Nasher

Have a look at the balance sheets of those clubs and see what portion of their income is from the AFL. I haven't looked in a couple of years, but I expect you'll find every club is completely dependent on the AFL and that the notion of "independence from the AFL" is nothing but a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

I should delete your post, but I can't bring myself to. The irony of it is one for the ages.

I agree P-man. Any criticism of Haddin in particular is absolutely laughable. Since his return he's arguably become the world's premier keeper-batsman, with genuine first rate contribution from both aspects. AB de Villiers is the only close rival IMO. I couldn't be more pleased with his game. The criticism levelled at he and Lyon is just a classic case of people allowing their preconceived views to cloud their assessment.

Who comes in if Harris doesn't come up? Pattinson and Bird have both been playing in the BBL, but I'd want to see them play some four day cricket first. I'd have thought Doug the Rug would be next off the rank, given his early Shield form.

The common thread was that we batted well and scored a shit tonne of runs. The link between that and batting first is tenuous and based on nothing but circumstantial evidence.

Because those conditions were those conditions and these conditions are these conditions? With tosses, you can't take a strategy that worked on a pitch on the other side of the country and blanketly apply it to a pitch with different properties and conditions. As captain it's Clarke's job to determine when batting conditions will be at their best. Obviously he thought they would be at their best at the end of the game. I'll wait to see how the chase goes and how the pitch plays on day 5 before passing judgement. It seems a tad premature to slam the decision to bowl first two days in to a Test.

Not everyone, it's not uncommon for defenders to spend the whole match on the ground. I agree with the general premise though.

Gillies was no more a disaster than Isaac Weetra or Heath Neville. A bad pick, but ultimately one of no consequence.

Yeah, him and all the rest of us! Clark's injury recurring is the single most disappointing (credible) thing I could imagine happening in the off-season.

Charming.

Did you make it along today Rog?

That assumes he's got 10k to begin with. I'd be very surprised if he did.

That was a bloody amazing spell of bowling.

It's because our opinions of him aren't (yet) being slanted by years of frustration about his on-field performance.

Yep, they look very alike, no doubt. The eyebrows in the photo are what's convinced me that it is Sellar, but I do acknowledge that they look similar enough for it to be hard to tell.

It's definitely Sellar in the photo.

How so? No reference of Magner at all in that article.

BBO and stu have two week holidays for hijacking yet another thread. Seems I'm having to delete 30+ posts from threads just about every time I log on, getting a tad sick of it.

With Davis and Sellar gone we had zero developing/reserve key position defenders on the list. It's not that much of a mystery to me.

I was wondering when chiropractic was going to rear its ugly head in this discussion, especially with a couple of physios posting in this thread. I thought about introducing it myself when I saw ding's scathing attach on homeopathy.

Agree with this, but in so many discussions like this, people can't tell the difference between a reason and an excuse.

So what else exactly did you want to know about Carroll? All the facts are here for you to read via the linked articles. You can ignore the rest of it's not to your taste, but given Carroll's background, I consider the discussion relevant and do not consider it a derailment of the thread.

What compounds it for me is that I don't even really know anyone personally who was affected. My father had not yet become an Australian citizen, my uncles were too young and most of the other people I know from that generation managed to avoid it. I count myself lucky to be so sheltered, but I'm glad I haven't chosen the path of ignorance like a couple in this thread have.

Going off topic a bit now, but for a 30 year old like me, it's hard to reconcile a couple of blokes who regularly post on the footy forum I post on, celebrating the fact that they avoided conscription. It doesn't seem like the same world. Obviously I know it happened, but I still struggle to imagine an Australia where people my age and younger are being ordered to go to war - and what a relief it must have been for those who were exempted.

You can't work out how a man who "would fly in to wild rages at the drop of the hat" and "shake, break into clammy sweats, hit the booze and go off on his own for months on end" might have a severe negative impact on his children?