layzie

Makes sense, get it ready for peak growing periods. Learning all the time 🙂

Gee slow burn this one. I'm no curator but trying to grow during winter would be tough with a lack of sun? Novice thing to say though surely.

Next man up, in Goody we trust!

Anything today? No? Ok. #Seeyoutomorrow

Give him a 7.5

Fat chance, people have been crying out for down the ground footage for years. I don't even think coaches have had access to it very long. I would love to see it and would pay for a service that includes it but it seems too hard for some reason. Have to rely on the odd occasions fox footy show some footage.

This is my default view as well Macca, as a team you aim to focus on what you can control and never leave things in the hands of a force outside of your control. Our game is about execution, athleticism and toughness both physical and mental. Obviously there's been more than usual frustration lately and there are some serious issues to be ironed out. We do need to aim to fix what we can but ultimately that's what I like my attitude to be when starting in neutral watching a game.

I watched this and I thought he started very well before everything turned into pure hyperbole. I like the idea of having umpires in teams who would know each other's game, but I think it should be a team of field umpires and nothing else. Having field umpires rotate through to goal umpiring and vice versa is absurd to me as they are specialist skills. As for getting rid of boundary throw ins, the bounce, touched off the boot, hit the post well sure. Let's take everything unique about our great game and jam it fairly and squarely in the hard rubbish bin. I appreciate his concern and trying to make the game easier to umpire, but we can do this by fixing general in play rules and interpretations. It's hard to see how the two or three score reviews for touched off the boot or boundary throw ins contribute that to the stress of being an umpire as much as is being made out. If any umpires out there disagree then I welcome that but he's looking at the wrong things here and grabbed a nice headline for it.

A friend in one of my game day message groups expressed his displeasure on Sat night at players ducking and driving head first into tackles for free kicks lately and suggested that if this happens there should be a free kick paid against. I'm sure there are many who agree with this but I think this kind of thinking is exactly what gets us in this situation in the first place where we just keep layering up the game with more interpretation for the umpires who have enough to deal with as it is. Seriously, so we should now ask them to make judgement calls on player's motives? And what if they slip in the tackle and the umpire now has another means to pull out the whistle and therefore a potential mistake? In my time watching the game I've never heard so many potential scenarios where experts are saying "This could cost a team a grand final you know". We need to make this game easier to officiate, plain and simple.

This wasn't at the Anglesea newsagent by any chance? I saw this on the shelf there and was half tempted to check it out :)

Having that buy in and work rate obviously doesn't just happen over night. It's every game, every training session, every moment on the job. The attitude is set from the coaching and you make it a lifestyle. And like La Dee-vina said it's the willingness to work to get back and keep our defensive shape that forms the basis of why we are so successful.

You never want to bomb in any quarter but if there is one where I don't mind a slight drop off it's the second. Our 3rd quarters in recent times have just blown the league away.

Awesome article. We're going to hear the phrase 'holding the width' a lot now and each team will need competent runners in this area. I think a few on that list do have other rotations going through but it's good to see.

I'm good with that. Or: - We're playing Chess while everyone is paying Checkers - We're Phar Lap while everyone else is Mr Ed And so forth..

Was gonna say that's quite an abrupt ending to that phase of the article.

I like the design but I don't know if it fits for us. Little too much in the way of other colours, it sort of reminds me of the logo we had in the early 2010s where there was just too much happening.

Great article, it's what the stats don't say as well as what they do say. For the moment it seems this team has broken football and the others are looking for a way to survive.

Not really a short term solution as it wouldn't have helped this week but would help a lot with forward planning, can we boot the floating fixture? This is a real inconvenience for people who want to know scheduling conflicts in advance. I'm dying to do an interstate footy trip but this makes an idea like that incredibly difficult.

Obvious choice would be Hunt but who knows. He does have abilities others don't and it will likely come down to matchups and who we are playing against at the time Salem returns.

Weid seems to take a while to get going and spills a few early but as the game goes on he seems to get his eye in and pulled in a few beauties in the second half. It's a tough decision, I think we need to bring Brown back in. Maybe against another side Weid stays in but there is a feeling that he gets found out in this game with Guys like Tarrant and Broad to contend with.

Yeah look that's a good point and something I probably didn't notice as closely the first time. Fact is I thought Flynn really had a go but as you say it may not have been against Gawn as often when he was winning his hit outs. I still loved Trac's game but am happy for anyone to give Gawn or May the honours, great problem to have!

Not being able to make it on Sat I'm disappointed to hear that Jesse was booed. I don't pay heaps of attention or hold special love for ex players (Seeing Jeremy Howe's 200th was bittersweet) but I do have a soft spot for Jesse Hogan and like many wish the chips could have just fallen differently for him. The harsh truth is that there is a lot going against him and it's going to be quite a battle to carve out a successful AFL career from here. His mental health, his body, the guy can't string a succession of games together and it's my opinion (would love to be proven wrong) that he has 3 years left in the game tops. I had a similar feeling with Watts at Port that he was probably not going to be an early 30s twilight performer and would give it away and he did. Whatever the future looks like from here on out I genuinely hope it works out for him.

I appreciate your comment BDA and I do agree that we need to strive for a standard of behaviour from players. The one thing I will point out with Rugby Union refs is that there is an avenue for players to ask questions about decisions and why they were made. Only the captain can do this and it's usually a very short explanation but I would hope there is some scope for this in AFL where players can ask the question and learn from decisions.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend I have no idea why this has been made a point of focus. We all know that there needs to be a level of respect for umpires, with a shortage of qualified umpires at all levels of the game we need to stamp out the disrespectful behaviour towards these men and women and make this an attractive option for kids choosing a sport to pursue. However, and this is a big however because it is driving me absolutely nuts at the moment. Is it necessary to teach professional footballers to suck eggs? I get that we're trying to condition new behaviour but do we really have to turn the football field into a classroom from the early 20th century where you get the strap if you look sideways at the teacher? In my opinion players are well within their rights to ask the question behind a decision made, yes the umpire's decision is final but there needs to continue to be dialogue between official and player. I don't know who came up with the theory that raising the arms in surprise is bad and punishable by 50 but it's ridiculous. Players are not robots. They train themselves into the ground then come game time they go into battle and I feel like we're asking them to be perfect in the heat of the moment, get off the grass! If they want to persist with this attitude, then go for it. But that means penalising everything. I've seen A LOT of players with 'arms out' appealing for a deliberate out of bounds and honestly going pretty over the top but nothing happening, ping them for that. I've seen players wait 2 seconds before not throwing the ball perfectly to the recipient of the free kick, ping that. I've seen Jack Reiwoldt joke with the umpire last week that he was going to go the Torp right before he did, ping that (ok bit over the top). It's just becoming a hard game to watch when substantial penalties are given for what the eyeballs are seeing is very little to nothing at all. 50s for dissent, 50s for breaching the stand rule and taking 1 step backwards on the mark. Our game is supposed to be about execution, athleticism and toughness. Right now it feels like mime or charades or whatever.

Don't usually do this but I just wanted to follow this up with reasoning for giving Petracca the 6. I think it's easy to fall into a comfortable pattern with the way he plays now much like Max if he's not absolutely setting the world on fire he's deemed to be serviceable but not spectacular. There's times when you watch a game and it's obvious how well he's playing but then are seemingly quiet patches that aren't as glamourous but when you watch again he's actually had a ton of score involvements in. Like a 'play starter' instead of play maker if that makes sense. 30 touches, 13 cont, 6 inside 50s, 12 score involvements, 2 goals (in reality probably should have been 3). That's a 3 brownlow vote game most days. I like everyone else's votes here there and Max's game was sensational but I also thought Flynn really took it to him especially early on when we were smashed in clearances. You could have made a case for a lot of BOGs but yeah just wanted to add my two cents.