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McLean, Bate and Jones are all reasonably slow movers and the game has gone up a notch but lets extend the analysis to our team at large which is the heart of my point. Forget other teams for one moment Moe. Dunn, Bell, Bartram, Meesen and Newton are good examples of the players who the club obtained not too long before Bailey came onto the scene. It is quite simply slim pickings. Since Bailey has arrived, we have recruited with much more purpose throughout the entire range of the previous 2 drafts, especially last year and this is why I made my point about promise. It wasn't a generic "happy happy joy joy lets all stick our heads in the sand and wish and hope" point of view but one based on the type of players we recruited who are more suited to the modern game. Daniher came close to playing 18 utilities every week and his emphasis was not on individual development. Daniher made the best of what he had but did not seek to improve it or get rid of the players who were not good enough. The other thing about our midfield is that not only don't we have elite mids but we don't even have fast mids. Geelong are elite, Essendon are fast with the possibly of becoming elite one day - we are neither. With the wealth of experience Daniher had horded in our team and the way they played, it was pretty much a no brainer that they would be there abouts - the thing is though they were never ever going to be better than what they were. This team subsequently died in the ass 3/4 of the way through season 2006 and Bailey inherited it at rock bottom at the end of 2007. Now Bailey has to rebuild a young team from scratch with hardly any top quality senior players to assist him on the field - the youngsters are not doing too bad but our personnel all over the ground is a problem that won't be fixed by next week. Coaching for tomorrow is essential when you are in the situation we are in and I may say is almost unavoidable. We still don't have our future blueprint even on the field. Having said that if Bailey wasn't coaching for today to some level then why has our defensive set up improved since last year where we have our most settled group of players? I know what you are saying Moe, planning for the future is no excuse for bad football now and to an extent I agree but you need to look at all the factors behind why we are bad other than the fact that Bailey is looking to kids of the future - many of the current players Bailey is trying to extract decent football out of now are just not up to it. To make things worse, many kids may drop off later this year due to the load in their first year. I definitely agree that we need to lift our game with manning up and our zoning (forming and breaking) as well as other areas but as far as being an attacking unit is concerned we have a fair few limitations atm.

Completely correct.

I have no problem with Sheehan having a crack, it was bound to happen at some stage but the biggest loss this year so far is what it took for him to take notice - perhaps we were going well enough throughout the season for him to umm and ahh. I am intrigued as to what exactly the "youth excuse" actually is. We have many developing young players as well as youngsters yet to play for us and I don't think this has been used as a crutch at all. The reality is that our youth have performed reasonably well given the circumstances. Our defence is predominantly young that started its rise last year when Garland was instrumental. What (IMO) the majority of supporters understand is that we have a personnel issue and this is more than exemplified in the middle and up forward. How on earth can we blame youth when our next generation forward (Watts) has played 1 game and others like Jurrah are a little bit off and we are perhaps looking at drafting another forward (Butcher) if possible? A lot of the youth supporters are anticipating to perform haven't even been on the park. I think Sheehan sums it up best with "Champion Data stats show the Demons are more effective defensively this year, yet it's much the same old sorry tale in other areas." Maybe he should go one step further to think about why. NEWSFLASH Mike, most of our kids down back are the reason why our defence has improved and the majority of Melbourne supporters know this! Up forward we have players in their twilight or perhaps being moved on at years end and in the middle we have no depth or elite performers - since when has this been a "youth" cop out or even argued as such? Any relevance of our youth is simpy a reminder that we have a team in transition and being one of the younger sides we will only improve. Youth is part of the solution and I think Sheehan is wrong if he thinks that youth has been bandied about as part of the problem or an excuse. Given the circumstances, our younger players have been reasonably good, especially those that were thrown into it just this year. Prior to Bailey turning up we had a plethora of neither here nor there players and purely because we have had to delist mostly older players there are still a fair few on the list who don't serve a purpose - we need to fine tune. Since Bailey has been at the club we have recruited with purpose and the youngsters added to our list in the last 2 years show genuine promise - how this can be construed in any other way than a positive is beyond me.

Yes indeed there has been a problem with players leaving their opponent free in the effort to exert extra pressure on the ball carrier. However we have also had many instances of where players have not left their man at the required time to get an easy assist. What it comes down to is the reading of the play, your speed of movement to cover a player in time and also which players are committing to the tackle and where. Lets look at the midfield: Yes, I noticed many instances where a Melbourne player left his opponent forward of the ball only to be too late in helping his team mate and see the handball or kick go over his head to his direct opponent. In this case, the player forward of the ball (ie towards the oppositions goals) should not be the extra tackler, they should stick with their player. It should be an extra player from behind the ball who should push forward (ie one of our offensive side players) and assists with the tackle or spill. The reason we need to take this approach is because our current midfield is not very fluent in movement. Example: Jones is 1on 1 contesting with say Pendelbury for the ball, instead of McDonald leaving Swan (who is forward of the ball) at snails pace to get to the contest he should stay on Swan and instead a half forward moves down to assist Jones. This way we cut off the player's options and also bring another of our own players into the area and if we do lose the ball at least it will not hurt us forward of the play. Once our midfield gains better ground coverage we may not be as exposed but leaving players on their own forward of the ball atm is killing us. In defence and up forward it is a different situation where we need numbers at the ball to support each other.

Correct. When you struggle to run the lines you are limited with your attacking options and to a degree with your defensive ability. Bailey understands this and will address it with respect to drafting. If you think that McLean's lack of pace is some how Bailey's fault then go figure. Moe, you know very well that the main tagger we have used inside the midfield has been McDonald and he has simply struggled. We don't tag out guns like Mitchell and Pendlebury because we can't - it is that simple. Bailey knows exactly what is going on in the middle and how it needs to be addressed but if you don't have the cattle then you are in trouble. Bartram is a secondary tagger for the outer players more often than not and he is hit and miss at the moment. Last year we copped 100 point beltings, apart from the two Collingwood games this year most of our games have had respectability on the scoreboard. When you consider what a shambles our forward set up is and our lack of corridore running power it shows how much more competitive the team has become. We are still moving kids in and out each week, we have a plethora of neither here nor there utilities that are being given their last chances to perform. Our forward setup has hardly stayed the same from one week to the next. Game day tactics and coaching will come to the fore once Bailey has established the blue print of the team he is happy with. I am not saying that we can't play smart football but it takes conviction and confidence in your fellow players to be a running and linking team and one or two slower players in the middle can drag the others down with them especially when they are important players who are hard to replace due to lack of inside depth. The dissapointing thing about the Collingwood game was that we let ourselves down with the basics that we had built on. Our manning up and zoning was non-existant. Although it must be hard to get our zoning right with the changing of positions and ins and outs every week I agree that this should be better. Our forward structure is not helped by the forward line being a drop in centre but I must agree with others that we could do better with how we place certain players closer to goal and create more options, atm there is no purpose to how it is set up.

Until yesterday we looked like being competitive as well. WCE could have a few wins to put them over 4 for the season no arguement but lets just see how they go first. Their priorities may not necessarily be wins anymore and there are many ways that a club can go about effecting the circumstantial aspects of their game whilst still looking competitive.

For the remainder of the year we should (IMO) give Grimes stints in the middle whilst we have seniors like McDonald there to share the load. It is not as if we can just put him full time in the guts for the remaining 11 games though, I think the load would be too much - it needs to be integrated. With 3 or 4 games to go I reckon Jetta or Bennell could have a stint there as well as a prelude to pre-season training.

Correct, finals have officially been written off by Worsfold and it is reasonable to expect WCE to employ "list management" like any club in their position. We will have to wait and see how things are closer to the end of the season before we pencil in picks.

Sylvia definitely had the best game today but there were a few others who had a go. Grimes was good today and although he made some mistakes I think Cheney at least tried to be purposeful. Jamar after a slow start got into the game as well. One player who I noticed for entirely different reasons to his usual game was Warnock. No doubt he didn't have the best of games today but he seemed to have a go a few times at running the ball out of defence and I must say he wasn't too bad at it - nothing flash but reasonable pace and conviction like say a McPhee from Essendon a few years ago. Defensive run is an aspect of our game that I hope we work on more and more and Warnock may have an extra string to his bow that I didn't know about.

You can't just manufacture an "enforcer". Moloney is proof. He is hard at the ball, strongly built, bashes and crashes but intimidates nobody. What we need are established players who are kings of their game and can exert genuine mental pressure on opponents and make them worry about them. Didak and players like that who make defenders conscious of how dangerous they are and then get in the mind of their opponent is what we need. We don't need smart asses but more players who know they have the attributes to put opponents off their game - there is a craft to it. Almost our entire team is an inconsequential group with no personality or pschological strength we need to change this. Unfortunately only once we become more dominant as a team will this grow - you can't force it, it just doesn't work because most oppositions are better than us atm.

Bailey has accomplished a lot of the boring jobs that had to be done without an immediate reward such as with delisting and recruiting. Apart from today, I think it is fair to say that there has been a noticable improvement in response in how the playing group has gone about it this year. Our football department is still not what it should be and this makes coaching life difficult. I am sure Bailey knows what he wants to do and where our deficiencies are but he can only do so much in a certain time. We only just blooded the first of our top 3 draft picks from last year this round (11) when other teams have young guns playing in the middle as of round 1. Our defence has become a unit which will only improve and this is directly due to the way Bailey and Wellman have built and developed it. Our midfield is a black hole. This completely effects the team dynamic. Only talent will fix this as well as better facilities with respect to conditioning - it will take time but having said that I hope Bailey starts injecting youth in there for the rest of the year on a rotational basis. Up forward is a similar personnell issue which we will fix over time. Our senior players are remnants from the Daniher era who only know one way to play. It is hard for the seniors to adapt to playing with kids in 2009 footy and even harder for the kids to adapt to the senior players. IMO next year will be the year that Bailey is under the pump but this year is important to get right as far as laying the foundations. With better facilities, more games under the belts of our kids and a bigger footy department then IMO Bailey becomes fair game. My only reservation with how Bailey is coaching is that our players don't zone very well and breaking laterally from centre clusters or to position is very bad. This I suspect is inhibited by our lack of run and endurance which we desperately need to work on but I just wonder how much we had to go back to the drawing board last year. I think you have to know where a coach has come from in order to measure how much progress he has made and I think some posters don't appreciate this aspect. We have many areas where we need to improve but all in all I don't see what more Bailey could have done to date if you want a job done properly with no short cuts.

It comes down to what sort of situation we are in. Are we playing him because we want to play him or because we have to play him or because we think we should play him as he is captain? It is hard to know what the inner sanctom at the club are thinking at this stage. We are in quite a predicament where there are apparently no real obvious young players who are pushing for spots in the midfield. I think we should use McDonald purely for rotation depth for the remainder of the year and put a few (admittedly raw) kids in the middle while he is still there as back up. Grimes, Jetta and Bennell are all underdeveloped but they are examples of young players who could get a bit more game time in the middle whilst we still have the likes of McDonald to rotate with them. If we wait until next year it makes things much harder IMO. At the end of the day, there have been first year draft picks thrown in the middle by other teams for almost entire seasons, Palmer last year, Rich this year. I realise that they were more developed physically but half the season has already gone and we have to make every last game this year count.

"There is not a skerrick of animosity or resentment towards Melbourne in any fashion from our president, myself or our club, however I've often wondered if those sentiments have been reciprocated," Rose said. Not sure how they can take a moral high ground in any of this considering they pounce on all the hard work MFC did with 'Mission' and now come out in the media to say they are squeaky clean but want to have a whinge at the same time. If they honestly thing that everything should just fall in their lap through whatever avenues then they need a reality check. Darwin isn't just an idea of the Bulldogs anyway, Port Adelaide have been considering for a while now about playing a small but long term part in the Darwin market, finances have forced the issue with them of late but they have traditionally had reasonably strong links with NT football. Article

haha very true, it pays not to think about it too hard atm.

As the season goes on, more and more clubs will end up playing kids as much as possible. Melbourne, Richmond and WCE have either a 1st or 2nd round PP to sweeten things but I reckon even some of the other clubs closer to the top 8 will do a similar thing once the writing is on the wall. The GC's influence will come home to roost for many clubs as the season nears the end and if Port can put the cue in the rack by about round 13 last year then there is no reason why they won't do it again (apart from Choco being under the pump). North's next 4 games are very hard and could put them in the doldrums as well so they may possibly call it a day earlier than expected (if at all). I think the 2nd half of the season is going to be very interesting indeed.

I can't see the club not picking these two if they had the chance and I doubt anyone would argue with it either. Elite mid and a good KP forward would do very nicely.

Jamar's game on the weekend was superb for a first senior game back and King and Gardiner are no pushovers. 29 hitouts, 3 contested marks, 9 contested possessions and 6 tackles and his dominance allowed PJ to play more of a mobile game himself getting 22 possies IIRC. Our rucks aren't flash but they are good enough for the time being. If a top ruckman fell in our lap obviuously we wouldn't say no but an elite mid is critical and a KP forward not too far behind. The thing about Jamar's game (and I realise it is only 1 game) is that he could get the ball for his side. Mobility is not as critical if a ruckman uses the players around him well and this is where we must improve first with our ball carriers. Jamar isn't a go to man but more the first link in the chain who wins many taps or in this case contested possessions and lays it off with a simple hand ball - nothing flash just simple and efficient. Our ball carriers are the ones who need to improve on their use of the ball. This doesn't mean ruckmen are over rated either though, 29 hitouts to Jamar may not have gone to a Melbourne player every time but it is 29 less hitouts that the Saints won which made life harder for their on ball brigade.

We missed him critically tonight. Without getting embroiled in the whole should he or shouldn't he aspect of being dropped, how bad is our forward set up when a player who supposedly isn't playing to the level required is so profoundly missed? I know it can't be easy when you have players coming in and out of the forward line every week but does anyone actually think that Josh Mahoney has a semblance of a forward structure at the moment. I can't see even a basic interaction between the forwards. They all seem to be doing their own thing, trying hard but not making things easy that's for sure.

He just isn't coming on as well as he should be IMO. I don't want to have a go at him for his kicking but I just wonder at times if he is even focusing. In front of goals anything greater than a 20 degree angle and he just holds the ball almost side ways and kicks and hopes. You have to at least focus when going for goal. I just have some major concerns over our midfield in general, we are in some serious trouble if we don't get some quality in there next year. No elite runners, no elite ball users, no supporting each other.

I went for Hawthorn as well. The old firms Collingwood and Carlton are naturally up there but the Hawks IMO have a bit of a smugness about them as an organisation. Carlton and Collingwood I am happy with never making a GF again. :D

It will be interesting to see how Jamar goes in the ruck although I have no idea what to expect as a first senior game back - will his mobility be better or worse due to a lack of senior level rigours of footy? Daniel Bell listed at HFF, not that we can take these lists too seriously with respect to position. I wish Bell luck on the injury front and hope he can get back to his best (and beyond) to at least make his case. The gauntlett has been laid down to Robbo based on "parts of his game" and this is no surprise - the ball is in his court. Petterd out - no doubt frustrating for him especially as there is one less player competing for a forward spot this week but I can see why Bailey is prepared to give some others a go ahead of him.

One aspect of White's game that I still miss was the fact that he was usually a reliable go-to marking option for our kick outs down the guts when we needed an outlet. Of our current ruck stock I don't see any that have put their hand up for that role. Hopefully things will change as apects of our game plan grow and our rucks grow in confidence and ability.

Good read there mate. "a few eyebrows were raised by some older folk" lol - don't these codgers know they have to lighten up, we're expanding into Casey for God's sake. :D

Rhino, I saw the post and replied to it without knowledge that you had pulled it - you will have to take my word for that and understand my post was at length. Please refrain on asserting whether I display grace or lack there of based on assumption. I'll edit the post now. I understand that and I did not take you out of context but there is also a similar arguement for Robbo as well given he is our most potent forward atm and in his twilight as a player. Absolutely spot on and this is where perspective comes into this. Robbo is a known quantity for his individual style of play and it is critical that he does his best. He didn't do his best on Sunday and that was extremely dissapointing but what I am trying to say is that even if he did it would probably be inadequate as far as forward pressure goes. Robbo is not a 2009 forward but we are playing him - this is where we are at as a club and this is what we have to accept. Competitiveness is critical in current footy and the job Robbo has is even harder than ever. For a 30 year old playing above his height who has seen the game go up a notch (whilst out) he deserves a little leeway given he is carrying a bigger load (notwithstanding his poor effort) than many others. Lets hope he can just lift his 1 %ers and use his head better. I have no problem with a forward taking opportunistic liberties if they are playing percentages or common sense. Robbo simply made a bad decision in this case. His effort is a seperate issue which he can work on. Yes I agree, in that last game he did not put in and that effort was below his own standards - he would know that too I reckon. I agree but I appreciate the role he is playing for us and it is this point where to an extent I am prepared to take the good with the bad as long as he tries harder than he did on Sunday.

Agree with that.