timD

hey dpositive. HR is more than hire and fire. Apologies if I stated or implied otherwise. Psych tests have a long history of being a damn sight better at selecting candidates for jobs than using interviews alone, which is most common way. Interviews are most often unstructured, biased and conducted by people with little or no training. That is what the MFC appear to have relied on - unstructured interviews. How do I know - because Cam Schwab described the process on SEN. Structured interviews are much better, but really only tell you about whether someone has social skills. If the club has qualified HR people on board, then I'd love to know why pretty basic HR selection process appears to not have been followed. Given that psych tests are more value the higher up the management/professional food chain you go, it is just unbelievable to not use them.

HAH! Straighshooter. Yep, that's you. No hidden agenda, no making suprious arguments that you cannot support, answering straight questions with equally straight answers... Straightshooter.

Great thread/post H. I share that dream. And right now I only have dreams. The forward line is just funny - we'd go from impotent to bloody dangerous overnight. We desparately need class and I think that group of players who are elite kicks coming form defense is still unaddressed - it is the only weakness IMO in the list you've put up (strauss is he gets it?). Would you bother with martin if you had both cloke and clarke? Not just structurally - I think he would be worth something on the trade table. People seem happy to pay for ruckmen.

RPFC, you've written nothing much of any help there. Most people are ignorant about this stuff. How would you know that tests would not be useful? Because you don't know better? You've reviewed that literature? There are simply thousands of scientific peer-reviewed articles that say that more objective methods improve human decision making. In fact, objective methods are often much better than human judgements. to say that you don't reckon because you don't reckon is a pathetic arguement. Actually, it isn't an argument. It's an opinion. That's great.

I think that that is wrong re the storm/teacup. THE most important people are head of recruiting and senior coach. Are you going to argue that the senior coach doesn't have to do that much really because he has assistants? Who is accountable for performance - the recruiter or his assistants? What is the point of having him there if the assistants do the work? Why are we paying him? If this set of recruits are as lame as the last 5 years, do we fire the assistant recruiters or the haed of recruiting? What responsibility do the board have?

I've had a problem with this for the entirety of the appointment. The more I have thought about it, the more the MFC baord strikes me as amateur hour. The two most important appointments we ahve - recruiter and head coach are made on what basis? One is because he is already at the club and he is one of the boys and he's done a bit that is related. The other bloke is because Mick endorsed him. Well, that is my being fairly disparaging and cynical...but I might not be that wrong. What care have the board taken to appoint the two most crucial members of the FD? Who else did they interview? With what criteria did they make these appointments? Using what methods? What have their instructions been? When I found out that psych testing had not been ued with Neeld, I just thought that they are absolutely no idea at all about hiring and firing. Anyone who has worked in HR, anyone who has done an MBA, anyone who bothers studying thi s issue to any degree will see that the support for using psych testing to heavily inform (not make itfor you) the process is indisputable. It is not perfect and you never use it is isolation, but you would be absolutely daft to not use it. Think of the risks of getting it wrong. Again. For both positions. It's like using medical tests to diagnose problems rather than just going of the doctor saying "I reckon"

Check out robot chicken's stages of grief on youtube. Good for what ale's ya.

I complained for the last few years. He is also my faviourite player and has been so for a while. I hope that his rewards come think and fast as a proud player for the MFC. He genuinely deserves it.

Morton is in his fifth year. 5th. the youth are the element that Bailey and Daniher before him needed to raise the standard. They are exactly the place to look - if they don't come on then we are effed. No, go look behind the teacosy - I'm sure all the reasons are there. Or we blame a bloke 9 months in for a decade a failing to draft a midfield...

We are in a double-dip rebuild...like richmond. The problem is that we have no A grade talent (or it is too unfit or iffy in its development) and we have no midfield. Without a midfield nothing else matters. Bailey and Prendergast failed to get us one. CAC failed to get us one. Take Mitchell, Hodge and Lewis out of hawthorn, stick them in our side and we go close to making finals. IMO that is why we fail.

The best post of the last 24 hours, bar none.

Tony, you are the only person in the football world who thinks our list is finals-capable. we do not have a good backline. we do not have a good forwardline. WE have almost no midfield. We have no experienced players with a high level of talent We have juniors who are not able to perform at a high level. we are physcially unfit we are physically weak We are mentally weak the team has accepted and put out disgusting efforts for years and has no culture of high performance. We have routinely failed to select "A grade" talent despute numerous picks We have failed to develop the talent we have to perform at even an average AFL level. Up until 18/12 ago we had the worst facilities in the AFL But you reckon....

No, this board is not a democracy. Posters are not all equal. No-one votes the mods in. THANK CHRIST The board challenge and Neeld are two separate issues. They should be kept separate.

61?

All bob is saying is back up your product...once. With content. Not hyperbole or rhetoric. Your choices mark you. Saying that you are not going to say anything because you have the right to is missing the point. It highlights that you either cannot back up your...material, or you are deliberately choosing to argue with empty statements and then deride those who question you as "apologists". It is not bizarre, it is either deliberately deceptive or a sign of having reached limits in your actual understanding.

Adelaide has to trade. Let's see what and whom they put up. Or he goes in the draft...and that won't work. We have the whip hand.

...and the agenda gets clearer and clearer. This is not about the coach or the players or the performances or the board or the gameplan. you have no idea what the gameplan is: to say it doesn't work is a red herring. Sanderson and Neeld are being directly compared despite all the obvious differences in their situations. What is the agenda, Hardnut? Stop dodging things. Why are you pumping up Sanderson's tyres and letting the air out of Neeld's? Your argument is a sham so we can ignore that. What is it - personal, financial, philosophical, religious...what? Don't talk about lists (the idea they are all about the same is so laughably silly that I doubt you actually think that). Don't talk about gameplan - neeld is barely showing it yet. Don't talk about the board - again a red herring. Own up.

Apologists FMD!. For whom? For a board sidetracked by the journey of their dying charismatic president? For a coach who led a team to one of the worst defeats in 150 of club history after 3.5 years in the job? For players who let near enough be good enough and inherited culture like that? For supporters who have faith ragardless of reason because, in the end, they've not got a lot else they can actually do? You are fighting an imaginary war against an enemy that does not exist to prove a point that you wont admit you are trying to make. There are meds for this sort of thing.

It is such a pity about the way things ended. If he couldn't get things his way he decided to take his bat, ball and go play somewhere else. Even the hawks tried to pursuade him not to leave! And in the end it was all for naught. He could have been a one club player and got more games and retired late last year and palyed much more senior footy and left a legacy at the club. He chose not to and that his what he'll be remembered for. It isn't fair, but then again, what is? "THE ROOKIE! THE ROOKIE!" God bless dennis.

Yep, it is the result of insightless tyranny that leads to posters disagreeing with you. You lone voice, you. You have an agenda you will not admit to. You refuse to argue the point, no matter how many times Bob calls you on it. You make statements in sentences, as if the form of your response implies meaning. It doesn't.

C&B, I'm not bagging him. I think he'll be a very good player - but only a very good player. He's had some quite good games this year too. He won't be a star IMO- and i would love it to be utterly wrong. I doubt he'll ever play KPF or KPD.

BFRE, I long for the day where we can debate the various merits of Watts and Jurrah being in or out of our top 6 as our most important issue.

Sorry BFRE, Clark is. I'd argue that neither Jurrah nor Watts would be in our top 6 on performance to date. On talent, yes. We've needed them to be, and jurrah's had some pretty good days, but I don't think either would be in our best six performers in, say, the last two years. I also don't think that either will be in the future (my pessimism is drowning me today). How many teams would have a defender that creates well but is pretty iffy in contests and a frequently injured foward with a limited tank in their top 6 players? Hell, maybe they both will be and our talent will 'bat deep'!

I agree it is not terminal. I'm relatively confident that we'd have among the best number 7-18 players on a list of any team...but the worst top 6. Change that and I'd hope that everything changes and changes fast. I agree that there is plenty to be hopeful about. Young Tom Macdonald shows more than a lot of key defenders with little experience under his belt. Howe is hopefully going to be a good mid with the hope that he might be very good. Grimes is finally playing consecutive games and sylvia is showing more as a mid than at any other time in his career. If Blease builds a tank and learns to run both ways he is going to be geat fun. Hungry little bugger, too . Some players have gone backwards but that is more to do with injury or talent limits being reached than anything else I think. We need a bit more speed. We need a crumber too. I'd give a bit to have this bottom-out thing finished.

None of the above being fit will make any meaningful difference. We could have had all those blokes fit yesterday and still lost. The margin would have been less, but that is it. We have 0 midfield. We have the worst midfield in the AFL. Bailey and prendegast failed to build one. I hoped and hoped. I saw many signs but none related to success. Yes, injuries to our kids have been unfortunate. We still do not have a midfield. As B-H says, we have no stars. No midfield. No stars. Until this changes we will go nowhere. The list that C&B generated shows how many players we have that should be in our players ranked 7-18. None of them are 1-6. For us they are - for any other team they wouldn't be. Our drafting and/or development have been diabolically poor for a decade. It will take another 3-5 years to make up for that. If they get it right. Once we have a midfield we could turn things quickly...but it all hinges on a midfield. For a midfield to work well, it needs depth and talent and experience. We have too little talent and too little depth. If we draft talent, it will take them 3-5 years to have pre-seasons and enough experience to perform well consistently. Christ, but it is depressing.