layzie

You and I both had the view that Hogan's decision to return home from the standpoint of a 'career move' was a terrible one and this one feels similar in a lot of ways to me. When you take everything into account: List, mentoring, successful culture, potential to grow as a person, money (although not as much but still decent) the total package of staying far outweighs the prospect of going home. He is not a bad person for wanting to go back but I really hope he doesn't live to regret the decision. Maybe the whole COVID thing means that the go home factor is more prevalent now, and everything feels further away now. I don't know.

Bad idea.

As usual, we lose a RB in the first game. Ahh

Nice move

Schedule cleared and heart pre-broken.

Maybe it was a reasonable year and not so much a good year?

Yeah well, Jon Ralph..

Seriously that is such a load of bull honk.

This is crap

It was a good year with a crap finish and now questions over our methods. That's in a nutshell.

There are learnings out there, you just have to find them.

Some old time stuff there!

After beating us many teams coaches or players in interviews started with "We know Melbourne do XYZ". I t was pretty frustrating after a while.

Sounds most likely because if Essendon knew they were paying $500K of Luke Parker's contract it would give them more insight into would the overall financials and that just seems a bit off.

Would this require balance sheets of clubs to be released to other clubs? Or would the club looking to partake just hand over $500K to another club in good faith? It would seem to give clubs a better idea of what players at other clubs are earning as well. I may be missing something and possibly this information is now available everywhere for clubs but until someone jumps in with that kind of info this sounds gross.

Talk about opening a Pandora's box. Imagine one company paying another company's employee to get more tax breaks or something like that? Not sure, need to know more but it doesn't have a good sound to it.

He's right

I guess the question is how do we prepare for this better next time? It's pretty unlikely we're just going to have a soft draw fall into our lap to finish the season so we need to make sure we're as fresh as possible despite these big time finals like games.

Hope we don't get linked to Williams, already sick of being linked to guys with immovable contracts.

For the panel: In your opinion, the most glaring issue with our forward line is: - Personnel - Structure - Strategy Don’t want to add too much because I’m keen to hear your instant reactions to these but some quick examples. Personnel – eg lack of a key forward that can contest and bring the ball to ground regularly. Structure – eg Selection and the mix of players that make up the forward group on a given week. Strategy – eg Our setup at forward 50 stoppages, our delivery into the 50 etc. I've narrowed it down to these 3 things but feel free to add if another comes to mind.

Agree, the banners were epic!

Firstly I don’t disagree with you, the facts are the facts and we didn’t get it done enough against quality opposition. What kind of bugs me with this hindsight view that people and media always seem to take is that it doesn’t tell the whole story. - We play the Dogs in Rd 1 in a GF rematch with the opposition desperate to atone and kick things off on the right foot in 2022 - We play Essendon in Rd 3 who although lost the first 2 were still a finals side from last year and looking to get on the board with what was still a decent team before becoming a basket case. - We play Port in Rd 4 on their home deck. Again, a prelim finalist from the previous year needing to make a massive statement at home to get their season back on track - We play GWS in Rd 5, another previous year finalist sitting at 1 and 3 and needing a win - We play Richmond on Anzac eve, finalist. - We play St Kilda in Rd 8 who were sitting 5 and 2 and giving a lot of teams problems around that time. Now I know a lot of these teams nose-dived but it’s easy to forget that there were a lot of big challenges here that we passed with flying colours at the time. If people think our 10-0 start was all easy wins then they are out of their mind.

Was just thinking the same thing AF! If anyone has it in him to re-sign a bunch of guys up with having leverage in mind for potential trade it's Bell! Reminds me of 'sign and trade' deals you see in NBA.

This is all part of the journey. We’ve got a window of 3-5 years with this group and there is always setbacks along the way even with the dynasties we’ve seen. Complacency, diminishing hunger and culture challenges are always in store for good teams aiming to become great teams. Let’s not pretend that the great teams of the past were immune to these sorts of things. This is the moment for opportunity and it will be exciting to see how our group responds and grows from these challenges.

We definitely need some class on the wing and I wouldn't be opposed to trying Salo there.