layzie

What a stupid goal

She's great but I feel she does it each year so it wasn't new. Not to go hard on a night like this but the bugle player whiffed two notes in the last post and the guy doing the oath stuffed a line.

Fritta is back in the action

We're on the board filthy animals

The umpiring

I think the best course of action is to get as enraged at this as possible.

Thought he was the best performer out there

YNWA

"Just kick the bloody thing" Player gets a hurried kick and turns it over "To a Melbourne player!" "Pick it up, come on! Argh why didn't you pick it up?" "Don't kick sideways, the goals are that way"

Yep. Win tonight, live to fight another day.

Bring effort and work rate from the get-go and don't be afraid to take the risks. Keep the ball in motion and we should win this one.

You'd be doing bloody well to keep him to under 20 touches. He's probably dropped under that one or twice in 4 years! I do agree though.

Can't say I'm thrilled about it either. Not because I don't want him back but we need to set standard of work rate in that forward line. Hope he brings it.

Because it happens every week these days Mr Double Quoter.

What did Wayne Gretzky say again? You miss 100% of the speeches you don't make?

Oh boy, here we go..

At this point any return involving Steven May shouldn't be headlining the nightly sport report.

His hardness and outside game was what impressed me. I liked the move early on but Serong definitely came into the game in the 2nd half.

I've all too often experienced those days of starting like a natural, losing your swing somewhere during the round and then feeling like the rest of the round is a waste of time. Wanting to force shutdown and fast forward to the next one.

I still think Tom is a ways off being a week in week out competent second ruck. I thought he worked hard in this game and did position himself nicely at times, it was an adequate performance and for this he should get another week for sure. We need to see a bit more but I'm willing to give him that chance.

Great to see us score 5.2.32 from centre bounce and get a leg up there but my main intrigue with the us this year is what happens when this is taken away from us in a game. I look at Wheel O Ratings stats from this game and compare it against the Rd 1 game against GWS and I'm encouraged by this one in particular. Score origin from Defensive half: Rd 1 V GWS - 1.1.7 Rd 6 V Freo - 7.1.43 I am looking forward to seeing Wheel O's chain from D50 scores in the coming weeks as this will really allow us to see how the transition game is coming along.

I just don't see defence as the long term position for Howes. Even back when he was drafted I saw him developing into a wing/half forward type due to his athleticism and skill overhead. I think it's great that he's had this stint down back to learn to see the game from that perspective but I would still really like him to end up further up the ground as a Gunston type.

His game in Adelaide that year will forever be etched in my mind. His acceleration out of packs was next level and the phrase 'he had the ball on a string' gets used a lot but he literally looked like he had the ball on a string, every time he burst away from the contest and gathered, the ball would always seem to bounce back up to him and never away. It was magic, one of the best individual performances I've seen from anyone in a Melbourne jumper. We've had a lot of great individual performances in losses but if there is one that always wish got us over the line and could change it, it's this one.

Absolutely Roost It. Getting an all-in unconditional commitment from a player that has had his issues with the club when we've just gone through probably our worst patch in 5 years is a big deal and it can have a flow on effect to others. The buy-in looked like it was there on Sat, let's see if we can string a few together now.

If Kozzie goes it's undoubtedly going to be one of those painfully hard ones to take, right up there with the Wiz. Performances like Saturday won't help this but if the worst does happen I would really urge everyone to take the approach of "Don't be sad that it's ending, be happy that it happened". Much harder to to implement this than it looks but we've had some great years from him and for that I know I'll always be eternally grateful.