drdrake

All about smoke and mirrors. Make something look like it has a bigger audience than it actually has to attracted sponsorship, TV $$$$$. I'm based in the West, my kids school if assigned to North Melbourne but the Bulldogs also get in there. A couple of years ago both clubs visited the school offering free tickets to the students, to access these free tickets you had to go online to register. We did this away game for the Dees V both clubs, as soon as I registered for the tickets receive Welcome to Bulldogs and Roos membership for all 4 of us. Free tickets that turned into a one game free membership. The MCG you basically have about 50,000 capacity outside MCC and AFL members, Marvel is less, seems like a lot of clubs with the arm chair members

Formally known as tanking. Still can't believe we are the only club to ever be sanctioned for tanking. WCE would need to off load players to fit him in. Their salary cap has been busting at the seems and they would need to off load a player like Gaff or Yeo to fit him in. Freo might have the space in their cap, but even with the poor performance yesterday you still expect them to be 7-12th on the ladder.

April is going to be a very interesting month of Football. A few side with Top 4 aspirations and a couple more to make the 8 could find their season over if they can't find some wins. Bulldogs, Port, Essendon, GWS would not have expected to be winless after 2 rounds.

Posted last week that the post match outburst was putting up smoke to hide the issues at the Bulldogs. Really 1 forward, weak backline and strong mids with no ruck. They need Bruce back to have any chance

Dogs backline is just terrible

No Salem goes out, they maintain the structure with 3 talls, a hybrid mid tall in Smith with Hunt, Bowey and Brayshaw. It is a structure we like playing with hibberd played the Smith Role on GF with Petty, May and Lever, plus Salem, Rivers, Bowey. Bringing in Weiderman helps keep the forward structure with like.

I think Smith goes to lukosius, tmac to Casbolt, May gets Chol

I can see one change Out Salem In Weiderman TMac as much as I hate seeing him down back to play there

English will be an Eagle next season, Jackson will sign 3 year deal with Melbourne. Freo have built a pretty good list, West Coast is stuff and will be going hard for new players

Bevo loves doing this type of stuff, creating the us V's the world type attitude for his players to feed off. The teams performance for 3 qtrs of football was terrible, Bont had no influence which adds to the stop Bont and you stop the dogs. A Journo's job is to unearth stories, report on the information they have and hopefully be the first to break it. It seems that the info Morris had was spot on and the dogs are upset it got out. That isn't the Journo's issue that is the clubs issue.

Maybe realise his defensive players are ordinary and forward line is 1 player.

Recovery today is making the side watch that game last night, one side playing pretty hard both defensively and attacking, the other going through the motions to get to round 1.

As someone already mentioned you need to have something else in with it to make it work. I've always said Reach foundation should be included in the space, you have the multi purpose usage for reach that can also be used for functions.

Do you know what the club has done under Pert, turning a culture of losing into a winning one. I have been critical on the club that we just roll over and accepted losing for to long, 2018 we all thought we are tracking great then 19 and 20 smacked us in the face. No question the Pert review and the personal changes made produced the flag in 2021, now the even harder part sustaining this success, but at least we have strong foundations to continue to build.

The club has been so bad for long periods of time we lost generations of supporters, your point one is correct sustained success will grow your supporter base. Point 2, I don't think a social/bar space will be included in the home base, as much as it sounds great it isn't a high priority for the 11-15 days a year it would get used. Point 3 AFLW, agree it has increased female participation but has it increased female supporters of the game. AFLW has a serious quality issue, the games are getting worse not better, the top 4 sides played each other on the week end for a combine total of 11 goals with Melbourne kicking 4 of these. You will see the flow on of financial benefits in this season, better draw mor prime time games, higher attendance at games, R1 should have 70-80,000 attend, a couple of years ago we get 25K at a Bulldogs V Dees match at the MCG.

Find it a bit interesting that there is a real push from Players to become full time and the season to be in the same months as the men. The issue you face with playing the same time as men you would get zero coverage, the product appeals to Channel 7 and fox as there is nothing else to broadcast out side 2 weeks of Tennis and a bit of cricket. Play it April to Sept your media exposure will be limited not just games on free to air by online and written media. I do agree playing football in the heat of summer is silly, but it is there to give the AFLW the maximum exposure.

I think the covering up of rail lines/Brunton Ave, make it bars and Restaurants so your visit to the MCG or Tennis centre can be a real day or night out. Or set it up with food Trucks, live music. The government will be looking at what is the next major project in Victoria. In 2-3 years you have finished the Westgate Tunnel and Western Ring Road extension, pretty large work force that needs major construction.

You might find they were waiting on the WA announcement today, I reckon the WA sides would have fielding reserve sides in the vfl if the birder didn't open in time

The AFL will put a spin onto this saying something like the average losing margin is the closest it has even been, yeh that's because no one is scoring. It is almost like the first year of AFLW all over again, high tackle counts low scoring. It needs to be in this slot as the game would get zero TV spots and media coverage if played same time as the men. The expansion is all about PR and government money, you need female participation to get the government money.

Agree and will only get worse. Don't know the exact percentage of females v males playing football I would say about 10% yet we will have the same size comp in 2023 18 sides each. You are going to have roughly the same about of girls draft as boys yet junior boys are about 90% of players on the community.

Yep, started early in the season, with the quarters should be shorter and went on from there. The game is ruthless these days, you can't have a coach moaning all the time because it doesn't suit his club, it is what it is cop it prepare for it and don't seek an audience to complain about it. His side wasn't going to beat us in the prelim, we took the stuffing out of them in the last round they were ordinary in the finals, they got smacked by Port, the game against GWS wasn't a good game and smack by us.

National competition, no need to have state of origin. Growing up in WA it was on mid week and they got schools to fill the stadium. Vic/SA/WA some great games, then the other states wanted a piece of the action, killed it. I will admit I grow up watching the WAFL, the only exposure to VFL footy I got was the Winners for an 1 hour a week. To see all the players that went over to the east playing in a WA jumper was fantastic.

Not sure about VFL clubs soft cap, they certainly don't have the access to staff that the AFL listed players have. When you look at the caps, the stand alone VFL clubs do an amazing job to be competitive, basically they have equative of 2-3(entry Level) AFL list players wage for their entire list. I'm all for the push into Female sport, however this shouldn't be done at the detriment of your core participants. The AFL can't do both, they can't afford to continue to grow female football and have AFL Reserves.

Local footy Div 1 and Premier comps have a higher salary cap than the VFL standalone clubs. The format of this comp is terrible, get rid of the northern state teams. A stand alone club has a cap of $220,000, big local footy clubs would spend more. AFL should spend more time investing in this comp or bring in AFL Reserves, I reckon if you polled AFL members they would rather see AFL Reserves than AFLW.

I was at a luncheon prior to Christmas, a medical person that was involved at high level sport spoke and one point he made was the unknown effect covid may have on Athlete's lungs and how each will recover differently. As you say they might not clog up hospitals but if it helps players avoid any long term effects, more so wiping out your entire clubs list for weeks, the mandate has a bit of merit.