Nasher

I’m shirking selection this week. Who comes out for TMac is too hard a decision. It would be a very brave decision not to select him. I think he is going to be in. Make no mistake though, the TMac question is the only one being asked. Melksham and Brayshaw aren’t going to be dropped for Jones or any of the kids, those suggestions are just laughable. The only player whose place in the side is tenuous is Lockhart, and they won’t make a pointless change like that after such a big win.

Fair enough. Over the years I have formed a pretty healthy disregard for what “sources” say on matters like this which are completely subjective. Even if Troy Chaplin himself was my best mate and told me that the newfound success was because Goodwin started listening, I’d still treat it with skepticism because I know if I asked Goodwin he’d say he’s always listened to his assistants. Perspective and facts aren’t the same thing, so I think we shouldn’t treat them as such when we’re so far away from the situation.

This is just inventing what happens in the box, just to suit narrative/agenda. Goody’s started listening to his assistants and now we’re good. Or Goody’s stopped listening to his muppet assistants and become an authoritarian, and that’s what has made us good. Or, the most likely thing, the relationship with the assistants is the same as it always was, and they’ve arrived at the right chemistry by chipping away at the problem together. We don’t know though, so we shouldn’t guess. In my view if we’re prepared to unreservedly put the blow torch on Goodwin when we’re struggling then we have to be prepared to give him all the credit when we’re flying. Anything otherwise is complete double standards. For the record, I do neither.

Jeez, they’re a bit slow off the mark on posting All the Goals (with thanks to Haymes Paint). Surely that’s what the media team start working on the minute they start work on Monday morning - if not, they have their priorities all wrong!

Petracca. Gawn. ❤️?

He was a decent player who filled a need at the time. I don’t know why people feel the need to whack club and player for no reason over ancient history.

On a scale of 0 to 10, my desire to go watch Hawthorn play is about negative eleventy billion.

@Skuitwill be happy!

Wish someone would have told me that before I made 13,000 of them!

Welcome to Sunday morning boys!

No Tassie either. We’ve just ticked over 60 days with no cases. Perplexing.

Agree LH. We could have won by 100 points had we only kicked about 15 more goals. You can't make a sliding doors projection based on what-ifs. If the first behind of the game had been a goal, everything that happened after that will be different to what happened in the real game, because the ball will be back in the middle rather than being kicked out. The outcome becomes undefined and unknown. The only valid scenario to ponder is the one that actually happened.

I reckon that’s rough. It’s true that he didn’t want to leave Essendon (evidence by the fact that he went back) but he had his moments at Melbourne. I don’t agree with the implication that he didn’t put in. The problem was that Heffernan was overrated to begin with. He’d played well in an extremely strong Essendon team and that created expectation, but there was a reason he, Blumfield and Caracella were selected as the sacrificial lambs when they had salary cap issues. The perception was made worse by the fact that we were crap in 2003 when he came on, and we all know how rationally fans view things when they’re not going well, and once the minds have been made up, there’s no changing them. When he went back to Essendon he didn’t magically become elite again even though he should have been in his prime; by then they had descended back to mediocrity and he looked the same journeyman than he was at MFC. He was finished by 28. Moorcroft on the other hand was clearly out of his depth. Not quite sure what the MFC were thinking with that one.

Same. Very unpleasant injury. I was surprised at how long it took them to patch it up for him, he was sitting on the bench for ages with nothing but his jacket hood covering up the eye. Taping the bugger shut is the only way to get any relief.

How about Jordie McKenzie’s handball in that passage? MFC were definitely taking the .... when they gave Oliver no. 13, they look exactly the same.

This type of discrepancy would be because the opposing coach will be assessing on different criteria to the coach assessing his own players. The player's coach knows the role the player was supposed to play, how well the player performed it vs prescribed, and how that exact role impacted on the result of the game. The opposition coach doesn't know any of that and will just be determining how much hurt factor the player delivered. Of course, we still don't know which coach is which.

Great post binman. This type of play is interesting - I think someone else earlier in this thread (I've forgotten who now, sorry) mentioned this particular shot as a calculated risk rather than a selfish play that the oafs in the box made it out to be, and I agree with that conclusion. Petracca is more than capable of that type of shot and would have been lauded as a genius if he had pulled it off. In the same way that I was stoked when he took responsibility for his kick in the last quarter and drilled it, I'm more than happy for him to try and take these opportunities when they present. If they don't come off, so be it. By the way, you may think you overdid the criticism of Brown and Lyon, but I don't think there's such thing as over-criticism of the current state of commentary in our footy. I've been harsh on Lyon and Brown too, but they're really just this week's symptoms of the problem. The commentators have plumbed to such low depths that they're ruining the experience watching football for me.

To me the prospect of manipulating selection to get Jones across the 300 line is out of the question. He’s too far away - the gap is every H&A game remaining this year and a couple of finals. If he was on 299 I might give it a thought, but you can’t carry a non-best 22 for that long just on sentiment. Unless he happens to go around again in 2021 AND can get his place in the side AND can hold it for that long, he’s not getting to 300. Sad reality I think.

That only looks unfair because the Adelaide side happens to be hot garbage this year. Most years that would be an extremely tough assignment. I really doubt the AFL has room to consider the strengths of the teams playing each other for individual matches, where they have to somehow have to orchestrate a season where everyone plays everyone with only 3 cities available. We’ll see if we’re still saying how lucky Essendon are when they end up playing a home game in Perth against West Coast. Anyone know why Tasmania isn’t being used? I assume it is border policy related.

Good point, Jordan Lewis’ 319 included 26 finals. Jones 287 includes 5. If Lewis had played his whole career at MFC, assuming he didn’t actually cause us to play more finals and all other things being equal, he’d have finished on 298. Degree of difficulty has been made higher for Jones by spending so much time in crap teams. Shaun Burgoyne has played 346 home and away games alone. Freak.

According to Max Gawn it’s the other way around. Ref: radio interview with Harford and Bartel posted on MFC website. Basic claim is that Oscar is the best reader of play in the team, that he sets up the entire backline and that Lever and May both directly benefited from this directly on the weekend. Said the challenge for Oscar is to make sure he also plays well himself. Hopefully I have interpreted and paraphrased that correctly I was surprised when I heard it, but I doubt the skipper is lying. He’s often quite insightful in these interviews.

I was thinking about this recently too. Two years ago I’d have thought making it to 300 would be a given, but it looks tough now with having been displaced from the side. Just goes to show how hard it is to get to 300 really, when a player like Jones, who has been both extremely consistent and virtually indestructible for most of his career, could fall short.

I can’t post a video but if you can get the AFL vid working it’s around the 11 minute mark of the 2nd quarter. Score result at the end of the play is a behind to vandenBerg.

How could he know for sure he was over his concussion issues? He might just be over it until he gets a rough tackle that makes his brain bounce around his skull again and suddenly he’s spending another month in a dark room, unable to string two words together with his girlfriend looking after him while wondering if this is the time he doesn’t get better? We got told the MFC were all over Kolodjashnij’s concussion issues too. More neck related, they said. Then he gets an innocuous knock early in the season and he’s missing in action with not much explanation from the club for a season and a half. I take “it’s all fixed” with chronic concussion issues with a grain of salt when there’s no way anyone can be sure until the next event. I’d have said the same about Brayshaw if his issues had continued on. His seemed to be more about repeat direct hits though, which were addressed with technical changes to the way he approaches contests (ie not head first) which seem to have ironed out the problem. It’s when the player seems to get concussed from innocuous contact that you really have to worry. It’s different with Bennell because it’s his calves, not his brain. If he wants to risk shredding his calves by stringing out an AFL career then yay for him. I wouldn’t extend the same autonomy of decision making to McCartin because the quality of life impact of a damaged brain is so much more severe than that of a calf. To me it’s not about footy. Others have raised stuff about KK clogging the list and whatever, but I don’t give a toss about that. If I was a decision maker at the MFC I’d be worried about making a decision that has a higher than normal risk of destroying a young man’s future entirely. There’s no way I can see past that.

I think that’s a lot easier said than done when you’re a young man trying to live out his dream. That’s why I think the clubs should take the choice out of his hands.