Nasher

Despite his youth and clearly having a lot of work to do on his physique, I've seen no evidence so far of Brayshaw being beaten up. If anything he has punched well above his weight in the physicality stakes. He's best 22 for mine and should play; the whole game ideally if the club thinks he's got the tank for it. That's the only question IMO. He should be good for 70% TOG like Viney saw in his earlier years, I would have thought.

And we punished them for it, especially in the first quarter. If we'd been horrific as well, the scores would have been close at quarter and half time, but they weren't. We must have been playing at least okay - okay enough to be able to take something away from it.

I tell you what Earl, if we ever start referring to not taking Bontempelli as a stuff up, I'm out of here. I honestly don't think I can take yet another round of this hair brained hindsight hero logic.

Welcome to six posts ago. (I'm starting to think I may have actually cracked...)

Drunk on confidence!

I was being a tad facetious. Felt like some of the doom and gloomers needed a morale boost. Take confidence from my lead or just laugh at my expense - I don't mind which.

I am relaxed. Looking forward to seeing how we match it against the form side of the competition on their own dung hill.

We were truly putrid for that first half where we ended up 27 points in front at half time. Absolutely no positives to be taken that at all.

Someone on here said years ago that nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems and I've come to believe it over time. I accept the possibility that we'll probably lose, but I never go in to a game expecting the absolute worst. I don't know how those that do cope for a whole season emotionally, personally.

We are going to win this. The boys have had a timely reminder about the effort required to win, they'll bring their best game, have confidence from rolling them over there last year, and Adelaide have started drinking their own bathwater. Vince to play 80% of the game after blowing the cobwebs out, and Jonesy back to his industrious best after his worst ever game last week. Looking forward to singing along to "Grand Old Flag" at the end.

I want to see Brayshaw play a whole game, but the only question for me is: how is his tank? I think he's shown in the last two games that he's already good enough to play a whole game and contribute, I wonder if the FD take the view that he doesn't have enough miles in the legs yet.

Surely the rpfc's "total percentage of the pie" is a more relevant number than total number of players.

They deserve to be paid a lot because they are the central product of an industry that makes a truckload of money. It would be pretty stupid and unfair if the players were offered the same salary as the lollipop guy on the road construction job, while the AFL built its own swimming pool of money. And I doubt very many AFL footballers retire and sit on their backsides after their career. For the smart ones it's a starting point for future earning, for the exceptionally lucky ones it's a gravy train they can stay on post playing, and for the dumb ones it is all just money wasted.

Yep, don't like the idea of our equal leading goal kicker(!) being the sub. Kent to sub this week for mine.

Bontempelli went pretty much where concensus said. Were GWS and St. Kilda negligent, too? Rhetorical question - I think this is a great case of the art of recruiting rather than the science. It think rather than "due dilligence", it's more just a case of rating him less than others. Personally I'm stoked with the outcome we got anyway, of two players in Tyson and Salem. There's still an excellent chance both will be A graders - even if they're both the rung below Bontempelli, this is still a fantastic outcome from the trade in my opinion.

Agreed. I remember commenting at the time that a player taking responsibility for his own form was a refreshing change. I too wish him well.

I reckon last week is just as unreliable an indicator to the way things settle. We were absolutely putrid in the second half last week, and I'll be staggered if we are even close to that bad again this week. You'll never see Nathan Jones have another 11 possession game again, for starters. Just think we need to be careful of the "last week is the only thing we remember" syndrome.

Did it look scary after round 1?

I don't think so. Jones looked completely and utterly knackered - given his reputation for professionalism/thoroughness in recovery, I can't imagine that something like this would leave him not only looking so poor, but so much worse than everyone else. There had to have been something else wrong with him.

He went on to be a decent player with Richmond, as he was at the MFC. No doubt he had his limitations as a player, but was the victim of some serious tall poppy syndrome on this forum at times.

Sorry for picking on the least relevant part of your whole post, but I'm intrigued by your attempted use of em-dashes, given that they don't exist on a standard keyboard? There aren't many non-standard characters I'd ever use on a day-to-day, and the em-dash definitely isn't one of them. I'm lazy and just resort to the every day hyphen.

Vince only played 52% of the game, but during that 52% he had the highest possession rate of anyone other than Cross for the game. That says to me that rather than him struggling, they were just managing his time on the field. No doubt the necessity to do that hurt us, especially since Newton also spent a lot of time off the ground, but I think it would be counter-productive to drop him now. If he wasn't 100%, the time to leave him out was last week, not this week.

Geelong would be a good start. They look absolutely pus so far. I acknowledge they've played strong sides early, though.

I originally hoped that special robert managed to find a ride after the bizarre tangent this thread took. Now after seeing the game, if he didn't manage to find a ride, he should send flowers to BBO and friends as thanks.

Genuine question AoB as I know you understand footy much better than I do: how much does pace really matter if your team never has the ball? You say our problem was exacerbated by us losing the contested ball, but I reckon that was the root cause of it all (not an exacerbation). When I think of teams that have jets running through the midfield such as Hawthorn, it works for them because they've got the ball in the first place. I can't think of many teams who routinely get pillaged in the contest, then make up for it by pace in the chase. As I said in earlier regarding tackles; once you're in chase mode you're pretty much stuffed regardless. Conversely, I can think of heaps of occasions where a team is pace-limited, but still gets on top through hard running and hard work - MFC vs GCS 2015 rings a bell. Pace is way overrated, I reckon. Firstly having the ball, then moving it quickly is far important and relevant.