Nasher

Has van Rooyen suddenly remembered how to play football? Clunking marks and nailing goals again. He’s been a pleasant surprise.

Put the remote and your phone away and have a balled up pair of socks handy. Your TV will thank you.

Don’t talk about Mr Fritsch like that.

The Brisbane Bears poached Alastair Lynch from Fitzroy on a 10 year contract in 1993, way, way before long contracts were cool. I bet they were definitely spewing when in year 10 of 10, after 3 flags in a row and an illustrious career and with retirement imminent, he got rubbed out for 10 weeks for swinging hay makers at fresh air, supposedly aiming at Darryl Wakelin’s head.

How would one long contract be any different to signing him on shorter ones 3 times in a row? If anything it gives more flexibility with restructuring it as required across the term to meet whatever our objectives are. Comfortable in the salary cap? Bring some of Kozzie’s contract forward. Need to free up some cap to land a big fish for a few years? Chuck some of Kozz’s money back a few years. Obviously all that requires Kozzie to be amenable to those adjustments, but assuming like all footballers he’ll be motivated by wanting the team around him to be good as possible, and he makes bank either way. It’s not like only earning 700k instead of the full 1.4 or whatever for a time is going to stop him from putting food on the table.

Jeepers. This reminds me of the Billy Stretch thread.

Slash makes stuff up.

Exactly this. Given what we know about May he probably did give Max some harsh feedback that the big fella wasn’t quite ready to hear yet, but so what. He knew he fluffed the kick but more importantly, we fluffed about 10 other moments in that quarter, all of which could have won us the game. He was filthy and rightly so - not just because of his kick but because he’s the captain of the team that let a golden chance slip. Realistically that play from Max was never going to be the winner anyway. Max’s face reflected how I felt, honestly. As you said - two ultra competitive blokes who were deeply frustrated. They’ll both have moved long past this by now and it’s so frustrating that the media are so desperate to keep this nothing story of nothingness alive.

Forgot about him. If he’s good to go then Howes, Windsor or Tholstrup can make way. I’m probably leaning towards Howes.

Thank binman. FWIW it’s not my argument, it’s just one I’ve heard and think does reflect an actual problem (potential umpire exodus on transition). I guess the way to solve that problem is to phase the new model in, such that all the existing umpires who don’t want to be full time are retained until the full time capability is developed. There will always be a need for casual/top up umpires though.

No change.

This is one of the arguments against full time umpires, in that many of them have well paid careers already that they’d then have to give up if they wanted to continue to umpire. The pay would need to be competitive - also because it’s a fairly dead end job with a finite shelf-life, in a similar way to playing is.

According to Gawn, he didn’t even hear what May said because of the noise. Talk about a storm in a teacup.

I read that as driving you away from the airport. Was having a hard time drawing the dots.

The free kick against Melksham for being pushed in the back resulting in a tunnel was by far the worst one.