Nasher

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.

I noticed that too. In addition with Dom at 71%, Newton at 58% and Brayshaw at 34%, you're almost two midfielders down. Obviously you'll always end up being "one down" due to the sub - that accounts for one of the two. In conjunction with other players like Garlett, Kent, Watts, Lumumba et al having high numbers, suggests to me that we always had at least one blow-in spending time in the middle instead of our actual midfielders. In addition to Jones having the worst game of his career, it all starts to make it not surprising that we struggled. I could be reading too much in to these statistics, though. I've never looked at them this closely before so I'm not sure what "normal" numbers look like.

If anyone cares, here's the complete set: Name Disp GT% PRDisp Daniel Cross 23 91 25.27 Bernie Vince 13 52 25.00 Dom Tyson 17 71 23.94 Christian Salem 22 93 23.66 Angus Brayshaw 8 34 23.53 Jack Viney 19 85 22.35 Heritier Lumumba 19 90 21.11 Ben Newton 12 58 20.69 Aaron Vandenberg 16 81 19.75 Tom McDonald 16 93 17.20 Lynden Dunn 16 93 17.20 Jack Watts 15 88 17.05 Neville Jetta 14 83 16.87 Dean Kent 13 86 15.12 Jesse Hogan 13 88 14.77 Chris Dawes 12 89 13.48 Sam Frost 10 76 13.16 Nathan Jones 11 89 12.36 Jeremy Howe 10 86 11.63 Mark Jamar 9 78 11.54 Jeff Garlett 9 86 10.47 Colin Garland 8 96 8.33 Brayshaw definitely has a case for more game time.

Newton only had 58% game time according to the afl.com.au stats. On a pro-rata basis (if all players had played 100% GT and accumulated possessions at the same rate that they did) he'd have been 2-3 possessions behind Viney and Tyson and about 4 possessions behind Cross (who was our leading possession winner in both pro-rata possessions and actual possessions). This on top of having his head smashed in to the turf after a sling tackle early on, I'm prepared to cut him some slack. I don't know if "pro-rata possessions" is a meaningful thing, but I'm not sure how else to account for midfielders who spend more time on the field than others.

Are people truthfully of the view that if we'd played JKH instead of Dawes (that's what the "we were too top heavy" argument amounts to), none of that embarrassment in Q3 would have happened, and we'd have won? Not buying it. We lost because our core midfield which appeared to be Jones, Tyson and Cross stunk on the day (without meaning to single these guys out as there were many others that were poor, but that is where it all begins). As rpfc pointed out, it's a major single point of failure that we already knew about - on this particular day it failed. Everything else, including top heaviness, for mine was just minor issues around the edges.

Best afield (for MFC) two weeks in a row. Exceptional start - he just doesn't give anything away easily.

Don't agree with that Dockett. The run-down tackle is very rare; most tackles occur when the players are in close. If there's a need to catch them, you have already missed the boat for the tackle.

The problem is that most of our worst players on the day are clear best 22 players and most of the fringers were okay. So despite the insipid second half, I don't think there will be that many changes. I'll be really bummed if the likes of Frost, Vanders or Brayshaw bear the consequences for the abominable performance of our leading players. Good to hear that Grimes, Toumpas and Michie put their cases forward emphatically.

I enjoyed last week more.

Tom McDonald a clear winner again today. Well done.

This has not been as enjoyable as last week.

So, I fell asleep on the couch literally 30 seconds into this game and woke up to find it's half time. Did I miss anything?

RIP Richie. The cricket hasn't been the same without you.

I have split the Newman/Clark stuff in to its own thread: http://demonland.com/forums/index.php?/topic/38204-sam-newmans-comments-on-clark/ Next time I'll just delete all the posts (35 in this case) and ban the poster. DO NOT BLATANTLY HIJACK THREADS.

In agreement with the 'land near concensus in the end. They just make sense. It's good when at least one of the outs come with a very heavy heart (both for mine), and it's not because they've done a career ending injury.

Hopefully Vanders was just talking out of first year/rookie modesty and not out of any actual knowledge. I'd be disappointed if he was left out.

I can't comment how they "always" do it because I don't watch Richmond that much, but the other night they were definitely saying "floss-stone". That is what prompted me to look it up, because I thought they'd lost the plot.

Now that we're up to page 23, I'm pretty much resigned to Toumpas and JKH out for Dawes and Vince in. Despite my conversation starter to open this thread, I reckon everyone who pointed out that Frost is too versatile and important are correct. It's been far more persuasive than the argument some have put forward that Dawes should spend the match in the VFL as a "lesson". I would have thought the suspension would provide any lesson needed. Both outs desperately unlucky, especially JKH. Our team looks stronger on paper with these adjustments though for mine.