praha

I'm not putting anything down to loyalty or how we've treated him over the years. Players have left teams in the past even after being treated by royalty. As long as the $$$ are right, he will go. But I doubt the GC will offer him much more than we do. They'll be throwing their money at Ablett and saving for the likes of Riewoldt (however you spell it). We must sign him up!

There was a good ratio in round 1, but we had nothing to cheer for. Hawthorn is one of the teams I'm never worried about in regards to supporter numbers. They don't have THAT many fans. Don't be fooled by their 50,000 members: many are 1 game memberships, and they have 10,000+ that are in Tassie. I'd say they have a 25,000-35,000 strong membership of committed members in Melbourne that go to every game. Had we actually been given something to cheer for, you'd have noticed that the crowd wasn't as one sided as it looked. But, based on the TV showing, Melb v Collingwood sounded like 10-1. But we always seem to come out for interstate games, even when we get only 16k to the ground. As long as we create a cauldron (which we normally do. Those two games against Freo and Brisbane in 2008 are two of my most memorable as a supporter), we can make a lot of noise. See of red and blue people! Wear your team colours!

You'd expect Sylvia to come in.

They kept showing it several times on TV, but I was watching it on a TV with no sound at a pub so I couldn't hear if the commentators were saying it was a good tactic or illegal.

We are a chance, no doubt, but I expect Adelaide to bounce back this week. Hopefully we can get off to a good start. If we do, we'll do OK. We just can't recover from slow starts with this squad.

Thanks for adding worth to my post that he is overrated. You pretty much confirmed MY OPINION.

I think you're all getting a head of yourselves. In regards to Hawthorn, they had Mitchell and Hodge, and had several players that would snag them top 20 picks. We don't, and haven't over the past few years. Johnstone was probably the only player worth trading for a top 20 pick, and we got Grimes, which is great. But we don't have a champion in Crawford, or players like Mitchell and Hodge, to lead. We don't have players of that quality. Nor do we have a Franklin or Roughead. Nor do we have a Lonie or Thompson to trade for more top 20 picks. We're totally different to Hawthorn of 2006-2008. I still don't see us making the finals until 2012. I hope they do before then, but I don't see. I'm just being a realist based on our squad.

He defeated Jolly and Fraser on his own. If he keeps this play up from the first two games throughout the season, he would be pushing for an AA spot. But we all know we'll have to win at least 6 games for one our players to be considered for an AA spot.

Bennell was great yesterday I thought. Got his hands on the ball, made a few mistakes, but so did Jnr, MacDonald, Dunn, Bruce and Davey.

If the high tackle count insinuates that he is second to the ball, then it also would insinuate that his second efforts are amazing.

Bruce is the most overrated footballer to have been at the MFC in the 20 years I've been supporting them. He has a great football brain, but his skills have never been good, and he is a "gimmie" type player that is NEVER in and under.

Bit late now. We need to develop out forward line around the likes of Pettered, Jurrah, Watts etc. Green is great to go there every now and then, but not for an entire game. We are too reliant of him around the ground. Daniher should have realised he is a forward in the 8 years he coached him. I was saying that Green should be playing out of the goal square since 2002.

Yeah did well today. Led well, marked well and presented. That's what he must do every week.

They were pretty bad. I can handle consistently bad, but to be as one-sided as they were was pretty disgraceful. The 3AW team thought the umps were pretty bad today, too. Shaw dropping the ball in the last moments should have been a free kick based on the other holding the ball frees given out throughout the day.

Collingwood actually train on a ground that has no goal posts over summer.

I'd rather Newton and Dunn in this side than Miller and probably even Bruce. Neither bring anything to the team, but are more pointless because of their age. At least Newton and Dunn have room to improve in. Bruce and Miller are just not right for this game anymore. In saying all of that, James McDonald impresses me so much. He actually seems to improve as a player. He has actually improved over the past 3 years. You just get a feeling when you know someone is going to be a club legend. I got it with McDonald against Carlton in 1998 at Optus Oval.

lol gee, a player in the leadership group telling the media how "angry" the team is at their own performance. Never seen that before. *cough* They talk the talk. Let's see if they can walk the walk.

Unless you have something constructive to add to the argument, as opposed to simply "Bailey sucks!", your post will be deleted. You can have an opinion, pending you at least post something constructive to back it up. Basic fundamentals of society and online communities. In saying that, we will pay 1-2 great quarters, before finally bowing down and losing to the Pies by 8-12 goals on the weekend.

lol Another extreme. One extreme says Bailey can't coach and is no good, even though he's really only had one full year with the young players. The other extreme is that Bailey is a brilliant development coach, even though no young player has really gone out and beyond in his time at the club. Also, can a mod change the thread title to "Bailey as Development Coach?" or something similar.

About as many left handers.

I posted this on Big Footy. I think a lot of people think that because Hawthorn made the finals in 2 years and a flag in 3, everyone can do it: At the end of the day, the MFC gave Bailey an extension because they didn't want to go into the year with an axe hanging over their coach's head. If you go into a year with no contract, you risk the pressure associated with a possible final tenture as a coach, ala. Terry Wallace at Richmond. They did this so as to remove any speculation. No matter how bad we go, there's no way Melbourne will sack Bailey this year. No way in hell. That will ultimately backfire if we do go bad, because the media will eat us alive (like they are already) If you actually set aside some time to listen to the way the guy talks, he is very, very intelligent and knows the game of football very, very well. He doesn't just talk out of his arse. If anything, he has not given in to temptation and pressue like Frawley, Wallace etc., but instead stuck by his guns and implemented a gameplan he has faith in. It might not work now (in fact, it fails miserably), but it's not like we'd be playing finals football with this squad anyway. If I remember correctly, Al Clarkson didn't start off so flash at Hawthorn and he coped it quite a bit. In saying that, you had a Brownlow medalist and several very good older players to help the younger players grow. We just don't have that because of Daniher and his Christian pacification of the club, keeping around players like Godfrey and Ferguson when they just weren't AFL quality. We are still paying for Daniher's list management, I don't care what anyone says. We have Bruce, Miller and James McDonald as our main leaders and probably in our top 10 players. What the hell does that say? Not trying to make excuses, but it's not like Bailey is working with anything good atm. We have no players (excluding 1-3 year players) that have the leadership and star-quality potential to make this a good team. That has nothing to do with Bailey. Why don't we wait and see how this team performs after three full years of development under Bailey, not including 2008, which was essentially Bailey taking the reigns of Daniher's team before he dumped the likes of Yze and White. Every other coach has gotten that long, and Bailey has essentially only had 1 full year with a list that comes even remotely close to the kind of list he has envisioned. Bailey got there in 2008 and (thankfully) realised the team was not good enough to win a flag. Daniher should have realised that at the end of 2005. There wasn't much Bailey could do, and the real clean out didn't start until the end of 2008. That season was a complete whitewash in that we didn't really achieve much in terms of player progression. Last year saw the likes of Grimes and Morton coming through, and Jones played his first full year. And this year we'll see even more. Bailey is and has always been in a very, very tough situation, and I think he's handling it very well. Hawthorn at least had quality senior players like Hay and Lonie that would get them high draft picks. None of our senior players from the Daniher era would have warranted a top 20 pick between 2008-2010. We haven't had the assets to trade for top 20 picks the Hawks have had. Our only asset was Johnstone, and we got Grimes, who has achieved more in his first 2 years than what Johnstone did in his. And I'm not sure what the big deal is about a 5 year plan? What other option do we have? We don't have a Hodge, Mitchell, Crawford to lead the team, and how often does a team go from the bottom to the top in 2-3 years? The Saints have taken all of 7 years to reach their full potential, and it took them 3 years from 2001 to make an impact with the squad they wanted. Only now do we have the foundations of a team we want to be successful with. We didn't even come close to that in 2008, and we were a step closer in 2009. 2010 has Scully and Trengove. It took the Doggies 6 years, including 2 years of Rohde setting the foundations of the squad they have now, to play finals. Now look at them

Talk talk talk. I won't be there on Saturday, have a wedding. But I see it this way: 1 quarter of fierce, great play (either 1st or 2nd), then the Pies will come out in the 3rd and kick 5 straight, going up by 5-8 goals, then the last quarter will be a tussle, but we'll still let the Pies kick 4 goals to 1 to eventually win by 9-12 goals.

At the end of the day, not much difference is going to be made in the next 12 months. Anyone who thought we would be playing finals footy before 2012 is kidding themselves. He is here for another two years, giving the young kids a chance. He might not be the best coach going around, but he's essentially doing what Rhode did at the Bulldogs, and now look at them. As long as the young kids are bled and we get something from our older players, I think we're on the right track. But obviously playing the way we did on Saturday is unacceptable and we're better than that. We need to see improvement, and had the Hawks been at full-strength, we'd have lost by more than we did in round 1, 2008, because I think we actually played worse in the first half on Saturday than we did throughout that entire game.

How to beat Collingwood: -Outscore them. /thread.

lol posts like these make me laugh. I pay my membership fees, I haven't missed a game in Melbourne in over 10 years, and I donated to Debt Demolition. I'm only 23 and with a mortgage, and yet I still dedicate my time and money to the club. If me leaving at half-time of an insipid performance is "weak", then whatever. At the end of the day, I probably dedicate more time and money to this club than you, and I have a right to walk out on a performance I've invested so much into. Support goes beyond just being there on game day. I have done more than enough for this club to justify walking out at half-time of a performance more suited to a third-grade suburban football league. They were a disgrace on Saturday, and I merely walked out on a bad performance. I'll be there against Collingwood. I don't like walking out early, but if the performance is bad enough to make me angry that I didn't spend my day doing something productive, then I go without hesitation. I spend upwards of $50 at every game, and on top of my membership, that's a lot of cash pumped into the gameday considering my salary. I'm not asking for sympathy, but I get offended when I'm called a weak supporter. It's an insult, and the only people worth insulting are the players. Me walking out at half-time is as insulting as you can get, and they deserved it.