Nasher

Y'know what's annoying? When you read a thread and find an entire page of a thread is filled with lame puns/jokes. I have no doubt it's hilarious when you're part of it...

Come on W_J.

I see no redeeming features of this thread.

Tactics are far less important than the quality of the players on the ground at the time.

In the last quarter, I saw H appear right in the middle of the screen lining up in the square, and I immediately felt safer. 10 seconds later, Jamar taps it right down H's throat, who bolts away and delivers a rocket to Watts who converts. I was really impressed with him yesterday. The guy can just play - I think that got forgotten a bit with all the silly business with Buckley in the last few years. Also, I thought we were told he was a poor kick. Early days, but no sign of that so far.

Remember when everyone* was having a haemorrhage over how we paid "overs" for him, when we actually paid the only reasonable currency we had left? *Almost.

I know it's easy to munge all the peanuts in to one, but I'm assuming you mean Barrett. Sometimes I think I should save some space in my precious memory and just refer to the three of them as "Hutchettinson".

Don't worry, Jones going down with injury is one of those hypotheticals that'll never really happen anyway

What would Roos know about footy anyway?

Jesus wept. I know the second half sucked, but can we knock it off with the extremist conclusions? Anyway, you choose to selectively only recall the second half: I selectively only recall the first half, and have therefore concluded that we are flag favourites. After Richmond, of course.

Well, that was a bit of a let-down.

Our flag chances are over?

Hard to know what to take away from this. We are not being challenged at all. I can't imagine this is doing the Bulldogs preparation any good either. At least we're thrashing them when we should be.

Coverage is awful, but better than nothing. Still can't believe it's not even on Fox. Not sure what I'm paying a bazillion dollars a year for.

That was Sean Denham.

I know it's not popular to talk delistings before the season has begun, but for mine the 5 most vulnerable players on our list at this stage are Trengove, McKenzie, Fitzpatrick, Hunt and Riley. Cross retiring (I'm not expecting this) or Jamar's end coming sooner rather than later (not expecting this either) might save someone. I expect Gawn, Toumpas, Salem, JKH and Garland to re-sign. Howe should also belong in this group, but alas, there's the "delayed talks" thing. Pedersen and Bail decisions may come down to how many players we intend to trade in or take as free agents, but I expect they will also remain on the list. No two-year contracted players to be delisted this year. Will be interested to look back on this at the end of the year and see how far off the mark I was and/or how my opinion evolves over the year.

Am I the only one who didn't feel a thing with this? I did all my fuming months ago. Can't be bothered beating myself up over it again.

You've just said you didn't care what the reason for it was, then you asked what the reason was. We pay 100% of the salary cap by front-loading. That's why it's silly to say "I don't care how front-loaded the contracts are" - that's *the* way we're paying 100% of the contracts.

No pressure, though. (I know, I shouldn't.)

Would people who were not already going to buy a $250 membership, buy one on a whim because they saw a MFC tent at training? I struggle to believe membership tents sell that many more memberships to people who weren't already going to get one. It's probably good for getting people on earlier (the "oh, how convenient, I've been meaning to do that" types), but I think we should be careful about overstating the value of them, especially when they come at a (admittedly small) cost. How many marginal members would bother going to training anyway? I thought that was the domain of die-hards.

Umm, because they're obliged to, because the players are on the payroll? If you were trying to be funny, you weren't. If you were being serious...

Lol. Wouldn't a Hogan foot injury be the funniest thing. If it wasn't already obvious, the footy gods are *clearly* taking the piss out of us now.

All finished. Night nighty.

All, Got a backlog of stuff to get through, so site maintenance will be occurring from now onward. At various stages you'll experience slowness, the "Offline" message, or just plain old can't get on at all. Should be done by 10pm Vic time. Cheers

Not sure why we'd want this. Our AFL team need the match practice more than our 10 bottom players. The Essendon side may have a lot of ringins, but it does have AFL grade players playing too (Chapman et al). I'd rather see us play at full strength and pulverise them.