Little Goffy

Might be a Tom McDonald thing. Once ypon a time I was at a cafe at one of those fashionable giant semi-communal tables and Tom was sitting opposite me the entire I leafed through the football news and checked demonland on my phone. I was even wearing the scarf. He enjoyed the double-take when I finally twigged as I was getting up.

Have to acknowledge the new administration's rapid action to increase the club's output of weddings.

Maybe you can. It has been proven conclusively that I definitely cannot.

Do you remember that time a $400m joint NASA-ESA mission was destroyed on landing because just one engineer in one sector had forgotten to convert inches to centimetres? Misplaced by about that much.

For the first time ever I've gone 'oh, I know it!' within a couple of seconds of looking. Almost certainly wrong but I'm just going to savour the moment before I send the PM.

The other day I got rid of some unwanted stuff (tip; evaporative coolers do sweet f-a when you don't have the option of also ventilating the space) at Cash Converters and was Christian Petracca there? NO! I get that it was a couple of days before his wedding, but he'll still be married tomorrow while it could be years before I drop in to Cash Converters again. We'll never make finals with this attitude.

A nice touch that it is made of wood, too complete the pointless anchor alliteration.

Mindfulness and mind-set coaching. When it's bad, it's rubbish and actually does harm. When its good, it trains people to be aware of the things they're doing which aren't actually helpful, and to deliberately choose to replace them with actually useful habits. It can also be quite good for learning to not give two ****s about external opinion, including avoiding the trap of reacting disrespectfully just to prove you don't care. Really optimistic about this appointment.

Possibly an autocorrect trip, or the writer was using Grammarly so it just assumed everything was middle-manager-speak?

You'd think people (or at least Zero Hanger) would have a full grasp of this after the shameful commentaries about Koutafides, who backended his contract to hell twice so that Carlton could cope when the AFL decided to enforce the salary cap on them for a few seasons. But trying to piece together a full picture of the peaks and troughs of player salaries would be quite the task, and nobody would click! Still, Ben McKay, lol. It should read 'Ben Mckay plus the premium rate for not having to use any trade value in the AFL's ridonkulus patchwork system.

It is weird to me how language loses meaning when people pick up a catchphrase or expression without actually knowing the meaning, and then just... use it when it feels good? I guess? 'One of those players with a glass ceiling' must be the weirdest description of a draftee I've ever heard.

I think there is space for a very wide rethink of how contracts are constructed. It all seems very ad hoc, and very much just an accumulated legacy as the league went from semi-professional to professional to 'marketplace'. Doesn't help that the AFL administration is addicted to reactive tweaks. At the simplest level every contract needs to succeed at giving both the player and the club security in an environment where a player's 'worth' can dramatically turn in the space of minutes, never mind years. I wonder how much of the current chaos, minutiae, and confusion could be boiled down to just a few key points?

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but if Langford does indeed get picked round 1 it will be a major early career test of his character. His 19th birthday is the night before, and it is a saturday night.

Yoikes, it is no wonder Simon Goodwin struggles to embed a game plan when the goalposts keep getting shuffled around. One moment Brisbane are missing key players, the next it is the replacements. Coleman, Doedee and McCarthy may well be in our 22, but they wouldn't be pushing our Petracca, Oliver and Brayshaw to do it. Anyway, it is a side argument. You believe that Simon Goodwin is the problem, I believe we've been hit hard by circumstance and have managed to load up on new talent during the storm.

Sigh. You just know the moment anyone says 'I'm optimistic that if we can get our best players back on the field we'll be back in contention' someone with a Goodwin-shaped axe to grind will announce that Brisbane had just returned from the Somme when they won the premiership. I'll sum it up. Oscar McInerney was the only missing Brisbane player who had polled a top-5 best and fairest finish at any club in the previous four seasons. Meanwhile the Demons we're trying to make do without two routine contenders for the Brownlow medal as well as one of our most important leaders, on top of a normal injury mix. Anyway, 2024 featured not only injuries but more simply a very poor season from about half a dozen of our best players. It was a huge drop in performance. If most of them return from injury and regain some form, then 2024 will be defined by the swell that produces alongside multiple highly rated kids that our misfortune and wisdom has allowed us to draft and to get games into. There is a possibility that we will absolutely stop the competition into dust in 2025. But the range of possibilities for us includes everything from barely competitive to absolutely dominant. It's a weird one. Just please leave the axe at the door.