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.

I fkn love Melky and this new lease on life he has. When he took that hanger he was like “these ……s are going to just keep kicking it to me in a 2 on 1, I’ll just have to find a way to grab the thing”. He’s playing his guts out for the the team at the moment.

I’m normally pretty good at not losing it sue, but this one stung, a lot. For a start my blood pressure was at heart attack level for pretty much the entire game, and we had a golden opportunity to show the comp we’re serious by knocking the top team off. The high I was setting myself for was ripped away from me. The come-down from this one will be lengthy.

Max knows he f’ed that up and he knows May knows no other way than to say how it is, at the tone in which he’s feeling it. They’re big boys. They’ll be fine. May was outstanding today by the way.

Effort has been there all game. We’re doing a LOT right. I feel quite sick.

My take: as long as Goodwin is at the MFC, Kozzy will be too. We’ll hear the murmuring of homesickness every year, because it will be true and he’s been open about that. But the club, and specifically the coach, will give him the support, the space and the visits home he requires to manage it.

Yep. Lever always takes a while to get going after he returns from injury. He’ll find his touch in the seniors like he always does, and everyone who’s had a crack in this thread will have to eat humble pie. Again. We’ve seen this movie before so many times.

What a shock that the best key defensive pair we’ve ever had were selected.

Teams are announced on a timeframe dictated by the AFL. What a completely ridiculous thing to pot the club over.

People who like footy want the stadium and people who don’t like it, don’t want it. 🤷‍♂️ I highly doubt Nick Riewoldt would rub shoulders with too many anti-footy commoners given his background. Most of the friction is around the location and the cost. The conversation gets swamped by highly emotive but low in sense arguments like health budgets etc, when the cost to build equates to about 3 months of health budget. It’s also hard to get sensible economic numbers on it because the planning council intentionally hired anti-stadium analysis on it - that’s why the government tried to bypass it, and would have succeeded if the (pro-stadium) opposition hadn’t just skittled them for unrelated reasons. Another part of the aggravation is the reason the cost is so high is because of the AFL’s requirement for a roof, which as far as I can tell is based on some suit at HQ going to Bellerive Oval once and being really cold, rather than any kind of analysis on weather patterns in Hobart, because it rains here less than any other city where AFL is played other than Adelaide. This is causing the cricket bodies to say the current design is unsuitable for cricket, which is muddying the economic waters further. I went to the Hobart Hurricanes cup winning match at Bellerive and it was one of my favourite sporting experiences ever. If it had been at a new stadium with double the crowd, it would have been amazing. And anyone who’s been to Marvel Stadium in the middle of winter knows the roof might keep the rain away but it doesn’t do much for the cold. Anyway, this is the one opportunity we’re going to get to bring AFL to Tasmania full time, and it’s about to be blown by a hostile AFL and an incompetent government. Cool.