Nasher

This is arguing about which player keeps the spot warm for the few we’ve got out. And this week it’ll probably be neither of them.

Let’s not be too harsh on Sam Blease. Not his fault he was drafted in to a basket case. Don’t think any of the kids of that era stood much chance, honestly. But yes, Bowey did make me think back to Blease. Probably just the red hair though. Blease was a bit bigger and had a fair bit more toe from memory. Love that turn out of traffic though. Great agility, burst of speed, and the guts to try it in the first place.

It’s so disheartening that every time we lift the lid on racism, scumbags start coming out of the woodwork. We have such a long way to go.

I honestly spent half the telecast thinking Leppitsch was Tim Watson, ergo I ignored everything he said. They sound exactly the same.

Now that the adrenaline has worn off, I’m feeling super content with last night’s match. The post-lightning play has all but been erased from my memory. That is an exceptional circumstance that will probably never happen again that was an absolute gift for our opposition, in fact Adam Simpson described it as divine intervention. Before the break we absolutely had our foot on their throats. We have heavily relied on superior fitness all year and West Coast looked dead on their feet. It was always going to be extremely difficult to keep the boys “up” for half an hour, and a 30 minute break during the last quarter meant our chief advantage was lost. West Coast are a good team and threw caution to the wind. We’re in an exciting place. The third quarter and pre-break last quarter were pure dominance, against a good side, in extremely hostile conditions. If it wasn’t for a one in ten year freak event, we’d be talking about one of the greatest wins we’ve seen in our lives.

He’s an absolute jet. For a small fella he’s tough, too. Wasn’t expecting him to just slot in and deliver from debut, but he has. Great stuff Jake.

To be assessed on return to Melbourne with scans. I infer that to mean he’ll miss - ie it’s proper injured and not just precautionary.

Agree. Vanders, Jordon, Sparrow and Melksham are the only players in the team whose positions are unstable IMO. Everyone else you could pretty much lock in for the rest of the year.

Agree with this.

Returning the favour from us yesterday. Now let us give each other a knowing nod and never speak of it again.

Thanks for the heart attack. Every minute of that break and what happened after was stressful to the max. Likelihood of me sleeping properly now: zero. Hell yes though. Back on top and now can’t get knocked out of the 4. Very happy.

Yeah I know that, but that’s less important than being locked in the top 4, it’s just a nice bonus. Obviously would go a long way to finishing top after round 23 though.

If we win tonight, we can’t fall out of the top 4. I’ve been pretty chill before most games this year but I’m crapping myself about this one, there’s so much at stake. Let’s go Dees!

What a goal by Parish. Looked like a shank off the boot.

Dunno about you but with the way this game has started, I already have deep regrets in the sale of my soul in barracking for Essendon. It it too late to give the devil a refund?

My preference would be Essendon be kept alive to the very last minute, then get snuffed out in round 23 and finish 9th, with a West Coast side who clearly don’t give a s*** whether they make it or not pinching 8th. Bummers can start by winning today.

Funny to think that when he was drafted, the most exciting thing about him was that he was the best mate of our gun F/S recruit, Billy Stretch. I’m a fan of ANB. The interviews he’s done this year show him to be the kind of honest but caring teammate I’d want if I were a player. He gets maximum use out of the talent he has. Well done on the way 100.

All done!

Hi all, Going to need to take the site offline for a short period of time, sometime between 8pm and 9pm AEST, to do a few cleanup things from the failure the other day. Hoping the site should only be off for 15 minutes or so. Please don't panic :-)

I can't. No thanks.

Not Henry...? Edit: this is pretty much exactly how I looked at 2am this morning.

Thanks, appreciate the offer. Root cause was an unplanned outage of the host VM, which lead to the MySQL database failing disgracefully when our server went off. Got some work to do over the weekend to move the tables over to the storage engine that is a little more resilient to failure.

I think pragmatically the AFL argument makes sense; everyone who would follow footy here already does, we're an AFL state. Anyone who jumped aboard the new team would be abandoning their existing team. It just dilutes the pool for the existing clubs. For me personally, I already have a team. I wouldn't jump ship. I already have a team I barrack for and I'm in way too deep to change now. It's embedded in my DNA now. I know plenty of supporters of other clubs who feel the same. I'm pretty meh about it. I don't really care one way or the other. I wouldn't go watch them play unless they were playing Melbourne, in which case I'd barrack against them. I think there's also a chance people will get all excited about it for a few years and then numbers will drop right off, especially if the team had a few lean years. I probably wouldn't bother with it if I were the AFL.

Yep. This one put my skills to the test. I've seen database corruption before but never to the point where the database engine won't run at all. Very happy I got it all back online with no loss of data - wasn't feeling very optimistic about it when I went to bed at 3am! Thanks everyone for the kind words. Re: what @Deeoldfartsaid - I'm an interstate member too whose lifeline to the MFC is this site. I'd be lost without it.

Looks like we are among the land of the living again. Phew!