sue

Why? Other than those opening goals, I thought WCE looked a better team for the rest of the match. They just couldn't quite make it count on the score board (until it counted)

Poor old Collingwood forever

Naive rule question: You not allowed to block a player trying to mark or spoil the ball. But you can when you are trying to make sure the ball goes through for a goal?

There is an old saying - 'A man's ambition must be small to inscribe his name on a toilet wall'. This seems to apply to any journalist whose ambition is to write about the AFL male or female.

This. I may be wrong but I don't recall us winning any Brownlows in the 50's/60's. We may have led the total votes count however.

Tough bloke. Well that explains his drop off later in the season (making room for Brayshaw to shine more). But obviously a stager.

Disappointed that you haven't converted her. If I managed it anyone can. Admittedly she wasn't too zealous so it wasn't that hard. She was just influenced by being a neighbour of Rose back in the dark ages.

Listening (why?) to the commentary I know I understand why they spend so much time talking about their past glories, who they know, what they know and boosting each other. When they comment on the game what they say bears little resemblance to what is actually happening.

True, but if we lose to WCE do you really want C'wood in a GF?

If the umps pay frees for pushing and shoving outside of play, then whether the player shoved falls over or not would be irrelevant, so it wouldn't matter if the pushed player was off balance or even faked falling over. It's the uneccessary contact that is paid.

probably whats been on the MFC site: http://www.melbournefc.com.au/news/2018-09-18/where-to-watch-this-weekends-prelim-final

If you want to know why the AFL gets rules changes wrong in so many ways, read this: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-15/afl-rules-changes-may-reduce-scoring-not-increase-it/10247576

Think how irritating it will be when he starts drooling over our emerging MFC stars in future. Cringeworthy.

The problem with the sliding rule is that is often paid when the offending player did not slide, but merely bent over to pick up the ball. That should not be a free. But sliding in as a tactic to knock over the oppo and then picking up the ball was dangerous and did need stopping. As usual there is a grey area between bending and sliding which needs a sensible umpire to adjudicate. Not much sign of that last night sadly.

One interesting moment was seeing Jetta's tall dad and wondering why Nev is so small. Then the camera turned to his mum and all was explained.

Maybe my memory is going, but isn't the big factor in R4 was that we had no idea how to play in the wet, but this seems to be ignored.

After the C'wood game at the end of 2017, they'll have learnt nothing if they do. I expect they learnt the lesson in the most painful way.

Umpires like everybody else are good or bad at their jobs in varying degree. If it is really true that every club's biased supporters single Nichols out as the worst, then he must be doing something wrong, missing obvious frees, awarding dubious ones, more often than the average umpire does.

That's why I grumbled about Weed not wasting 30 seconds when he marked 3 metres out.

Good to see the old lynch mob attitude to running society is live and well in Mernda.

All is explained.

Sounds like you are a false-flag left winger trying to discredit right wingers. Keep up the good work.

yeah, and to make it even tougher, why not a spot of eye-gouging, or since that is contact above the shoulders, how about twisting the oppo's balls. .

When an oppo player does something dubious (eg. TB and his boot, Dangerfield and his 'ruck' contest), it's always useful to think what your reaction would be if a Melbourne player did it. In the TB case, the answer is easy - embarrassed.

If the AFL doesn't instruct the umpires to penalise it, then some day a player who has a boot coming towards his face will grab the boot and upend TB slamming his head into the deck. He'll probably be pinged for a trip, or is it a dangerous tackle, but I expect TB won't be doing it again.