Nasher

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!

So? I never said I get it right all the time, in fact I most certainly don’t. I just thought this one was a pretty easy situation to read.

Nah, I did actually laugh when I saw those suggestions and I did think it was ridiculous. His game was imperfect, and he’s an imperfect player, but there was a massive overreaction on here to one or two poor bits of play. He was never going to be dropped.

Looks to me like Vanders or Jordon for Viney, Weideman on standby for TMac. Harmes named on the field just to troll everyone who made the laughable suggestion that he’d be dropped.

Won’t be pressing play on that one ?

I reckon it'll be St. Kilda and Collingwood. Just a hunch.

Nev by a nose.