Nasher

Sorry, which of those facts are you disputing? It sucked, it hurt, and we should have won. We couldn't capitalise with our dominance of the ball, or our huge number of f50 entries relative to theirs. I know all that, and it burned. I had an hour trip home after the game and I seethed the entire way. My heart still starts thumping again just thinking about it. But the last quarter was a slog, and we were unable to outslog a team better and more experienced than us, on their own poo pile. We're young, we tried hard, and it was in Perth - you can be sick of hearing it all you want, it doesn't stop it from being fact, and significant factors in the loss.

How about I just close it? PF knows enough about the forums not to make a new topic for every thought that goes through his brain.

Cos it was wet? Come on man, did you only see Melbourne players out there? West Coast were the slip over, fumble the ball, turn it over kings. Top 8 side, apparently. Wet game, olisik moans about about players slipping over. FMD.

I am distraught over this result, but this is garbage.

Came in to this game with no expectations, so was as cool as a cucumber. Now I'm a nervous wreck. Keep the intensity up, we can and will win. Come on boys!

Because emotion has trumped reason.

Yes we should.

No, that's not at all what I meant. If anything, that's what you've done, and I really hate it when people do that.

I think ol' can't follow instructions Lynden could be considerably worse than Dawes, yes. We need Dunn to be a good key defender again I think. Let him concentrate on that.

Listening to Roos' press conference, bringing in Dawes is clearly in response to Hogan's frustration on the weekend. Of course it should be expected that Dawes contributes to the team in his own right and if he doesn't he'll be dropped again, but I think that's the context. It's been said numerous times that Hogan finds playing the game easier when Dawes is in the team - and specifically Dawes (same not true of Pedersen, for example). We know Dawes won't kick 10 and may not even kick 1, but if he plays an adequate game where he contests, competes, tackles, and lifts Hogan by 50%, he is worth having in the team in my eyes. Either way, we had to bring in a key forward. The alternatives were Pedersen, who is coming off a lengthy layoff from illness and by all reports was average for Casey, Hulett who is not ready, and Weideman who is less ready. In the long term Weids or Hulett need to step up for this role, and pretty quickly because I think both Dawes and Pedersen are on borrowed time, but I'm comfortable with Dawes filling the role in the mean time.

Judging by the responses I've had, I expressed my point very poorly. I don't begrudge people their long term frustration, of course that's understandable. I suppose I see some of the complaints in this thread in a very similar light to the "we've been rebuilding for 10 years and we still suck" argument. I see it differently - I see this as the third consecutive rebuild. It's a subtle but important difference. As disappointing as the Bailey era was and disastrous as the Neeld era was, I don't allow my frustration from those failures to deliver cloud my judgement in assessing *this* era. This is where the lottery analogy comes in. The outcome of the lottery is independent of past lotteries; the outcome of this rebuild is independent of past rebuilds. This is something that is application to all generations of supporters. I didn't intend it as an attack on the older supporters. Anyway, I don't feel like I'm making my point any clearer, so I'll stand down from this topic. I often wish I was as articulate as others that I read posts from.

Nor will it be to me, when I'm 60. That's my point. Besides, it's not as if 32 years (or at least 25 if you discount the years I was too young to really care) is a short amount of time to wait.

I am 32 - that makes me Gen Y. I'm willing to bet that if I'm unlucky enough to still be waiting for a flag when I'm 60 or whatever (let's hope not), I'm still able to objectively assess what's going on at the time in isolation, without conflating issues by raising the irrelevant past. I guess we shall see.

While I have some sympathy for people who have been waiting a long time for any kind of success, I find the I've been waiting 50 years for a flag! argument is a bit like complaining that you've bought a ticket in the last 1000 lotteries, and because of that, you should/deserve to win the jackpot this time. False dawns, disappointment at previous failed attempts, and your ever diminishing patience don't change the fact that these things take time, especially when coming from where we have. Nor do they change the fact that this time looks very promising, for the reasons outlined by ProDee above.

Did that guy ever get Rohan Bail's signature tattooed on his forehead?

Regarding him not getting enough of it: his possessions-per-minute on the ground put him in the top 3 for the game this week. It's hard to rack up possessions when you spend more than 1/3 of the game on the pine. This will not be a concern at all when he's playing midfielder-level minutes on the ground.

Yes, I know it wasn't good enough. I wasn't implying that it was. I don't agree with your assertion that he did not look behind the pace of the game though. Besides the event in question (and I don't recall one in the first quarter, but others do so I will take your word(s) for it), I thought his ability to compete for the ball and use it cleanly and quickly was a feature of his game. To me he looked a totally different player to the one we saw earlier in the year, but I must have been the only one to see it that way.

The same holds true though, doesn't? Michie will receive his DCM and the Casey B&F at about the same time later this year. If you want people to believe your logic, you should be campaigning for him too.

If one of those easy misses becomes a goal, the ball goes back to the middle, so instead of Harmes or Vince doing a dud kick in that comes straight back in, we have Viney and Gawn contesting again. You're then on a totally different path of reality. We have no idea what would have happened, we might have been thrashed as you suggest, or we might have lost by less or even won if St Kilda hadn't peppered the goals. It's an invalid argument, because a goal puts the game on a completely different course to the outcome, compared to a behind.

Did Brayshaw get caught "a couple of times"? I recall once (the HTB before 3qt), and he was totally and utterly filthy about it. I don't count times in traffic when receiving dud handballs from teammates.

I hate this argument. The margin should have been what it was, because that's how St Kilda played and the score they kicked. You can't make up a magical margin that you think we should have lost by, then tailor your argument as if that was the outcome.

All the other players on our list are just the same are when they walked in the door? It's obvious that all our players have improved. Jetta was delisted three years ago. Harmes played Casey 2s in his first season. I do see the words "consistently" and "recently" in there. The improvement in Watts and Gawn were not consistent: they simmered along very slowly for a lot of years, then exhibited massive step changes this year and last year respectively. I don't think too many players get that much better throughout a season, as energy is drained. The biggest improvements occur between seasons, so it was this year, so it will be next year. To claim our players aren't improving in any way other than usual is just garbage. You guys have just got to stop with this "everything is stuffed" attitude after losses.

Equally nauseating in both directions I reckon faulty. I do reckon it's hard to be objective when you're still furious over a poor loss though, and many start focusing on the worst case scenario, when the range of possibilities is much greater than that. Yes, the positivity goes in to overdrive after good wins too. I just struggle to relate to forecasts of doom that don't at all reflect the trajectory of our season at all, and I did truly not enjoy the surge of negative emotions I felt when I did that post.

Zero wins for the rest of the year. We're hopeless. Carlton have gone past us and West Coast will beat us by 150. We haven't improved one iota. Sorry guys, just testing out what it felt like to do a post like this. Feels a bit yucky actually.

I didn't see it that way at all. I guess we'll see.