Nasher

Sun is shining, lovely winters day. Froze my arse off when I got off the plane though, wtf Melbourne? Hobart airport was 6 degrees warmer, I thought Tassie was meant to be the cold place.

Boarding plane in 1/2 hour. Been up since 5. Coffee at airport luke warm and unpleasant. Is it 3 o'clock yet?

Agree that it's a pragmatic and correct approach, but unfortunately Worsfold isn't the only one with his skin in the game, and the likes of Dodoro have a history of being as obstinate and obstructive as possible with these sorts of things. I hope you're right, but I have doubts.

Anyway if the issue is AFL favouring certain clubs for Friday night games, all that would do is guarantee the top clubs get all the Friday night games. At least this way forces the AFL to guess somewhat who the good clubs are going to be.

How do you make just the Friday game a floating fixture?

If Viney plays as well I definitely wouldn't rule out Harmes or Kent making way too. I can't imagine Kennedy not playing on the back of his VFL game and the fact that he was pretty stiff to be dropped in the first place - could easily have been Harmes, Kent or Garlett as previously mentioned. Kennedy and Viney for Garlett and Harmes seems entirely reasonable to me.

*cough*I'veneverseenalivewin*cough*

About as likely as you jogging down I'd have thought.

Heading over again as my (probably) only trip for the year. If Viney plays I would be bloody stoked.

Definitely not coming from the site. Other than that I can't help, sorry.

1) I think we could win any of them. 2) I don't expect a prolonged fadeout. I expect continued yo-yoing inconsistency as we have already seen so far this year.

For sure: none of them. Possibly: any of them. We're not in 2013 any more man.

I am I the only one who feels an actual, physical stabbing pain in my brain when reading such irrational pessimism? Maybe I've just been around this site for far too long, but after years and years of reading it, it does my head in. As if we're only going to win 2 more games for the year.

I know rpfc laments this too, but the obvious reality is that there aren't unlimited midfield spots. Even without Viney you'd think Jones, Vince, Tyson and Oliver are going to eat up the majority of the midfield minutes. It'd be good to see him starting in the middle on occasion but I can't see him spending heaps of time in there.

I agree that it doesn't matter really. All of them are capable of the required pressure to play the role. The difficulty comes in predicting which ones are going to be on this week; the results suggest Kennedy should have played, but how do you predict that in advance? 3 out of our 4 half forwards will play (vB/Kent/Harmes/Kennedy). I'd be leaning towards leaving out Harmes as he has had consecutive poor weeks now and selecting Kennedy. It feels like a very low percentage change though.

How would you know how much they played though? There are two umpires in the AFL who played at the very top level (Fisher and Bannister) and they're hardly better. I bet there is a poor correlation in umpiring between games played since under 12s and false free kicks (either paid or unpaid).

They wanted him to be a second ruck. With his athletic traits he would have the potential to be a brutal 5 minute per quarter ruck/on baller. With Pedersen sick we're now playing Watts in this role which is clearly a compromise, and Pedersen is a 29 year old journeyman footballer anyway. It's not that much of a mystery why we hoped Frost would come on - he's got the right traits and we have a long term need. Defenders are a lot easier to find. Happy to see him settle as a defender; there's no reason why his athleticism can't be uses as a weapon there as well, but I can see why they persisted for as long as possible, until it was clear it wasn't working.

Generally the idea with changing the side is to make it stronger - that usually precludes dropping the best player you have for particular positions.

I thought our ability to lock it in the forward half was what kept us in it, especially in the first half. Those stats don't look good from an individual perspective, but those players aren't the only ones in the forward line in contested situations - half the team is, so someone must have been tackling.

The score gap reflectedly positively on the experience gap in a tough game IMO. While disappointed, I wouldn't be too critical.

It was a bunch of disjointed thoughts with no bearing whatsoever on what you initially said, didn't address my point in any way at all, and you opened and closed with abuse. I gave it the level of response I thought it deserved. Moving on.

Might not be talking about the same night binman. I'm pretty sure it was this game I was at: http://afltables.com/afl/stats/games/2003/091120030808.html - was a Friday night, not a Saturday night, and the scoreline doesn't reflect the drubbing in my memory. Looks like Geelong kicked a lot of points that day though. I also saw Richmond get pasted by St Kilda the next night in some sort of milestone game for Nathan Burke - might have been his 300, or he'd just announced retirement?

Exactly.

I (as a Hobartian) didn't meet a single person that went "nah, not going, too cold". Most people were pretty pumped about it. During the game it got as low as 6 degrees. You can't tell me it doesn't get that cold in Melbourne in the dead middle of winter. The coldest I've ever been in my entire life was on a drizzly Saturday night at the 'G watching us get rogered by Geelong about a decade ago. At least in Hobart you can be pretty confident it won't rain.