RalphiusMaximus

I love what Garlett brings to the table, but I'd be even happier if he could work on those hands. He could have had 50+ goals last year if it weren't for dropping easy marks and fumbling ground balls here and there.

I can't see us beating them. We'll crack in hard, but Mumford is going to be too much for Gawn and their midfield class is well above ours. Also our backline has looked really disorganised this pre-season for some reason and I worry we're going to leak goals.

I haven't found a way yet to stream on my PC. I think if you can get it to run windows 8 or 10, mobile versions (emulator of some sort?) you would be able to do it. I'm still reasonably happy to watch on my tablet.

There was also the broken back Sylvia copped after being tunneled by Butcher. Again, no case to answer.

If you look at the interview, what he actually said is he "wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

I download the replays on my PC so I can watch them on TV. Much better than trying to watch on a phone or tablet.

I'm almost done watching the TV coverage. Very interesting to pick up what I couldn't see at the ground. Oliver at 7.10 or so in the second quarter makes an amazing play. Picks up the ball in the back pocket and nails a perfect 50m pass to Pedersen, who dropped it. Oliver then followed up with a big climb and mark off the return kick and nails another pass out of defence. Hunt was actually better than I thought. He didn't get much of it and didn't get into position to use his pace outside, but I've seen him doing a lot of defensive things that I didn't expect. Lots of tackling, spoiling and generally being a pain for the opposing HFF. Our defence still looks poorly organised.

Plus Watts seems to have found his niche and is now making a serious contribution to the team.

Terlich finished top five in our B&F once. Of the players listed, I have Boyd as past it, Stevens and hunter as generic mids who can be replaced by any of their other generic mids and Picken as probably being phased out if he can't do more than tag. I rate Stringer, Bontempelli, Wallis, Wood, Dahlhaus and Murphy as being notably better then the others. That is the core group who's absence was felt yesterday. The rest? As I said, they have a hoard of interchangeable mids/flankers who run and use the ball well. Crameri I am ignoring as he's not an AFL player right now. Jed Adcock - 21 Games (with Brisbane) Jordan Roughhead - 16 Games Tom Boyd - 14 Games Lin Jong - 13 Games Jack Redpath - 12 Games Fletcher Roberts - 12 Games Mitch Honeychurch - 11 Games Joel Hamling - 11 Games Will Minson - 10 Games Caleb Daniel - 10 Games Bailey Dale - 10 Games Lukas Webb - 10 Games Plus Libratore who is an automatic selection for their side but didn't play last year. These are all players who were a regular part of the side (plus Adcock) and are quite capable of challenging the 15 young Adonises listed above who are apparently Godlike in their abilities when compared to mere mortals like the other players on their list. Added to this is their likely CHB for the coming season in Adams who is of course a mature recruit and as such does not have games under his belt yet.

Have to go out right now, but this evening I'll not only name them, but I'll provide how many games they played last year.

Ok, enough of the rubbish about the doggies having 15 round 1 starters missing from the side. The doggies have a huge number of second string players who are largely interchangeable. Claiming that the ones they played yesterday are lesser players than the ones they didn't is a fabrication their fans have cooked up to make themselves feel better about the loss. The reality is that they were missing six or seven of their best, and that clearly hurt them, but the side they had on the park had better than a dozen players who were regular starters for them last year.

Have a look at the side that played today. There are a dozen or more who were regular starters in their side last season. They're only down half a dozen or so who are clearly better than what was on the park. It's all just trying to spin a loss they thought would be an easy win. Bont, Wallis, Stringer, Murphy, Dahlhaus, Wood. The rest are good players who are interchangeable. They have a hoard of more or less identical running mid/flankers. Naming a bunch who didn't play doesn't make them better than the ones who did. Boyd is getting past it, so throwing his name in there is questionable at best. Morris, meh. I'd take three of the backs they had today over him. There's no denying that they had probably six of their best off the park today, but the rest is just BS their fans are throwing out to make themselves feel better.

Except we've had years of those sort of losses and the same division of posters existed. There were those who said that it was a good performance to get close and those who insisted that if it wasn't a win it wasn't good enough. Quite frankly I don't remember which camp you fall into, but from your recent posting I would guess the latter. What has Roos been preaching for two years? No more "honourable losses." We want wins. This was a win. To complain that the opposition didn't put their best side in is less than useless. Nobody is saying that it was perfect. Most of us have singled out the same half dozen or so players as having had a good game while the rest were very rusty. That doesn't change the fact that we produced a hard-nosed performance characterised by brutal contested play and tackling which got us the win despite the very noticeable skill errors.

Seriously? I think you need to hand back those memberships and go follow Richmond or something. Why do you bother claiming to be a Melbourne supporter? If we lose we're a crap team. If we win we didn't win by enough. What would you be saying if we'd smashed them by 50? "Oh, it was just their reserves, it doesn't count, they'll still destroy us in the real season..." You can only beat the side that shows up to play you. It doesn't matter if it's the best their club can field or not. What we did today was win ugly, and I'll take that over getting cut to pieces any day.

Also, I spotted 'Gus in the stand high-fiving the team as they walked off. No bandages on his knee, but he did have a bit of a limp as he walked down the steps.

OK, that was a hell of a long drive back from the ground. I was at the scoring end, so missed a lot of what happened at the other end of the ground, including two goals to Watts apparently. Anyway: There was a solid three goal wind blowing to my end. It was pretty consistent for the whole game. We were three down at quarter time, level at half time, three down at 3/4 time... The big difference is that the doggies couldn't score against the wind. One of the biggest issues I had with our team today is that they didn't seem to have any idea of what the wind was doing to their kicks. We saw both kickers over-hitting passes because the wind caught them and targets missing the ball because they couldn't read the drop when it was kicked into the wind. The Doggies read the flight much better than we did. One of the biggest positives was the furious attack on the ball and the man. Even a bulldogs side without half a dozen senior players has a very strong midfield, and we matched them through brute force as much as skill. This is what Roos has been talking about when he asked for a team of competitors. Even though we didn't handle the wind well and many had a bad case of the fumbles, the attack kept them in the game and more often than not won the ball. Other positives: Watts: Took some really good marks, roved between the 50 and the wing and occasionally dropped into defence at the end of the quarter (and took a nice mark in the goalsquare down there). My biggest issue with his game was that he took long shots against the wind in the first and third, but refused to take the same shots with the wind behind him in the second and fourth. He could have had five or six today if he'd backed himself to kick 50m with the wind at his back. Gawn was immense again. They were actually pulling Boyd out of his forward spot to double-team him at one point. Boyd was designated ruck and just blocked Gawn out while Minson got the uncontested hitout (I'm pretty sure that blocking is illegal, but the umps were not on our side today). Speaking of Boyd, he did not impress. He was lazy defensively, kicked poorly and in general just failed to impact the game. Viney is awesome. I have to say this. Even when he turned the ball over, he went back in and won it again. Harmes took a ripping hanger and goal, which was nice. I have a feeling though that he may have also been the one who kicked a perfect pass to a Bulldog for a nine-point goal. Kennedy worked really hard and in the second half that translated into winning more ball and creating attacking opportunities. Our backline weren't great today. They were disorganised and repeatedly got caught out being too far up the ground while their opponents had dropped off and were wide open in the 50. At one point Nev was marking Boyd (who didn't manage to take a mark on him). I think they were too eager to attack and forgot about their men or just assumed that someone else was covering for them. Overall, a good win even if the doggies were missing a few. It was based on guts and hard work more than skill, but hopefully they will get the touch back by the start of the season. There were far too many players fumbling for my liking, including a few dropped chest marks. You have to give them a pass, but lots still to work on.

Interesting point from the game today. When Pedersen was dumped over the boundary at HF, Oliver was a few feet away and turned to jog off and set up for the throw-in. A teammate (I think vandenBerg) yelled at him something along the lines of "He's your teammate, give him a hand up!" by which time Pedersen had already picked himself up. Still, it's another example of team-building and player-driven standards in action.

I have no real basis for this opinion, so please feel free to treat it with the respect any totally uninformed opinion deserves, but I have developed the impression that he hasn't really figured out the degree of dedication required to be an elite player yet. This could just be a response to his reportedly relaxed and happy demeanor. Who knows? We'll see.

This exactly. I would add the Saints to that list as well. The thing we really need to do as a team is put away the teams we should be beating. Too often we drop the easy ones and it destroys all confidence and momentum.

As a supporter who loves the MFC I want to despise Mitch, but I have too much experience with people suffering this sort of thing to really place the blame with him. The thing is that there is nothing more selfish than a mental illness. It's very easy for a healthy person to say that he's been dishonest or lacking in integrity, but this is someone who's brain has more or less been hijacked. When the illness is in control those concepts just aren't a factor. I think one of the hardest things to understand as an observer is that this isn't someone making a choice to behave like this. It's not a matter of them having a really really strong urge to do things that they should know not to. More often than not they don't see any other option. Their illness won't let them.

I on the other hand don't get mobile coverage at home and the landline is so bad it's virtually unusable. On a good day it may be possible to get 1MB/second on the internet, but that isn't often. For years we have fought Telstra to get the lines fixed or repaired, and replies have varied from "Our records indicate that this has been fixed" to "it's your fault" to "as long as you can dial out we have no obligation to fix it" to the most recent "wait for the NBN." I think I have good reason to regard them as a terrible company.

They could offer me free entry to every game of the season and I still wouldn't go with Telstra. They're right up there with Australia Post as contenders for worst business in Australia.

Didn't he look unfit in the photo on that article?

The little bit I watched featured something I hope not to see again. Watts took a good grab on the 50. Rather than take the shot, he passed to frost in the pocket. It was a perfect pass, but Frost from 30m at an angle is far less likely to score than Watts from 50m. In this case the team thing would have been to take the shot himself.

I only saw the first few minutes on my tablet during a break at work. It looked like a classic Melbourne pre-season game, with injuries, dirty play by the opposition not being called and us unable to score. How the hell did we turn that around? I look forward to watching the replay once it's up on the AFL site.