Nasher

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.

Forced changes only. Pre-emptive LOL for any posts suggesting differently.

Under what circumstances would you not take a 98 point win?

I thought Demonland would be safe after a 98 point win. Tough crowd! That was as comprehensive a demolition I’ve seen in a long time. Sure it would have been nice to pile on a few more at the end, but it’s splitting hairs. 12 of the 20 behinds were posters or rushed. It’s the absolute dismantling of a bad side we’ve been waiting for all year. Great stuff.

Avoid Demonland, as per personal policy. It's not going to happen though.

Thanks Kiran. I hadn’t listened to your podcast before but I thought I’d have a listen. It’s become a bit of a little secret of mine recently, which I dare not mention on Demonland, that I’m becoming a Kane Cornes fan. It was interesting to hear him talk about going over the top on certain issues in the past - he said the “extra 10%” or the “bit of mayo”. My observation is that in his recent work in the media, he’s cut that aspect out of his work. Since then I think he’s shown that he’s able to analyse the game and give us some insight without the need to make headlines, and that actually makes him more interesting to listen to. I think at the core, he knows what he’s talking about, and as his experience in the media increases, it’s starting to shine. The observation on Gawn getting back to help out the defenders is a great example of the type of things I want smart commentators to point out to me. I watch mostly on TV so I don’t get that view, but even if I watched at the ground, I doubt I’d be observant enough to notice. Great stuff, thanks.

When I was a number loving nerd-child, it would have been my dream job to work for Champion Data and invent new statistics for the AFL. As a number loving nerd-adult I find it just about impossible to gauge how meaningful these complex statistics are when there are so many components of it that are subjective. For example, in some particular situations, "corralling" is really the most effective method pressure available - if you're standing several meters from your opponent who beats you to the ball and you're a bit flat footed but your opponent is mobile, and you try to apply direct physical pressure, you risk over-committing and having your opponent leave you eating their dust. And oft times you see a player lay a tackle, which would amount to "physical" pressure, but the tackle is hopeless and the player gets the ball away easily. And don't even get me started on the fact that DE% is an input in to the calc. I mean I guess the weightings of each type should take these vagaries in to account, but I'd need to see this particular stat get used a lot more before I was comfortable with how well it is calibrated against how high a team's pressure "looks". If I were a coach I'd be pretty skeptical about using it for any sort of analysis until I'd seen it play out a bit. The longer I go on, the more I'm convinced the only statistic that really matters is the W or L in the result column. The simple, counting stats can be used to debunk obviously wrong criticisms of players ("Joe Bloggs just kept getting caught holding the ball. Oh, only one free kick against for the whole game? Guess not.") but I think for the average fan, the complex ones are just gobbledygook that confuse things more than they make them clear.

I was about to ask who the two teams were that we hadn’t played yet. Christ it’s been a long week.