Nasher

Yep. "Last thing we saw" syndrome is the worst when you're frozen in it for 5 months. Sigh. Come on Melbourne and lift, if nothing else to spare us fans some grief.

Yay, this discussion again! I'm looking forward to the Demonland off season so I can stop reading this garbage.

Oh well. Shame to finish off in this fashion but it's still been a good season of progress. Hopefully we can lift in the second half and get some respectability back in the scoreboard.

Would settle for the margin not growing any further. Please don't get belted.

Great start Dees! Highly competitive effort. Well on top, keep it up! So do I keep watching, or call time on this season?

He'd better kick them - it would be a shame if he couldn't scrape the barest of pass marks for the season from ProDee.

You've got the wrong end of the stick mate, the posts in question are gone. Had nothing to do with picket - at least his incessant ramblings are on topic.

Joins in 2014, posts next to nothing until August 2016, then spams us with the weirdest chain of posts I've ever seen. What's the story man?

People, if you see posts that upset you, use the "Report post" button that appears at the top of the posts. Don't engage in an argument with the person about it, that is likely to end you up in hot water as well for topic derailment. I'm getting very tired of continually having to clean these threads up to keep them readable, and bans are going to start being handed out.

When a player showed the early form he did, and is of such high calibre as a person, you'd wait for as long as you could before giving up. I thought the club would give up, but I'm very pleased that it hasn't. Everyone just ignore Picket please. Unfortunately we live in a country where we grant anyone the right to an opinion, no matter how unsavoury or downright mean spirited it is.

Development decision. Same as last week.

Reading that gave me a headache. I think the tl;d; version is that you can't trade picks you wouldn't have otherwise been able to use. Seems a lot of words for a fairly simple concept.

I agree. Brad Scott also didn't dispute that Harvey's form warranted another year and even went as far as admitting that if Harvey was on the list next year, Scott would still play him, but that it's not in the long term interests of the club to do so. Given that their club appears to be embarking on a rebuild, it's pretty hard to dispute that. He'd be taking the spot of a player they need to be getting games in to, there's no upside to this if they don't think they're going to seriously push for a flag. I think it's responsible list management. I'm still not sure about the timing of the announcement, but I'm pretty comfortable with the decision (from an outsider's POV, acknowledging that I don't really care).

I would. You Victorians can keep your own basket cases. Don't be sending them here.

If I remember rightly, Heffernan didn't want to leave Essendon and came begrudgingly. This was reinforced by the way he played.

1300+ games experience gone in one go. Nothing like easing in to the next era eh?

Surely by now you realise the futility in this type of engagement.

I see that as complementary rather than opposing. Oscar, Frost and Weideman playing ahead of Dunn, Garland and Pedersen are examples of young players being brought in to the side in order to fast track development. The rest of our young players for mine have been self-selecting on talent; I don't believe week by week selection of Hunt, Oliver, Stretch and so forth has been bold, just obvious. The difference between our appoach and Richmond is the goal has been sustainable improvement. The four top 10 picks is ensuring we continue to get talent through the door. We've traded very astutely to ensure that happens, and have picked up talent that will make sure we can continue to grow. We've still also managed to bring in senior players without spending those valuable early picks. 4 top 10 picks, but when was the last time you saw us use a second round pick? In recent years ours have all been used to bring in senior players - Frost, Vince, Lumumba, Melksham have all joined us from picks in the 20-30 range; Hibberd will do the same this year.

Hawthorn and Port will be smacking their foreheads with vigor. If only they'd thought about trying to nullify Gawn.

To me that amounts to Salem for pick 19. The club's strategy in the last few years has been to take the fastest route possible towards improvement. All our trade types have supported this: 1) trading out picks for experienced players; 2) trading future picks for picks this year to get the jump on development, and 3) trading late picks for fringers at other clubs who are about the right age. Yours is type 4) trading out talent (unrealized at this stage) and going back to the well. It's a regressive strategy. I can't support that and it's at odds with everything the club has worked towards in the last three years.

That one, as far as 'records' go. Winning 3 in a row was also nice. Pretty hard to top the Hawthorn win for moments of the year (decade) though. Not so much for the broken embarrassing record, just for the pure pleasure of the way the game unfolded.

The commentariat is a microcosm of footy supporters in general - only capable of remembering the last thing it saw. How often do you read on here after a poor loss: "oh woe, we're not going to win another game for the year"? It's the same - this year's premiers always forecast to be next year's premiers and so forth. It comes as no surprise to me that after one poor game, they've forgotten all the good they've seen. The analysis for the most part is shallow and tedious to read. Like you didn't say but implied: who cares what they reckon. The game is too dynamic and subject to too many forces for the dimwits in our media who report on it.

Probably the most curious thing about Hunt's non-nomination is that he's got all the traits you'd think they'd notice: speed that he uses both ways, commitment to the contest, loves a running goal, and blonde good looks. It genuinely staggers me that the rest of the comp aren't fawning over him.

I see the exact opposite. We looked flat as a pancake after four high energy games, of which we won three. Just about every time we've looked that flat this year, we've sprung back almost as drastically. Just going off this year's experiences, I expect a highly competitive effort against Geelong to round out the year.

That's a far more plausible number than the other rumour in this thread. I'm not sure why supporters get so hung up over how much players are paid anyway. So long as players on our list aren't leaving for money, who cares how much we play the players we recruit?