sue

Has anyone, particularly those panicking about his foot, offered an reason why MC would lie in his twitter message? My mind is not devious enough to think of a reasonable one.

Only a very little bit surely. It sounds like the sort of operation that is not likely to go wrong or have longer term issues with pins being removed etc.

I am limited by only be able to watch matches on TV, but it seems to me this is one of the most striking differences between the way we have played and how the better clubs play.

My, you are having trouble adjusting to the 20th century, let alone 21st aren't you. Good luck, you'll need it.

HH is spot on. OldDee you are nitpicking. I challenge you to be injected with an unknown substance. Unknown substances are precisely that - it could be the elixir of life or it could be anything.

Perhaps bigestred meant it has been forgotten about by some Essendon supporters. That certainly seems true.

It's stretching the language a bit, but I wouldn't mind it if we were a despot of a team.

Good to hear you saying something optimistic OD, even as a joke. Things are looking up.

On rereading the Age article it looks like maybe the insurance company didn't ask about bikie connections until after the claim was made, so my last comments may have been off the mark. But in response to RobbieF, it seems a bit rich to expect customers to know what in their past might affect their 'right' to insurance. Obviously a previous conviction or insurance fraud would strike one's mind when applying, but there must be lots of grey areas.I'd have thought the company should at least have a list on the form and then throw in cover-all. I have no sympathy for bikies, but I'm not sure why a bikie should be expected to think they are an extra fire risk just from being a bikie? Should a refugee of 'middle -eastern appearance' have to declare that they are one just because they are more likely to be fire-bombed by some idiot inspired by a shock-jock? I enjoy a long bow.

I agree with those sentiments. However it seems from the article that the insurers did ask a number of questions which the 'bikies' refused to answer. It is implied that that was before they issued the insurance. If it was a concern to the insurance company that the customer were possibly bikies surely they should have refused the policy and the payment for it (and they may have had sufficient justification for doing so from the refusal to answer questions). Taking the money and then refusing to pay out sounds more than a bit naughty to me.

OK, there's no footy so I thought any reference in the press to the Demons might be worth posting. Nothing to see here really: A photo of an alleged bikie member with MFC players might be evidence presented to suggest he is a bikie in an insurance case. Or rather the caption of the photo might be evidence. Brothels insurance claim rejected over bikie links

How sad. Condemned to permanently being wrong on all issues because I may have posted something in support of the man in response to what I saw at the time as virulent attacks not based on hard evidence. Even though we now almost all agree CS was no good, I suspect a lot of the early criticism of him was the equivalent of what Maschy wrote in response to Saty congratulating himself on Hogan's injury - even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

Most of us are suspicious of stated injury recover times. But sadly mjt you are a glass 3/4 empty on almost all issues. The mirror image of Saty. I don't think Mitch was a good example to choose however. There were clearer cases where 3 weeks became 4,6,8..... Maybe I've forgotten (note this before lambasting me if I am wrong) but I thought once he was out, it was pretty clear he'd be out a long time. In any case it is hard to see why a club would lie to their supporters about this. But I can see they might not want other clubs to know too much and we are just collateral damage. Plus of course, sometimes injuries take more time to recover than originally expected.

Scare for key Dee

Fair enough. Though I would have thought the meltdown at Bomberblitz was a symptom of them being stuffed.

No. You may have been assassinated (though your words of wisdom are still there apparently), but over on Bomberblitz there was genocide and a rewriting of history. Of course if you were indeed unfairly banned then I share your outrage. But it is amusing to see me lumped with other posters on the stated basis that I see a difference between you being banned and what has happened on Bomberblitz. It must be comforting to see the world in such black and white terms.

Even if you were banned unfairly, it is quite different from what has happened on Bomberblitz. There entire threads disappear, clobbering all contributors as well as all readers and making it impossible to see what was said by whom later on. The motivation for this Stalinist approach is very suspicious. It's one thing to shoot you, it's another to airbrush you out of existence as well.

I'm not sure if silly is the most appropriate word, but I think Machsy is right. To call the MFC website a 'joke' on these grounds is a bit rich. First, only a tiny minority of Demon supporters are interested in such pictures, let alone having new ones available after every nth training session. Second, I expect it takes more than 5 minutes for someone to snap the photos, upload them and create all the new URL's with headings in the AFL system. You wouldn't want a coaching staff member to be doing it since they have better things to do at and around training times. (We all know what a pile of crud the AFL's templates are.) So it would have to be someone in another role. Do we really know that there is a superfluous staff member with their feet up and capable of doing this? As pointed out, the MFC site is being updated a lot more than other clubs. If you want the MFC website to be 'not a joke', find the $ to enable us to get out of the AFL's embrace and hire more staff. But until we are rolling in $ like C'wood, there will be better things to spend money on. With all the new players I don't know who is who in many photos that have been uploaded, so it would be great for me if they could label the photos. But I'd prefer them to focus on developing players and winning games.

Thanks again Dr G. I should have looked at Wirlpool. It's a good site, but it didn't occur to me to look for AFL stuff there. I was able to stream through Apple TV - using mirroring I dimly recall. Glad to hear that I'm not the only one with the live action 4:3 cropping issue.Other than Foxtel the app is my only option (can't change ISP) so The problems you listed sound eerily familiar. I'll keep my ear to the ground and email Telstra again as the season approaches to see if there have been any improvements. (Like some of the posters on the Wirlpool site, I have no interest in other Foxtel products, I'd just love to be able to get the AFL, but they insist on packages and I don't like paying for something I don't want. Roll on the AFL taking over completely offering an internet service - I think...) BTW, does anyone know how the AppleStore censors reviews of apps? I sent in an extremely polite one about the 4:3 issue last year and it never appeared.

Thanks again Dr G. It was cutoff on the iPad - not just an artefact of transferring it to the big TV screen via AppleTV. As I said in an edit above, Telstra claimed that is the way Fox provided the video stream. I asked if they intended to lean on Fox about fixing that and got no response not surprisingly. However getting any answer out of Telstra was a struggle and there is a fair chance that the person who finally responded didn't know what they were talking about and just wanted to brush me off by blaming someone else. I also gave up on the app because of interruptions/buffering even though I have good broadband. I suspected their servers were overloaded and it was not a network issue. Why they would be overloaded during a Demons match is sadly a good question however!

Thanks. I was using an AppleTV and I'm pretty sure I fiddled around with all settings to no avail. The odd thing was that it was full-width for replays, but not for live broadcasts (which would imply I had the aspect ratio settings right). I got no useful response from Telstra. But I now recall they said it was the fault of the broadcaster. Presumably Fox was doing that to protect Foxtel subs. I'd really like to use it in 2014 so if anyone has any info I'd be very grateful.

Dr G, when I tried this at the beginning of last season I gave up on it because they cutoff the left & right parts of the screen. (Whereas for replays they showed it all.) Did this get fixed?

True. And you'd want a player to avoid talking to anyone who does read these sites. "Did you see what they said about you on x, they said ......" would be very painful. Perhaps people who are really close to footy and to players don't bother with these sites where most of us are quite distant from things.

That argument depends on what Pedersen's contract status at NM was. Anyone know?

If they artificially penalise only handful of players like you suggest they may need to provide clear reasons why those players and not others. Although we will hear the usual 'it is not an excuse that others did it' line that we heard around tanking, surely(?) in the current case it may be grounds for court action rather than just the moral indignation many of us felt about the failure to widen the tanking investigation.