mauriesy

I think that's the death neil for this thread.

Neil Armstrong. We could really take off. Rocket into the four. Take one giant step.

They harried our run and carry. Result: harikari.

A tidbit of information: although he's played 231 games overall, tonight is Jeff White's 200th game in the Red and Blue. Good on him.

I reckon he could get on his bike with about 6 tonight.

If the just-in report in The Age is anything to go by, there might still some prevarication about Yze. Reading between the lines, has the streak ended? http://www.theage.com.au/news/Sport/Form-t...4761534229.html The report quotes Rivers as "in doubt to play" due to hamstring soreness. Guess that might have been an opening for Frawley, but perhaps it's now one for Ferguson. Is Bartram still any chance?

So far I've biased it towards the midfield. I've got Judd, West, Bruce and McLean because of their possession winning capability, with West as captain because of double points. My highest-priced back is Joel Bowden, and while I'm trying not to bias myself towards too many Melbourne players, I've got Chris Johnson and Daniel Bell, because they're reasonably priced but with the potential to get possessions and spend some time further up the ground. I thought 'running' backs would be better in this regard than 'tall spoilers'. Adam Hunter (WCE) is a good price as a nominated back who can go forward and kick goals, similarly Koschitzke, provided he gets on the field enough. Some of my reserves are some new draftees like Hawkins and Selwood (Geelong), Gibbs (Carlton) and Davey (Essendon) that I thought might step up and play early but were cheap. I'm wondering whether to leave them in or draft them later if they start playing well. Of course, if they do, their value goes up and I might miss the boat. Is picking players like them early a sound strategy? Bit of as punt I know. And what do you reckon about rucks? Worth having the best ones (e.g. Cox and Lade), or again, would you "draw down" in favour of midfielders or forwards?

Just a dumb question about selecting a team in the AFL Dream Team competition, which I've never done before ... You have $6.94 million to spread among 30 players. That's $231,333 per player. Given that points awarded place a high value on possessions, goals and tackles, it seems to me to bias towards midfielders and forwards. Backs score zero for their main task, which is spoils, and negatively for frees against, which they'd give away a lot of. Rucks can score for possessions, but only get 1 point for a hitout (e.g. a moderately priced ruck like Jamar probably wouldn't score very heavily). If you spent your cap evenly through the four areas (backs, forwards, midfield, rucks) you'd spread your cap as follows: 9 backs x $231,333 = $2,082,000 9 forwards x $231,333 = $2,082,000 8 centres x $231,333 = $1,850,664 4 rucks x $231,333 = $925,332 However, if most of your point-scoring possessions are going to come from forwards and midfielders, shouldn't you spend more than average on them and less than average on backs ... say $1.6 million for backs and $2.2 million for midfielders?

Bradshaw's AFL season in serious doubt

My guess: B: Whelan Carroll Holland HB: Frawley Rivers Bell C: Johnstone McLean Green HF: Yze Miller Pickett FF: Robertson Neitz Davey Foll: White Jones Bruce Int: Jamar Bate C Johnson McDonald Need the backline height for Gehrig, Reiwoldt and Koschitzke. Frawley will become this year's version of Bartram, play from the opening round and cement his place as a back with height and pace. Watch for Rivers to sneak forward. Not bad that Sylvia, Dunn, Bartram and Moloney aren't in that team.

Well he didn't have his measure the last time we played each other. ND had a comprehensive win.

www.bombersfc.com.au is the "cloned generic" site that the AFL link takes you to. www.essendonfc.com.au is still the "real" site maintained by them.

The MFC website is, as of today, a "clone" of the new AFL web site. I don't think it's better or worse than the original, they are both rather obscure in some of their navigation. It does look better graphically though. (Already though I have one minor problem. If you're a Firefox user, it doesn't interpret the "strong" tag properly. So instead of getting bold "strong" type (e.g. "This is a Heading"), you literally get "<strong>This is a heading</strong>". It will be the way they've used URL escape characters instead of simple <> brackets. Poor programming.) PS How come all the players were born at midnight? :D

But it is also silly to have bias beyond reason. The top 5 on ranking points were: Bruce (Melb) 126 Franklin (Haw) 126 Brown (Melb) 123 Bell (Melb) 117 Lewis (Haw) 100

It was worse where I am. We get Seven relayed through Prime Bendigo. Prime Bendigo have not yet installed a digital transmitter. So not only did we get disjointed commentary, bad cuts and '80s graphics, we also got a ghosty, overbright 4:3 analogue picture. After having widescreen on 9 and 10 last year, this is pathetic. Prime really suck. PS. Someone please tell David Schwarz that a group of supporters is a "contingent", not a "contingency". Although in the case of Collingwood, he might still be right. PPS. Who on earth picked Brucey's suit? PPPS: What's Brucey's favourite word, except for "special"? It's "ta". Egan kicks ta Burns, ta Wakelin, ta Thomas, ta ... PPPPS: I know it's early in the season, but Collingwood's young players look like they've got an awful lot of work to do.

I think the demon could look more ferocious. There's plenty of concepts around of mythical "demons" that would scare the pants off the opposition more than this limp fellow. He just looks glum rather than angry. I also think more could be done graphically with the shapes and contrast between the red and blue to look like flames. At the moment they just look like waves. Our current clash strip has better graphic elements.

It's a very simplistic assessment just dividing players up into age groups and height, without studying how crucial they are ("core players"), their impact, inside/outside skill, games played or team balance. You can adopt a concept or analysis model of your choosing, and draw all sorts of erroneous conclusions. GIGO. For instance, there's no mention of games experience in the young players, or the actual impact the older players have. Players weighting the "old" end of the scale, like Brown, Wheatley, Bizzell, Holland, Yze, Ward, Godfrey, Ferguson and Nicholson (who has retired ... a light into the analyser's knowledge maybe?), are not "core" players. It's not like Collingwood, whose aging players are still largely their core. Of the young players, some are great talent who have now got enough games under their belt. Jones, Bell, McLean, CJ, Bartram, Sylvia and Bate are now, or nearly "core" players. And I'd rather have a few tough Brocks than a few quick Tamblings. I also don't believe Melbourne lacks runners, and besides, there's still debate about how important they'll really be. Western Bulldogs run at all costs style play failed dismally against West Coast, and anyone could have run the legs off Collingwood. I also think a statement like "Melbourne's great weakness in 2007 will be its ability to run out full games, and to run out a full season" is just an easy and glib regurgitation without much knowledge or real analysis of the list ... the sort of cliched utterance you often get from another team's supporter making easy pickings of past events. Like the Bomberland forum analysis that said "after Sylvia and McLean, Melbourne's young talent looks a bit thin"! I hold hopes that with better conditioning, fitness and a good pre-season, this year will be markedly different.

If 3373 people have responded, it's pretty unlikely we'd change the 56% majority feeling of 5th-8th. I think the Melbourne fans have all voted 1-4, the Melbourne haters have all voted 9-16, and the majority have just put us where we were last year. To be expected for any predictive poll of this sort. Besides, I don't really want to pump us up. I'd prefer we just went about our business confidently but without making rash statements or projections. The only way to answer any critics, especially those who have us finishing 13-16, is by stellar performance on the field.

The whole team.

8.30 pm tonight, ABC2 (digital)

I thought the bookies lost more when the favourite gets up. And if a whole lot of people put a dollar on the Tigers, they won't be at $17 for long. Bookies aren't stupid.

No, I meant you talk as if ND's spruiking days are over (past tense). Yet you've just listened to him on SEN, and I'm sure there'll be a lot more appearances in the future all over the media. We're not up with a lot of clubs for membership yet. We still need the "Reverend".

Like just talking on SEN? You speak strangely in past tense.

OK, seems the problem is a "known issue" and it's going through the boffins to higher and higher levels to fix.

Seeing as how it's getting close to the season, and since Telstra finally upgraded my local exchange so now I've also got Bigpond 1500/256 ADSL, I thought I'd review a few Melbourne games from 2006 at afl.com.au to hype myself up for Season 2007. I went to the Video page, searched the 2006 list, picked "Final Series Week 1", chose "4th quarter" from the drop down box and clicked play. The media player screen came up, I logged in using my Bigpond user name (the video download doesn't add to your user allowance) and waited for the video to start. But what started was the first quarter, not the 4th. The url even showed "... ?quarters=4" at the end. When I went to view the 3rd quarter, the same thing happened. When I went to other games, they all started the first quarter, regardless of what quarter I picked. Could someone try it and tell me whether they get the same result? Is there another avenue into the same video that might work? If others get the same result, I'll contact Bigpond and try to sort out the problem. BTW, the replay in a small window on my 1600 x 1200 monitor isn't bad. Quite acceptable quality and a good video resource.