Tony Tea

That's a reasonable question, R. And it's why I wrote "Turns out Matthew Lloyd had been charged with explaining why Melbourne was copping a pasting. Or maybe he had volunteered to give us the benefit of his rapier football acumen." Who knows how TV stations organise their on-air experts. The footage came after an ad break, so no doubt the producer and Lloyd cooked up their slap-dash analysis while Ten was flogging car insurance or Masterchef.

Trade Bate. Nyuk. Nyuk. Nyuk. But seriously folk, the veal is great.

Would Melbourne have possible salary cap room to accommodate Scully if Miller, Bruce & McDonal play in 2011? Would Melbourne be a better side in 2013 if James McDonald plays in 2011?

Yesterday, while watching the TV in the Percy Beames Sarfraz bar during the last quarter, I spotted a highlight marker around Jack Watts. Curious, but unable to hear what was being said, I made a mental note to watch my recording of the match later that night to find out why Jack had been singled out for analysis. I mean, it was about the only reason to watch any of the footage. Turns out Matthew Lloyd had been charged with explaining why Melbourne was copping a pasting. Or maybe he had volunteered to give us the benefit of his rapier football acumen: Except that is not what happened. Watts was manning Sidebottom and chased him all the way into the Collingwood forward line where Sidebottom did not feature in the play having been well covered by Watts. Jack did exactly what he is supposed to do: run hard and chase his bloke. Pretty solid work from Jack in a lost cause. And if you ask me, Lloyd knew he'd made a stuff up. You see the ellipsis? (That's the three dots ...) That's where Watts & Sidebottom went out of shot and Lloyd paused momentarily, realising he'd made a blunder. He thought Dawes had beaten Watts, but instead Krakouer had beaten Rivers and Dawes had beaten Gawn. But Lloyd carried on regardless to cover his arse. Pretty poor, Lloydy. In the pursuit of full, open and honest broadcast precedent, you can apologise to Watts at his social media platform: http://twitter.com/#!/JackWatts4. Of course, subsequent to Lloyd's less than insightful disquisition, Old Mother Maher piped up in that earnest "best ever-worst ever" voice that he reserves for his most performance enhanced hyperbole: Oh, just get stuffed.

Fair points, DP. Everything we do this year must be viewed in the light that we are still very much a work in progress. Getting flogged by Collingwood is not the end of the world, no matter what the pearl clutching drama queens in the media try to say. And hello to you, Andrew Maher. Our rebuild is still in its early to middle stages. We started off rubbish. We are currently inconsistent. Eventually we will start to show results. When you consider Melbourne stripped virtually their whole list and replaced it with youngsters, is it any surprise we are inconsistent? No. More generally, I would love to know why the media are chronically incapable of spotting the bleedin' obvious: we bounced back against Essendon because Essendon were rubbish and allowed us to bounce back. Collingwood are miles better than Essendon and did not let us play the game on our terms like Essendon did. Melbourne tried hard, but Collingwood are bigger, more experience and better drilled. We are still several years away from Collingwood's level of performance.

We'll be lucky to get a pick as high as the teens. Probably get a pick somewhere between 17 and 25.

RR, your compensation/poker game comment is a fair point. Garry Lyon's "Scully could be as good as Judd" comment is part of the same strategy to ramp up Scully's compensation value.

If Scully leaves, we will get shafted because Melbourne always gets shafted, it's traditional. It would then be interesting to hear what he says at his first press conference. "I gave Melbourne the very best I had to offer. But after the most enjoyable 30-odd games of my career, I felt the time was right to move on." Wonder who would then be the first AFL shill to sanctimoniously ooze "Gee, I hope Melbourne fans don't boo, Tom."

Maher said his Scully info was also on AFL360 last night. I didn't see 360 last night. So, was it?

When Tim was on holidays early this year, Maher & Gaze were utterly unlistenable.

Did Maher say "heads of agreement"? If so, it would be easy for Scully to back out since an HOA is non binding.

Good luck trying to convince the AFL to give up their rigged... sorry, I mean revenue maximising competition. For instance, the AFL will baulk at any risk Collingwood won't play Essendon & Carlton twice in one year.

Spot on, Sue. Would the Pies have made up their lie if they thought the MRP was a rock solid judicial organisation that always gets it right? No, they figured (rightly) the judicial process is a fiasco raffle and they may as well cook up a ridiculous lie, roll the dice, cross their fingers and hope to scam a result. MRP: joke. Collingwood: liars & cheats. Pants on fire!

Barry Hall played in (and won) a grand final after his punch to McGuire's was deemed reckless, not intentional. And Campbell Brown's elbow to Ward's head was deemed reckless, not intentional. The combined brains of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Yahoo Serious would struggle to solve the riddle that is the Match Review Panel.

Collingwood might try to get it downgraded from "intentional" to "reckless" to reduce the penalty from two weeks to one week. Then, with a guilty plea and his good record, that one week would become no weeks.

Big IF:

Here is how Round Robbo rated the hit: Would anyone be surprised if Thomas got "careless, high, in play, low impact"? If a bloke is having a great season, the Match Review Fiasco looks to get him off. Call it Judd's Law.

Cynical me says: Not many players are playing as well as Thomas so far this season, which means he is in the running for the Brownlow, which means he will not get reported.

Yes.

Darcy is a wood-duck, who has never once offered a skerrick of insightful commentary. Cliches, what we already know and filler and are very much his stock in trade. He should stick to the netball.

And every tackle slipped down around his opponents' ankles:

No doubt all 29 touches went sideways:

Demonic Ascent, you will not get any argument we are playing bruise free footy, but I want to know why. Are we badly coached in tactics, game plan, man-on-man, or simply not good enough? We got up against the Crows because the Crows were utter rubbish. If we played Collingwood the week after the Eagles game we would not have smashed them by 94 points.

"Soft" implies we are scared to go in for the hard ball. Certainly we have a few "outside" players - Bennell, Jurrah, Morton, to name three of the most cited examples - who appear reluctant to charge into a contest, but I think our weakness is just that, weakness. We are small/light/undersized, call it what you will. Until we have a side that can match it physically with the other good sides, who are mostly full of strong, big-bodied players, we will struggle. Then the players, including the perceived soft players, need to be taught to stick a tackle. Will that come with development? How much of it is down to the game plan having players in the wrong position? How much is is down to the footy department concentrating on game-plan at the expense of personal physical development? One thing was obvious to me: against North & Carlton we had a go, but did not have the grunt to win the ball our way. No matter how hard we tackled the ball still managed to squirt out to the opposition's advantage. Nevertheless, at the moment we have too many "outside" players and not enough "inside" players. We are unbalanced. But surely the footy department knows that and it trying to do something about it.

Toad (and Peter James), Agree with what you say, but it is difficult to both shepherd the ball carrier and spread for the kick-it-to-me at the same time. You run into trouble when you expect players to do both. I had a close look at Geelong over the last two weeks, both against Carlton and the Schoolies. The Cats were able to find space for the receiver, not so much the kicker. The kicker was backed in to hit a target, even under pressure, while the receiver was able to find good space; especially around the defensive 50 arc. It looks as though the better teams are blocking for the target, not the kicker. The trouble with blocking for the kicker is that you lack numbers further down the ground. This is what sh1ts me about the Davey run-a-round. I would much rather the defender with the ball backs himself to hit a target down the ground, rather than hand it off to a player who loops for the cheap handpass. The key, of course, is the bloke with the ball needs to be a better kick. Therein lies our problem: we have a dearth of defenders who are efficient kicks. The sooner we stock our backline with good kicks (a la Corey, Scarlett, Milburn, etc) the sooner we will be able to break out of the famous press.