RalphiusMaximus

A quick shout out to the three girls who took Football Victoria to court and forced them to start a Girls' league. It's barely over a decade later and we're about to see national league start up.

Chelsie Randall. She's awesome and sadly already signed with Adelaide. As people have said, Moana Hope looks like an absolute ripper as well, and Bri Davey (ex Matildas Goalkeeper) has improved as a FB too. I honestly think that Melbourne have completely stuffed up their Marquee signings though. We were always going to take Daisy Pearce, but we should have picked up a younger player with our second one. Hickey is experienced and capable, but she's not a star. Tonight showed us the sort of talent that the other clubs have collected and she's not at that level. Compare her to Hope dominating the forward line or Brennan charging around the midfield in the second half. We're also hearing that some teams will get priority picks at the start of the draft or have already been given extra players to sign beyond the two marquees. We needed to get the absolute best bang for buck out of the two we had and I don't think we have.

Top 10 pick who's been injured since he was drafted more or less. Huge wraps on him though. We don't need another key defender given the young group we're putting together down back. On the other hand, he'd almost certainly be an upgrade on to of them if he could get on the park. Depends on the price and whether he wants to come and play I would guess.

Well Saty, I personally can attest to my absolutely perfect technique when kicking a ball. Admittedly, I lack a degree of penetration, but over 20m I'm an absolute gun!

There was a lot of talk that we'd go for him with our No. 1 pick as well. Even with the result of Scullygate we probably dodged a bullet here.

His 2015 was really good. Not so much this year. His skillset is exactly what we need though. He has pace, clean hands and good skills. Work ethic is an issue. Personally, I'd love to have good Motlop in the side. Do the coaches think they can get rid of bad Motlop?

Honestly, it's not the worst idea. Yes, there are better options out there, but are there better options we can get? Watts is not the answer to the second ruck problem. Butcher can take a mark and is a better ruck that Watts or Pedo. His kicking is an issue but it can be worked on. We already have two for the remedial kicking class over the summer, so why not a third? On the down side, the only place you could play him would be in the forward-line, which means not playing Weideman, Hulett or someone else we are developing. But that issue remains no matter what we do to give Gawn a cutout.

Thompson is more of what we already have. We simply don't need him. What we need in our midfield is better pace and ball-use. What we need outside our midfield is a backup ruck/forward option.

Gubby Allen implicated. Imagine the outcry from Collingwood if he gets banned for 2-4 years.

There was an interesting point raised on SEN this afternoon. They suggested that the Richmond board hire a notable, knowledgeable football figure or three to conduct an independent review of their list and give them a comprehensive and brutally honest rundown of exactly what they have. The theory obviously being that they can't trust anyone in the club to give them a realistic assessment. I actually think there's a lot of merit in the idea and it would give them a much better idea of whether they need to keep backing Hardwick or move him on and bring in someone who will manage a rebuild.

He actually did kick a few rippers for us in his rare game-time. The problem was (and still is) that he isn't great at reading the flight, doesn't have great hands and his passing game sucks. Where he looked good today was when he was able to get a little space to lead into and use his straight-line pace. He took a great mark on the lead to start the game (missed the shot), then in more or less the same place got a free and nailed the shot. For the rest of his time forward he was early to the ball and getting crunched by the players who timed their runs better. He took a few good marks while rucking, but let himself down with some diabolical short kicks. That goal put his ahead of Pittonet as the forward-ruck option, but they were both pantsed by Grundy.

If we go back to what we said at the start of the season, I think most of us had this as a pass mark. For me, I said a finish of 9-11 was acceptable, so we've come in on the bottom end of my pass range. We dropped a couple of games that we really shouldn't have, and that would have made a big difference to our final placement, so that's bad. I think it's very easy to feel let down after the last two weeks. We were all on such a big high with a run of wins and a realistic shot at eighth place. To have the side give up that opportunity with barely a whimper was horrible. While we met my requirements for a pass mark this year, I still want to call it a failure because of the let-down, and because of a couple of glaring problems that have marred our games this season, such as the set shots of Hogan and Petracca (and Garlett for the matter), or our continued poor kicking into the forward 50. Looking at the season overall: 3 more wins MUCH higher percentage Made it into my ladder range Had a sniff of finals. Gawn is the AA ruck. That's a pretty good year.

I want to see every side get at least one home game on a Friday and a Saturday night. I want us to not play ANY home games at Etihad. We have two marquee games in Queens Birthday and ANZAC eve, so we're ok there. With our ladder position we should see two matches against Richmond, Collingwood, St Kilda, GCS, North or Port. Something around that range. If we saw something like this I'd be pretty happy.

LOL. I'd like to claim I was thinking of them, but sadly I was mistakenly thinking that Alex McDonald had played for Melbourne at some stage, making it the full set for them. I don't know where I got that from.

http://www.shavershop.com.au/online-store/beard-trimmers/beard-trimmers.html

It was a shocking decision to leave him out of the side against the Blues. Why on Earth would they have made three changes to a winning side? Idiotic thing to do.

It was a pretty decent game, but he needs to work on his short kicking. Had a couple of shocking turnovers that cost the Hawks. Still, I'm very happy to see him getting a game and doing ok. Two goals and some decent ruck work. It could have been a lot worse.

He's not quick and he's not tall. That gives him a pretty big handicap to start off with in the AFL. He compensates for the speed issue with great awareness and lateral movement, but it's still an issue. Also, normally for a player to make it at his height they have good pace and often a good leap (think Fasolo or that dude from Hawthorn). He's hard at it, but he'll never take a mark like those guys.

last time we collected a set of three brothers it worked out ok for us.

It seems pretty clear that the generational change is on. Grimes, Dunn and Garland are all on the outer. Terlich and Michie as well although they are younger. We'll try to trade for something with at least some of those. We know they want to bring in Hibberd and upgrade some rookies. Not sure we'll have anything much to take to the draft.

You can only be a DFA if your club fails to offer you a contract. If GC have made him an offer then he can't be a FA.

Pretty sure you're the only person who's mentioned the umpires costing us the game. This isn't a thread about whether the umpires cost us the game. We played like [censored]. We cost ourselves the game. That's blindingly obvious. What this thread IS about is the fact that the umpires were absolutely terrible and produced an insanely one-sided performance. This is the sort of thing you normally see at WC home games. The number of blatant free kicks that they failed to pay to us is damning enough even before you look at the 50-50 calls that all seemed to go Carlton's way. The reality is that the umpiring in the AFL is as poor as in any professional sporting body anywhere in the world. They like to pat themselves on the back and tell everyone about their world-class administration, but any objective observation reveals that the AFL as a whole is poorly managed, inconsistent and frequently tries to arrange outcomes out of the public eye so that they can ignore their own rules and regulations. This is just as true within their umpiring ranks as anywhere else.

Yeah, I had a look on Footywire and was a bit surprised at how well he stacks up.y thinking may have been tainted by his poor form from the last month.

Like that time we played North and the Umps gave them five frees directly in front of goal leading to us going down by 5 points? I don't recall any great uproar about that to be honest. In fact, the only close game against North that gets talked about in the media is the one the Saints lost.