Its Time Again

Eagles look like they are finally going to have to face the fact they need to start a rebuild. Gaff is 29, a bit outside the rebuild window but 3 years younger than Isaac Smith who we offered a 3 year deal. Gaff looks like a better proposition than Smith would have been. Worth a question I would have thought. At his age he won't demand a super high pick. AVB was on a lot of money after we fought off Sydney going hard for him a few years ago. That money and a few other departures like Jonesy and Nev might mean the salary cap is there for him. I wouldnt' think it would need to be silly money like what Carlton have been paying role players.

The thing that's got me the most about him is the warp speed improvement week on week. When he was drafted he was said to be a project player who hadn't played much footy but showed rapid improvement. I thought he looked like one of those players who are picked for their athletic potential even though they don't have a footy brain. His game awareness has turned out to be absolutely elite. His ability at 19yrs to already compete physically in the ruck against mature bodies is a shock. He's put on 10kg's just since last season. 91kg to 101kg.

People were shocked he went that high in the draft. They could have had Serong and others. He was picked for his elite running and elite skills. Unfortunately so far has played on the wing and really struggled to get in to games. Easily knocked off the ball. Not a strong competitor. In theory exactly what we need on the wing, in practice a bust so far. To be fair the wing is an incredibly hard position to get on top of as we've seen from a few of our boys put out there so he may come good over time. There were rumours Jordan Dawson might have wanted to go home. He's an absolute jet.I was super excited about that if we could get him until my son told me home is SA not Vic and it looks like he's about to resign. Alas.

Did anyone hear from the Club yet about ticketing? it’s a sad day for me. Had flights booked flying out tomorrow from Sydney to spend time with family over there and see another Dees win. Alas can’t even go down the road up here for the foreseeable future. Trying to work out how I can get out somewhere in September and quarantine to get to the Premiership. Surely that bloke Dan Andrews would get that wouldn’t he

Exactly. I can't believe the State Govt would call a press conference to make this announcement if there was a risk that MFC would be moving elsewhere very shortly. This was a State Govt announcement it's not an announcement MFC had control over. All you Pert haters like @Mach5 etc, what would you be saying if the State Govt made this announcement and Pert and the Club said nothing. Unlike most other clubs we don't even have the land for this so we're dealing with multiple Govt bodies try to get public land as well as the facilities. Yeh it's frustrating it's not sorted yet but come on take a bit of what @daisycutter is having and treat it as a glass half full progression.

LH can you imagine the State Govt making this announcement and MFC announcing shortly after we won't be using Gosch's because we couldn't reach an agreement with Govt on facilities and are forced to go elsewhere.

We've been mainly training at Casey this year anyway.

Thanks for this @Lace Out. Is there any chance you could overlay the measurements of the new dimensions to see how they are going to fit it. Looks like a lot of trees are going to have to be replaced. A surprising political commitment by the Govt given how controversial cutting down trees is even if they are replaced.

So by the sounds of it we are going to end up with everything we wanted, virtually MCG sized ground, state of the art training facilities, Admin and FD combined in the one place. Function facilities for a Social Club and events. All in the MCG precinct. Only issue is it's not what we expected if we were hoping for a permanent MFC owned stand alone facility. In the short term we don't have the cost of building our own standalone facility in the long term we don't have our own standalone facility. Will be really interested to see what the deal ends up being are we just long term tenants like we are now or will they negotiate some sort of long term security to be there which isn't an exorbitant rent. From memory the whole club was going to be in AAMI but the rent was so exorbitant we had to split the Admin to the MCG where the MCC looked after us on rent.

I'm guessing Club's request to recover the $800k we lost when the Alice game was cancelled.

These are great ideas. You should email the Club. Seems very fair to say MCC members who have had paid up memberships of their AFL club for 10 years have priority in the ballot. But unfortunately the ballot is run at the beginning of the finals not GF week. But that's what they should do.

Met Ray Biffin a few times. His father Leo worked for my father. I used to go hang with him at work when I was a little tacker. If you asked Leo I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have thought he was hanging with me. Anyhow.... He used to slip me an old redundant MFC training ball every now and then. Met the great Ronald Dale at his pub once through a mutual friend. Had a long chat. Told him he was the reason I supported the club watching him on the Happy Hammond show when he did the Western Star footy clinic every Saturday when I was the only person awake in our household. He had a laugh and was delightful. Couldn't believe what his fingers were like. The knuckles were so swollen from being bent back and broken by balls that the knuckles met a long way out from the fingers. Met Robbie at the old MSD sports store where he worked at the end of 1980 . I went in to buy something and there he was on his own no one else around. We had a long chat. He was quite candid in saying he loved Carl Ditterich as his coach and didn't know why they had replaced him with Barrass. It was before Barrass started. LIke Binman and others he was my idle. No. 2 is still my favourite number. I got tennis lessons from Todd Viney for a while at the Junction Oval. Without a doubt the best tennis coach I ever had. He was still playing and it was a bonus to sneak in a few footy questions during lessons. I met a bunch of the players at the 2011 B & F. My son was about 12 and playing footy. He was a nightmare at getting to eat vegetables so I went around the room and got a bunch of the players to say into my phone Charlie eat your broccoli if you want to be a great player. Jack Watts was particularly great saying Charlie I hear you're like me a skinny, tall, CHF. Take it from me you gotta munch on that broccoli if you want to become a great player. Liam Jurrah was hysterical. He didn't know what the hell I was talking about but did it anyway with a great grin on his face. Got a few others as well. Had a great chat to Aaron Davey with a group of other supporters and he was saying he thought Bailey was trying to get them to execute a game plan they couldn't execute. I believe it was the two way running it's only taken them 10 years to finally master.

As I understand it Selwyn Griffiths was the fitness and conditioning guru at Lions who was credited for a lot of their build up the ladder fitness wise. We poached him end of last season and he's being mentored by Burgess this year. He sounds like he's in the mix amongst the best with Burgess, and Russell at Blues. Here's hoping.

Where did you get this totl from. Its not on the website

Hard to believe he's only 19. Looks like he has a fully developed mature body already and has great game and aerial judgement. Only knock I can see at this stage is possibly a lack of pace but it's obviously a very small sample at this point. Looked right at home immediately. Other than pace he looks a more complete footballing package than Smith.

The official MCG measurements are 160 x 141. Is the distance between the boundary and the fence 7metre. That seems like too much.

What happened to the article?

The interesting thing about upgrading Gosch's to MCG size is why would this be announced in a few weeks with State Govt funding which has already been announced if there's an immediate chance that MFC will have to move elsewhere if they fail to reach agreement to build the facilities there. It seems to me to be a very solid indication that the facilities will ultimately happen around the Goschs precinct.

And so it begins. "There have been rumours swirling recently that Melbourne’s Luke Jackson is homesick and misses family and friends in Perth. These have been flatly denied and the Demons are not concerned about losing him any time soon given he’s contracted until the end of 2022," Has anyone on DL heard these rumours. First I've heard of it. Always the worry drafting young Western Australians but he's coming into a very different environment than the one Jesse Hogan came into when he was only a 17yr old. So hopefully a very different scenario with hopefully a very different individual, who also has his best mate, Rivers, here playing with him. Always a bit of a worry when a young player doesn't sign a longer term extension than just one year. We'll now be on the merry go round with him until we get a more meaningful extension than the repeat 2 year ones that Hogan would only make.

We're back row Ladies Stand.

I was having a lend. GWS makes sense. What a huge benefit to the Club it would be if that happened.

I really hope they do this. Ideally it would be the Cats game. That GMBH Stadium is a seething sess pool of Covid. Can't have the game there under any circumstances. Just please don't transfer any of them to Cairns.

Got Mrs IT coming again with me and the boy. And bringing a couple of friends. Went out and bought everyone fresh MND beanies from my local Bunnings up here. Very surprised I could do that up here. Impressive. No one up here would have a clue what they are. This has been the worst 10 days financially in the Clubs history. $1.8mill lost just like that. Seem so absurd not to have allowed QB to go ahead. Thrilled to get to see it up here but appreciate the terrible cost to the Club. Have tickets booked to come down and see the Dons game. Hope it's on. That would unexpectedly make 3 in a row. One of the bigger seasons I've had adding on to the Saints game earlier in the year. How things have changed. I went to that 2nd rounder with a couple of mates and all of us expecting it to be a loss because they were top 4 bound and we would be scrapping to make 8th. Perspective is just a bit different now especially after Friday.

OK. I didn't realise there were separate soccer and rugby fields there. My theory would have worked if the soccer team was leaving and you just had the two rugby teams who could both play on the one field which could be put at the existing Goschs paddock. I guess they're not going to put different sports lines on the one training field like we all grew up dealing with. Red lines for soccer, white for rugby or whatever. That would solve it.