sue

I'm not assuming it either. Just on my relentless crusade to turn up improbable excuses for the players.

I've tried and failed to think up plausible excuses for the players not reporting the injections. Here's a new attempt (boy am I leaning over backwards for these cheats): I wonder if they didn't report it to ASADA partly (if not wholly) simply because of embarrassment caused by not knowing what they were being injected with. What would you do if faced with a form which stated "please list any supplements you have had in the last x months' and you had no idea what they were?

I agree with much of what you wrote, but not with the sentence above. It was more than not asking questions. Why did they not mention the perfectly 'legal' injections when ASADA made its regular inquiries if they had nothing to hide? There is no innocent answer to that as several posters have demonstrated,

If by completely cold you mean doing all the usual pre-season training, then yes. And do you really think that any serious player will not spend between now and Sept 2016 doing private training. I'm sure that could be programmed without breaking any WADA rules if sensibly and carefully organised. Well I would be sure except the brain-dead responses from the AFLPA people makes me wonder if there is anyone with the necessary intelligence to organise it. Of course it is a long time and some of the 34 still currently intending to play will fall through the cracks for various reasons.

I'd guess that a number of banned players will get together to train and even hire a few support staff (with money coming from unidentifiable sources). I'm sure that will happen for the blokes at EFC and maybe they'll welcome an old mate Melksam to join them. Those at Port may have to form a smaller group.

On the contrary, if a player is on another team he risks meeting Viney maybe twice a year. Watts has to face the prospect of being tackled at training several times a week.

Before the draft many posters were saying the club must have had a player in mind when manoeuvering to get the #3. Has the club said that CO was part of the plan, or did we just #3 regardless?

I've now watched most of the Vic metro v country and I still didn't see that Parish was much good. Didn't seem to get into the game. If we do pick him someone please tell me that that match was unusual.

I've no idea if Parish is the bee's knees and am happy to assume he is from the enthusiasm displayed here. But after viewing some of that match I'm convinced of one thing - take no notice of highlight reels. I watched most of the last quarter and got the impression Parish was nothing special. While he got the ball a bit, almost every time he got the ball he kicked it forward wildly and some of his handpasses were B-grade. Did I miss something? Fortunately the recruiters, and I presume even posters here, do more than look at the odd quarter.

Ture, sensible postings were difficult to find amongs the volume of complaints that the club wasn't being tough enough. But they were there - they just didn't use jargon labels (copyrighted by Harvard) to attach to the concepts.

O good grief. Just the pedantry I was referring to. BTW, it you buy 100 tickets in a lottery, is it not a lottery to you because your odds are better than the bloke who has only bought one ticket.

Can't even say that. After all, we all know the draft is a lottery (even if we pedantically argue about the obvious point that the probabilities in the lottery are weighted in favour of early picks.)

Good to see they teach the bleeding obvious at Harvard. Presumably they teach some other stuff to justify the large fees.

My point was that EFC blabbed it, not MFC. My reference to scraps was not to that statement which as you say was categoric. It was to the other speculative stuff we've been drowned in for the last 2 weeks.

And its our fault he said that? Still building castles on scraps of information and the mis-information that is dribbled out by partiesas it suits their cause.

Still amazed how many posters are privy to so much inside information to form these black and white judgements.

Amusing to reflect on how much positivity is expressed when we nominate 18 year-old "Johnny Hasn't-Played-an-AFL-game" as an early pick in the lottery of the draft, yet how much negativity is being expressed about this bloke. Let's wait and see.

never saw a game more in need of clash jumpers

agree - too many kicks to oppo's advantage and handballs that didn't quite hit the target - there must be other reasons why Petracca is rated so highly. I'm always suspicious of these clips but you'd expect them to make a player look better than he really is usually.

The argument has no real merit. Under your reasoning the only club which would ever 'deserve' a PP is one where half the players were killed in a airplane accident. (Even then someone would argue the club's at fault - they should have gone by bus.) In all other cases, if you are crap, it is because you had some form of bad management. Therefore it would be argued they don't deserve a PP. There is a whiff of the Victorian-era attitude about only helping what they saw as the deserving poor.

My position on Watts is now very simple - if we get Roos and Roos says Watts is required. He is. I don't care how weak or uncommitted is is.

Fair enough BB. My intent was to critique the OP's bald statement, which if accepted would say lack of commitment is sufficient to trade someone as good as Buddy. I think you'd agree that it is not sufficient, though one would prefer star player with commitment. I agree with what you say about about relative leverage of course.

True, but you miss my point. The OP said : He has said he doesn't know if he wants to play for the club. That's enough for me to want to get a decent trade going and forget about player attachment. I said there may be lots of reasons to trade someone (as you believe applies in Watts' case), but the above is not sufficient to want to trade someone, eg. Buddy.

I think the reverse. There may be all sorts of reasons for wanting to trade Watts, but I don't think this is one of them. Few players have any loyalty to a club these days. Would Hawthorn supporters say trade Buddy for no other reason than he hasn't fully committed to the club? (No, I'm not saying Watts is as valuable as Buddy, just saying there are more important reasons to trade/retain than commitment these days. Also not saying the way Watts spoke reflected well on him.)

How predictable. You and another poster or two miss my point. I don't like threads about drafting Cloke, so I don't read them. But I know what they are about because they (usually) have a meaningful title. What about starting a thread entitled "Not the Not Tom $cully Thread" - we could put all sorts of meaningful stuff in there. Ah well, back to ignoring this thread for me. I guess I'll just have to die wondering if there was something interesting in here to read. Bye.