach since inception given his association with the Essendon scandal. As things progressed, I also didn’t consider him to be an astute tactician and was rather invariant to the dynamics of the game. He also seems to have set views on certain players irrespective of the perceived reality. I also have struggled to see evidence of the so-called ‘game plan’ that he talks about relentlessly in his learning this and learning that diatribes. I wondered whether the game plan was flawed and/or the players had not been educated sufficiently to embrace and execute it and/or the education had failed because the students did not have the capacity to absorb and implement it (even if the plan was in keeping with the ‘industry’ standards). Obviously as an outsider, we cannot easily discriminate between these different conjectures. But the last minute or so at yesterday’s game gave us some real-time evidence that suggests the players despite being well paid are really not that smart (in a football sense), which might help understand why it is hard to see the ‘game plan’ in action and why the disconnect should have been addressed by the senior coach eons ago. The two Saints protagonists displayed serious football intelligence in those few seconds while the Melbourne players looked like they were being blinded by headlights. NWM consulted the free kick taker, they worked out a strategy, there were signals to other players who understood and obeyed (and remember the Saints are a much less experienced team than MFC), and then the plan was executed to perfection. I was really impressed by their intellectual capacity to do that under pressure, not to mention their physical skills. What about MFC players? If they really were clever they would have flooded the metre in front of the 50 metre arc rather than concentrating in the centre area. What the hell was Viney doing on the wing as if it was a centre bounce? That told me that the players are not that smart in terms of understanding the dynamics and possibilities of the game. Which then suggests their poor performance over the last few years reflects a dissonance between the complexity of the game plan and the capacity of the players to comprehend it and implement it under pressure. Which means despite all the ‘love’ between coaches and players the two groups have not really connected. There has been ample evidence of that disconnect. But those last seconds yesterday helped me understand why.

I am hoping a new ticket will form for this year and the membership will finally realise that it is being scammed by these self-serving characters on the MFC board and turf them out and give a new team a chance. The status quo is destroying the club.

Dear JTR I don’t know your personal circumstances but I doubt that many members (if any) have travelled as far and as often and laid as much air flight dollars and hotel expenses as I have over many decades - year-in and year-out - to support the Demons every week. So show some respect to those who are at wits end and propose civic action to put pressure on the management who have overseen this train wreck but refuse to take responsibility.

The problem is defining what the ‘club’ actually is. No-one is saying you abandon your association with the Demons. But we are dealing with a situation where a self-serving board of insiders can’t even establish decision making leadership (they are all interim) and the senior coach is beyond redemption but no-one with authority will deal with that. Meanwhile, the membership diminishes and our credibility for future trades diminishes. That is why I am staying home again next week. We are being scammed by a few self-interested individuals that have ‘taken over’ our club who won’t take responsibility for the train wreck they have created.

As I indicated last week, I go to all the games (flying from NSW each week) but after the Carlton game and Goodwin scamming us with his press interview I decided to save the time and around $500 and stayed home. I am so pleased I made the effort to do that.

Commentator: Saints were planning their last move while Melbourne couldn’t even get their 6-6-6 right. That is on the coach.

Saints are back because their forwards can take marks and ours cannot (with exceptions). That last mark by NWM was beautiful.

JVR is putting in another doleful display in a game where the delivery to the forwards is fine and there is a lot of such delivery. He is rarely in a position to do anything effective.

This is the nub of the problem - the dysfunctional and self-serving management board. It was clear that Goodwin had run his course before he was reappointed. Part of the solution is to run an alternative ticket for the next board elections and really connect with the membership using the dissonance of this year as the momentum builder. We know there is massive dissonance because the membership numbers have fallen significantly and that fact can be expressed in significant dollars. We also have to stop the board approving dysfunctional ‘boys’ club’ contracts. For example, why was JV extended so long when it is clear he has limited capacity as the game evolves? Having said that I still favour asking the senior coach to leave (a few months ago :-)). Having him scamming us again with his weekly nonsensical commentary on our team’s failure in 2026 is going to be a step too far for even long-standing and loyal members such as myself.

No, we will approach the peak at the end of the season when we realise that the senior coach is continuing and 2026 will be worse than 2025.

On membership: I have been a long-time member and pay for the Trident’s category - so not cheap. I have been to all the games in Melbourne for years and many games in other states. I would also think that I would be one of the most travelled supporters who has laid out more than most in terms time and money to attend games given I live in NSW and fly to the games in Melbourne each week. So I don’t expect anyone would be able to doubt my commitment to the club. However, I decided today that I can’t be bothered going next Sunday to Marvel (a ground that I dislike and where my reserved seat lapses under my home and away membership). I kept going through the decades of bad years - faithfully. Someone once asked me why I kept turning up when the team loses so by so much so often. I replied: “There is an aesthetic in the struggle” - and that was my approach. I would, of course, regularly interrogate myself to wonder why supporting a team is so irrational (especially in the context of the MFC). My father supported MFC so I did - a child’s commitment. What is the adult logic in that? I have never successfully answered that question to my own liking. It is what it is, as they say. At any rate, I am done for the time being. I am sick of the nonsense that the coach pumps out in his weekly media appearances. It is frankly insulting. It is not about getting ‘value for money’. It is about not being part of a scam and the way the coach smoothly shifts between ‘learnings’, ‘it is not about winning’, ‘we are building something’, ‘the game plan is about to be understood’ and all the rest of the corporatised nonsense he gets from some management training seminars or wherever just insults the intellect of the membership. The lack of response from the senior management who seem to cosy up and enjoy the wine and food on game days but refuse to publicly take responsibility. It is ludicrous that we have an interim leadership who cannot do anything because we are waiting for the real leadership to arrive - when we are in the throes of a football season where key decisions are required and we are performing so intolerably. So I have decided to not go this weekend and save the travel time and dollars and my happiness. There is no aesthetic in being scammed by the club any longer. When October comes up, I will review my long-term membership status - currently I am doubtful I will continue if the senior coach is still there at the head of the scam.

The question for me is: are we on an improving trajectory or not? All the talk of the lag before the so-called ‘new game plan’ starts working etc can only go so far. Eventually, the team has to be evaluated for trajectory. The answer is clear: our trajectory is downwards and has been for some years. Whatever the reason, in any institution or organisation the top leadership has to take responsibility - that is why they are paid so much over the odds. There are lots of overpaid senior players as well who appear to be on a downward trajectory and others like JVR who are simply not up to the task. I saw an article this week that analysed the shift away from contested strategies at the centre to a new ‘outside’ dynamic. MFC is still trying to reinvent itself with the former and the players who excelled in the past with that strategy are not suited to the new way. I would terminate the senior coach (nicely) this morning.

Yes, the senior coach must miss seeing JVR wandering around aimless, out of position and when he accidentally gets near the ball he drops the mark. Good selection I reckon. As bad as bringing Lever in and persisting with Viney. If only Spargo came in too - then it would be near perfection (-:

I wonder what the proportions are on Demonland for Goodwin to go or stay. There is also a lot of posts about the membership falling away again, which appears to have an empirical basis. Certainly home game attendances this year so far are down from 2023 (average 40,335 compared to 48,974) or around 17.6 per cent, although, interestingly, if you had have asked me for a rough off-the-top of the head estimate based on sitting each game in the Olympic stand this year I would have predicted the fall off was greater. Demonland is a sort of echo chamber though and the threats to abandon memberships etc are hollow unless the Administration and the Board, who make the decisions actually fear there is a trend that has to be dealt with. Perhaps those who have had enough and actually want to see the coach gone and a major shakeup should ensure that message is transmitted to the decision-makers. Petition via Change.org or something like that would be the way, which would also get press coverage - in other words a grass roots uprising. But, of course, like all activist campaigns, one has to be sure before one starts that the numbers are there. Otherwise, the end result tends to be the opposite of what was intended. It goes back to proportions and what people are willing to do to exercise change. I have been reading a lot about the nouveau group in Japan in the 1960s (as an academic exercise) who wanted to overthrow the establishment and fracture the US domination of the constitutional machinery after the War. They splintered badly because despite opposing the establishment they adopted the habits of the same in their personal lives and propensities.

Well one good thing today is that the sun has come out shining in Victoria and we didn’t have to waste time going to and from the game. I predicted we would be a bottom 4 team this year and that is proving to be accurate. So the level of disappointment is not as much as it might be. Coach should resign. Planning to move various players on in one way or another should be articulated.

Sure, did you see JVR this morning? Barely up to VFL (reserves) standard much less AFL seniors. The only thing I would say is that he wouldn’t be offering his usual liability if he was playing in the seniors today because the ball has barely gone into our forward 50.

Sorry, Carlton are better, which tells us all.