Nasher

Agree, TMac played tight on Lynch and nullified him. I thought it was a good demonstration to his brother and Frost on how it’s done. It’s easy to sook about TMac’s ball use coming out of defence, but honestly that’s such old news I’m amazed anyone still bothers. He’s a 100% known quantity as a defender; we all know what the tradeoff is, and we got what we paid for last night with him.

Depth is overrated. Our biggest issue is our most important structural players are playing like crap. Depth players always look great when the team is flying and ordinary when the team sucks. They are the effect, not the cause.

If we drop Weideman for Preuss, our tall forwards are Preuss and Smith. Preuss was going alright before the injury but I’m still pretty unconvinced he’s any good as a forward. If he’s not marking it there’s not much else he does - he doesn’t know when or how to bring ground players in to play, and he is too slow to do anything about half backs who want to escape with the ball. I liked Smith’s game last night, but he’s a medium sized forward who is borderline AFL level. He tries his guts out though, which is hard not to love. We’ve definitely got a problem at the moment as Weid was hopeless again last night, but I’m still confident he’s got the right attributes and will come good. If you drop him now and go with a makeshift Preuss/Smith forward line, I see that as giving up on the forward line before the game has even started. At least with Weideman in, there’s at least some prospect of the miraculous happening and they start to fire, no matter how minute it is. I hope the TMac back thing is only temporary. We desperately need him to return to last year’s forward marking form.

You want to see the coach irrational?

I’m not sure it’s skills - I think we generally hit the player we’re pointing at. The problem comes when we kick it without having pointed at anyone. It’s as if we’re expecting a player to be there, but the only player there is Dylan Grimes, who always seems to know where our kicks will go before we do. It’s exactly the same as it has been all year. We’ve addressed “easy to play against” though, thank f. Hopefully we can find an avenue to goal.

The Neeld years felt like losing to Essendon by 120 points.

Skills are crap because intensity of the game is through the roof. I’ll take that.

Melksham in the middle looks like the most effective of all the moves. Tim Smith took that mark because he didn’t fly for the same ball as Weid. He has been excellent so far. Jack Viney is a bull.

Disappointed they didn’t pick [rookie listed VFL player], who is obviously vastly better than [other rookie listed VFL player]. Fair dinkum.

What’s the difference between TBA and indefinite?

Demonland becoming collectively homocidal/suicidal is usually a sure sign we’ll pluck a miracle out of nowhere. That’s about all I’ve got to cling to at the moment because all signs point to this being really bad.

Is Jetta right? He got up a couple of times holding the knee that was strapped up and looked very ginger. Looks a long way off fit to me.

Oddly enough, those rambling posts that always make out that the club is rotten to the core always make me feel a little bit better. I would hate to be so damaged that every time we went off track that it felt like it was just part of some huge, insurmountable problem spanning decades. It’s not. If it was, I’d probably have given up long ago. It’s just this year’s problem.

So many candidates this week to go out, but Spargo is definitely the low hanging fruit. A player who so obviously adds nothing at the moment. Happy to swap him for any of Lockhart, Garlett or Stretch. After that, dunno.

He kicked it straight over the goal umpire’s hat about 45 seconds after the miss.

I know, but honestly. He was one player who had a bloody go today and it frustrates me when there’s about 15 targets well worth potting that people just resort to their usual go-tos whether it’s warranted or not.

Fair suck of the sav. Petracca close to the 6 DL POTY votes IMO, if I could be bothered voting.

How can you possibly pinpoint which coach is directly responsible for this problem from the outside?

Oh man. Feels like the bad old days where you just wonder where the improvement is going to come from. It’s been the same story every week really - win the ball and kick it to a forward line that is outnumbered, talls don’t mark it, smalls don’t crumb it and sweet nobody puts any pressure between there and the opposition goals.

Hardly.

Membrey is a good player. Edit: then again, so was Kent Kingsley in his prime.

This is the Essendon game all over again. Completely dominating the ball but slaughtering it going forward and giving away easy goals on the defensive side. I am tearing my hair out here. The good news is that we’re dominating in the ruck still. It could be we hit another gear in the second half ala the Sydney game. We can only hope.

I just took Demonland at his word. Seems like an honorable chap who wouldn’t lie or make a mistake ?

Weird, surely one would carry over? What happens if someone does a hammy in the warmup?

Travis Johnstone’s son is named Tigga? That is excellent. Next you’ll be telling me David Schwarz has named his son Ox.