george_on_the_outer

I also didn't get the email. I contacted the club and they have confirmed it wasn't sent to me at least, but they said it was a problem at the AFL end....either software or email lists..... At least they are looking at it. Thank goodness for Demonland

The other thing this shows is how much the MCC is ripping out of AFL at each game. No fans so the only income is from ground advertising. How much do the clubs get normally? I seem to recall hearing plenty of times we needed 20-25K to break even from an MCG home match....how is it with zero attendees that they can give us $150-200K?

Channel 9 News has Ross Lyon commentating on why Harley is looking so good...." one word..Darren Burgess" https://wwos.nine.com.au/afl/ross-lyon-confident-about-harley-bennell-melbourne-demons-return/3800b7de-c3bd-4c3c-a86b-91ead1f12a72

Unfortunately this "argument" comes up every time someone "discovers" it. Roy Morgan do surveys...So when they survey anyone in NSW about what club they support in the AFL, the answer is the first NSW based club they can think of. The fact that they have zero interest in AFL is irrelevant to the question. So the Sydney Swans is the most supported club in the land? Complete rubbish. It is a measure of the number of responses RM got in NSW in their sample. How many supporters do they think Sydney have in W.A. or S.A for example? According to RM 1 in 25 people in the whole country support the Swans, simply because they extrapolate the NSW survey numbers to the whole country. It looks good for the AFL when negotiating broadcast deals but the only true measure is the number of memberships taken out.

All you people who have admitted to watching NRL need to take yourself off to BBO's manor for a jolly good flogging!!

Let's get this back on track... The club had a poker machine venue at Leighoak, that has been sold. The club retains the Bentleigh club machines until 2022 ( I think). In the current circumstances, neither is producing any revenue for us or the new owners. At least the club has the proceeds from the sale of Leighoak "in the bank". All clubs have the same problem. In the interview Pert and Bartlett talk about the loss of 6-10 $M . In the Age today, St.Kilda ( who have poker machines) are expecting an increase in their debt by $8M to about $20M, as a similar example. Pert and Bartlett emphasise this is because of the loss of gate receipts, sponsorship, AFL distributions and membership. What can be done about it? not much!. In the short term perhaps...membership. 13K members from last year haven't re-signed. That is why they are asking those people to come on board again, even if it is only an armchair type membership. But membership is only a minor matter and revenue raiser, the other losses are more concerning. Even if all 13K signed up it would only add $1-2M to the bottom line. A sponsor can put in that much alone. AFL distributions contribute 10 times as much. Gate receipts will be non-existent for everyone this year. The sponsors are in their own financial downturn. Hertz has already filed for Chapter 11 in the USA. With a non-existent tourism market in this country, something similar can be expected here, and these types of companies have got better things to do with their money now and in the near future, than advertising through football clubs. Sponsorship will be the on-going concern as it is dependant upon the well-being of the economy, and we should all remember what happened around our sponsorships post GFC. It cost about $1M per month to run an AFL club. The club has already "trimmed its cloth" and like most AFL clubs will be in "AFL assistance" during this period. Probably 12-14 of the 18 clubs will be in the same boat. This only means we can borrow from the AFL, but only if the club complies with certain guidelines. If you borrow from the bank, they would be expecting something similar. At least the AFL has an interest in the club surviving and it will be interesting to know if the AFL are charging interest....

Perfectly implementable ( if that is a word) ....just get decent umpires!

https://www.melbournefc.com.au/video/700087/training-vision-match-simulation?videoId=700087&modal=true&type=video&publishFrom=1590559223001 Vanders and Bennell......yes!!

The club did when they first moved there, and it was one of the reasons that they did. At the time I was told that 5000 families were moving into Casey every year. With the average family having 2 kids, than meant 10,000 kids each and every year. This is a nightmare for schools i.e. building them to accommodate such a big influx every year...you probably need new primary school and 1 new high school every year while that rate of population increase is happening. And that is why the Club was running "Read like a Demon" and various school programmes. Get the kids interested before the age of 10. Get them barracking for the local club...now named the Casey Demons....all that is needed is some success to truly lock them in.

Double Holy Moley!!......Greg Stafford is 203 and Jackson is half a body above him!!

Unfortunately " turning a dollar" does not equate to making a profit. And as I said the club did a business case evaluation on this years ago, and the answer came up negative. While we have heaps of memorabilia etc, a good part of it is to be seen in the Admin section in AAMI where we have the 12 Premiership cups displayed. Yes I agree we would all like to see it.....but that is a museum, not a social club. No other club has a "social club" today unless it is co-sited with a poker machine venue. Given that we are dumping that option, we should not be investing in a venue that would only be used for 20 days or so out of 365 each year. Social clubs have gone the way of the dodo.

Exactly. The MFC declined the offer to run the cafe in AAMI park when we first moved in because it was uneconomic. No passing traffic no nearby housing or offices. Nothing has changed. Social clubs are a complete and utter relic of the 1950's. It came from an age when there was little contact between people with a common interest. Like the cafe, it would be empty for 99% of the time available. The club needs to spend its money on FOOTBALL not superfluous white elephants.

It is impossible to know what is happening on the ground, when watching it only on television. However, our observations are consistent about what happened in the WCE game. Barass/ Hurn/ McGovern are able to play off their man because we are playing our "loose" man up the field, and around the ball i.e they are playing a form of the old 1 man extra in defence. And like all teams they play a zone defence, but very, very well. The closest defender comes off their man after the ball has been kicked to intercept. Trouble is on TV all you see is one of these 3 marking the ball seemingly all on their own. We didn't go into the match with 3 talls up forward, but they had 3 tall defenders, who have perfected the zone defence perfectly. Then to make it even worse Tom Mc gets taken into the ruck for the 5 or 10 minutes each quarter to give Max a break, and our tall forward consisted of ..Brown! ( who couldn't catch anything that day, despite the ball being given to him on plenty of occasions) . With only him to worry about, that left WCE's 2 other tall defenders on ...Fritsch or Melksham... Richmond play Lynch and Reiwoldt but they also use Soldo and Nankervis in the ruck. No robbing Peter to pay Paul. WCE in this game had Darling and Kennedy, but had Natanui and Hickey in the ruck. Same deal. The trade off the coaching staff are making is about getting more possession around the ball. But at the moment, the downside is while the ball goes inside the forward 50 more often, because of those possessions, we haven't got the right sized people to kick it to, or even to bring it to ground.

Clint's father John was given life membership of the club in 2018 in recognition of his services as Head Trainer: https://www.melbournefc.com.au/news/267958/agm-head-trainer-receives-honour

There has been much conversation on Demonland about this matter before, the possible sites and the impossible sites. I am afraid that after 160 years as a club, 30 plus years since divorcing from the MCC, that we still do not have something of an AFL standard to train on, or a place for our administrative and coaching staff. We share our facility at AAMI park with 2 Rugby codes and a soccer team. No other AFL side is in this position. The current Board has been in power for 5 years, and I have been hearing proposals to fix this problem for the past 30 at AGM's. They claim to be looking at options in the "MCG precinct". The Board wasted a lot of time and effort with a proposal for Yarra park that was never going to fly because of residents, Railways, trees, parking and a slope that would have required pyramidal type earthmoving. I fear the option they are favouring is in the Gosch's paddock area and unless major alterations can be made to the ground or that the other tenants can be "encouraged" to move, then we will finish up with something 2nd rate. Compare the size of Gosch's ( particularly how narrow) with the Collingwood ground at Olympic park or the MCG itself. To widen it requires tree removal. The area currently occupied by soccer fields and the rugby pitch alongside Olympic Bvde would provide a proper sized ground, but can we convince them to move or swap? Can we fit in an an admin building, indoor gym and weights room in the remaining area....maybe in the car park, but where do the cars go? We still wouldn't control the upkeep of the ground as this lies with the Olympic Park trust. I want to see something which will last the club for the next 50-100 years, not something that we have to re-visit in 10 because we have fallen behind again. We need space, and to me it isn't available in "the MCG precinct"

At the moment there is no VFL and no practice matches

Until the match committee select at least 2 tall forwards and not use one of them as a stand in ruck, we will struggle to kick goals. As was proven in the WCE game.

Hard to believe anything both of those have to say. Moorabbin to Seaford....really. Didn't seem to worry Hawthorn who moved from Glenferrie to Waverley and are now heading to Dingley.

It was interesting listening to the players comments at the Casey training sessions in the past couple of days. To paraphrase " good to be at Casey because it is close in size to the MCG, so we can practice using the space" ( unlike Gosch's).

Yes, that is correct. None of the existing committee would stand aside, to simply let Norm join, so it went to an election. 4 of the committee ran tickets that placed Norm last on their how-to-vote cards to protect their own positions!! Norm finished 9th in a contest for the 8 roles, nearly 100 votes behind no. 8. That was the final insult. Peter Smith, his son, who was playing for the Demons at the time, left to go to Carlton as he also wanted nothing to do with the club any more. In " The Red Fox" he recalled"....But I suspect those blokes were thinking more about their own positions than what was good for the club. They were also thinking that Dad would shake them up a bit too much....Maybe some of them felt it would have been a bit too much for them to handle"

Having been following the MFC for a long, long time and wishing to make all the arguments raised so far into something concise...what I have seen for myself and have read about in the various histories of the Club, is that the common factor which has caused our demise is: Lack of Resources, and/or the willingness to apply resources to winning football matches. In "The Red Fox" there are multiple stories of the arguments that Smith had with the committee, long before his sacking in 1965. All of them were about resources. Other clubs were recruiting players and paying them good money, like Polly Farmer, Darryl Baldock etc, but the MCC committee refused to participate in this. Even before this we had the stories of Fanning and others who left at the height of their careers, simply because they could earn a living playing football in country leagues. In 1964 the days of the amateur player were as good as over. Even Barassi was offered 3,000 pounds and a 10,000 pound loan to join Carlton, which he said was something he would not have got at Melbourne. But the MCC committee still continued to stick its head in the sand, about what was happening. Until Barassi returned and made an ultimately futile attempt to turn the club into a professional operation, by removing it from the MCC, the Club was simply bled dry of talent or watched that talent disappear to other clubs. Zones that we had were not developed. Recruiting and more importantly, development was not done in those zones. They were just left to their own devices, while the MCC concentrated on what it was formed for...cricket. Contrast that with the work that Hawthorn and Richmond were doing in their zones. A friend of mine who worked as a teacher in the Eastern suburbs in the 80's said that any school that asked for a Hawthorn player to turn up to meet with the kids, kick a footy, were always obliged. Small wonder their supporter base grew over the subsequent periods. The MFC was banned from training at the MCG from 1985, so off to the Junction oval we were sent....to stay for the next 25 years! How much was spent by the MCC on facilities there....so little that the MFC Coterie group had to chip in to get a portable for the coaches to have a room to work in. Then the footballers were tossed out during cricket season in any case as it was still used to play games. It was a miracle that we had any success during this period! Other clubs were establishing proper facilities, were buying players from interstate, making offers to any talented players to join while Melbourne watched the likes of Healy, Spalding, Thompson and other disappear or players like Jarman not come. Why would they not?! It was not until the Stynes team convinced the MCC to kick in $1M per year that the club got any revenue from them for nearly 25 years. Even today 25,000 MCC members identify with the MFC, but as was pointed out at last years AGM, 4-5,000 of them come to more than 5 matches and don't take out a MCC/MFC membership. The MCC gets all the loot from football, yet gives little back. Same as in Norm Smith's day. It first really struck me about 30 years ago at at MFC AGM. The total assets of the club which had then been operating for nearly 150 years was less than the average house value in Melbourne! That was fine when you were running an amateur organisation, but this was supposed to be a professional operation. I can't remember who said it, but it was claimed that the MFC were "the most professional in the amateur era, and the most amateur in the professional era. Small wonder there has been so little success".

October in the NT...yeah sure!!... Darwin: We have had enough experience with how humid it is in June/July....only the locals know how bad it is in the buildup to the monsoon season, by October. You can't play during the day regardless, because of the heat, so it could only be at night. ( this might suit the broadcasters). Alice: too hot by that time.

The loss of development coaches will be critical as the "hub/lockdown" situation continues. This club of anyone has learned how damaging the lack of good development to young players can be, thinking that all was required was to draft talent. Coaching is not about what happens on game day alone. In fact it is the easy part of the job. Getting the basics and the game plan/style into 40 odd players is not something that can be done by 1 or 2 assistants. And what if the plan has to change because critical players get injured? Other players have to be taught a new/different role. Look how miserable we were last year, when we had all manner of players on the field playing out of position, or not ready to play at senior level.

...and watch Collingwood get to play WCE, Fremantle and the S.A. sides in Victoria as "away" games in the first of the hub games.....then when the hubs are removed, they can play all their home games in Vic.

....and Richmond ( Soldo, Nankervis)......hang on haven't WCE ( Lycett, Vardy and Nic Nat on sidelines) and Richmond won the past 3 Premierships playing 2 genuine ruckmen???? ...and Collingwood, Adelaide and GWS playing only one genuine ruckman lost the GF?