Little Goffy

I actually had someone break up with me because their horrible mother insisted, so I think I'm even closer to the pin on the Jackson feelings!

I already thought the AFL were being a bit too obvious and dodgy with their commercial favours to Essendon with the high profile fixtures, but rigging the Suns' game just so that next wednesday's match wouldn't be a total dead rubber is surely going too far.

I don't remember a specific Isandlwana reference in those mad novels but I do recall the Flashman and can see how it would play. Ahh, Flashman, who I do believe went on to become Rowley Birkin QC after retirement.

It's a shame that some of the more detailed stats like metres gained and score involvements don't got back a long way in the publicly available records like Footywire. Got a little bit of a Fyfe vibe and it would be great to compare. Langford is much better looking and has the bison shoulders and haircut, but many of the available stats are quite similar. One thing that sits nicely with a Fyfe comparison is the way Fyfe's second season worked out. Good games pretty much every week, but then mixed in with that were four BOG 3-vote brownlow games which were genuinely powerful. I can see that being Langford's early growth path; never slouching, and sometimes just putting together a totally dominant game foreshadowing more to come. Langford's style and toolset is as perfect for the current game as Fyfe's was for the 2010s. He's Goldilocks!

I think the particular issue has been poorly handled in the traditional way for large organisations with mostly performative motivations for taking a stand on genuine issues. It has been 20 years of 'meh' followed by roaring cannons. Ah well, as much as the heavy-handed stuff is irritating, the fact that the general populace is pretty solidly aligned with the core goal will mean it'll settle after a while. In a way, we're dealing with the final sliver of numb-nuts who maybe need to have 'consequences' thrown at them. I do worry, though, that there's a secondary politics within the game that just like with every other issue will shield certain clubs from being 'outed' because of their established connections and capacity to harass anyone who criticises. You know, like with salary cap breaches, on-field thuggery, [recreational droogs], [performance droogs], draft tampering, fixturing, promotional opportunities, institutional-scale and personal racism, sexism, beating the [censored] out of people, etc etc etc etc Collingwood definitely would know they are less likely to be pinged for similar behaviour than other clubs, ergo it is in their interest to have the rules be as punitive and reactive (and vague) as possible in all cricumstances. TLDR; The underlying goal of the penalty is valid and the issue will be largely historical within years, but the method of delivery is heavy-handed and symptomatic of a poorly functioning organisation. This is giving some people the opportunity to resent the principle and play into the 'Cult of d-head as victim.'

Dancing along that line between 'due diligence to ensure correct payment and prevent fraud' and 'deliberate obstruction of process and harassment of clients to apply pressure for a cheaper settlement'. Strange fact is, the amounts of money involved in the insurance payouts could rival the amounts of money in the sponsorship.

What did Roos call it? The 'veil of negativity'. I suspect it is a little more treatable than the impact of a decade of abject cellar-dwelling, but being so good and falling short against your own expectations has to be tough. We really Isandlwana'd it, and we're in need of a Rorke's Drift to reset.

Yikes, calm it down. You're not 'wrong', but you're not that right.

6 Gawn 5 Langford 4 May 3 Salem 2 Fritsch 1 Pickett Difficult one. Many were good, but many came in and out of the game or had some very visible clangers.

Bang lol bang lol bang lol? Geebus, Langford has got something. Gawn putting punctuation on his All Australian selection. Been good seeing Van Rooyen effect some contests.

It is a complicated question because when you consider players who might have been considering greener pastures or who the club might feel are at their plateau in the current environment, all of them might also get the same fresh kick from new coach and significant changes to the whole coaching panel. Of the younger players with at least a few seasons in the system already, all of McVee, Rivers, Sparrow, Van Rooyen and Petty would be reassessing both sides of the equation. I suspect (feeling only) that Turner, Bowey and Chandler would all feel pretty confident about their future at Melbourne both in the sense of making good personal progress and being valuable to the club. There's also a bunch of older players who really need to examine what they want from the final 2 to 5 years of their career. To me, Langdon and Fritsch just 'feel like' part of the club's personality now. Max kind of goes without saying, Viney is never going to get a better contract or be more appreciated anywhere else. Salem looks like the most likely to assess that his future is to provide the quality 'completion' to another list, rather than always falling a little short of the expectations here. His epic 2021 kind of put a weight on his shoulders where 'Salem, yeah, I guess he was alright today' feels like a disappointment every week. That leaves the tall defender veterans. I'd assume McDonald and May will see out there careers with us and that includes at least 2026. Lever... something hasn't been going right for him for a while. He's another who will be assessing what the effect of the new coach will be on his performance and role. If the new coach arrival insists that he has to adapt his role away from his 'preferred' game, then Lever might make the valid choice to find a club which needs his particular way. That's a long post and I've not mentioned either the twin elephants in the room or the mice, but I won't pretend to know how things will pan out with either set. I guess my list to watch most closely would be Salem, Lever and then the McVee-Rivers-Sparrow group. This will be an unpopular opinion but in purely ruthless list management terms all of them are replaceable.

All three could be quality players with valuable characteristics that can make our team much less predictable. This might be a more significant announcement than the low-profile would suggest.

Whatwhatsaywhat, I appreciate the exemplary restraint and civility you have brought to Demonland there. Nietaphart, surely you mean we have enough -old- backmen. Anyway, McGovern has performed to AFL standard sometimes. I think we're just about all agreed that is not a sufficient use of a list spot, especially if it obstructs the development path of the next generation of tall defenders coming through. For example, while he builds his body Kalani White will likely spend a lot of time at Casey mastering the positioning and rhythms of the intercepting defender. Given that McGovern is like a stockier, slower Lever there would be a clear jam of roles.

One of the alleged knocks on Buckley was that he didn't appreciate or connect very well with the flawed and second tier players. I'll speculate that one of the advantages for coaches like Clarkson, Sheedy, Fagan and Hardwick is that they understand the value of not only the not-perfect contributors, but also the stars and silky types who can do things they never could. I'd also argue Bruce understood it even in his playing days. Knew his limitations and knew which teammate to connect with. Although looking back the Daniher years were not wildly blessed with smooth operators or outright top rated players.

I for one love the AFL's commitment to growing the game in Sydney by showing us Essendon St Kilda and not this silly little top-4 game between two contenders with question marks over them, with wild momentum swings close scores and blah blah blah...

Is there any link to a stream of the game?

Junk game best forgotten as quickly as possible. Specific disappointment with Pickett. Ten disposals, one goal, not looking very interested. Hopefully hitting the '20 disposals and 2 goals per game' mark for the first time of any player in 15 seasons will perk him up a little next week. He'd need 25 disposals and 2 goals to get there. Let's see what is left of Collingwood to bite into.

Already time to start looking for the interesting details inside the game. So here's mine; Max Gawn has a curious pattern of gathering a large number of hitouts in the first quarter, particularly in the first 20 minutes or so, and then it tapers to a more reasonable pace for the rest of the game. I suspect that if his first quarters were his overall rate, he'd be averaging close to 60 hitouts per game. What strikes me about that is that it is clearly not a matter of fatigue as his other stats tend to pick up the pace later in the game - the around the ground intercepts, marks, and general involvement all push hard. So here's a challenge for the detailed stats experts - is this a genuine pattern or just a coincidence of a few games I noticed it in? And how does it play out on things like his @WheeloRatings figures? Does Gawn in hitout-mode outrank Gawn in around-the-ground mode?

That couldn't possibly go wrong.

These last few rounds seems to be becoming a competitive level of [censoreding]-the-bed. Tragically, Freo's effort against Brisbane mean it is no longer realistic to try to knock Collingwood out of the 8. But there is a fair prospect of making them play away from home for all finals if we can drop them to 7th-8th. Just makes handing some misery to Hawthorn all the more important. Meanwhile, there's no real clue on Geelong's form. You can only beat who you're matched against, but in the second half of the season they have only beaten one team (the perennially flaky Suns) from the top-8, lost their other two contests, and then just accumulated beat-ups against much lower rated teams.

Fact is, if Buckley comes to us then from day one he will have exactly as many premierships with us as with Collingwood. He could well be with us for a decade, and by the end of that time Collingwood will be 'the old club he played for that never quite reached success despite every advantage', while Melbourne will be where he won the 2028, 2030 and 2031 premierships. The story will be that he never really found happiness until he separated himself from that awful club. This isn't Collingwood 'giving' us something, this is us taking an opportunity to redeem a soul.

I hadn't even thought of him in leadership terms until I opened this thread. Chewing on it now... He has shwon some good character qualities. Actual on-field contribution is improving steadily. Two more years we'd have a reasonable idea of his ceiling and how well his maturity progresses to being the calm head and communicator in the urgent moments. The swingman aspect of his game is a bonus touch. So... if all went well then two years from now we would be looking at a non-DH version of James Sicily, which would be outstanding. Personally I don't see it being likely he'll reach quite those heights, but I think we can be confident he'll be a good contributor to reaffirming standards and behaviours for years to come.

Pre-spleening he was explicitly kept to lower minutes and less midfield time in the first half and early in quarters, and then thrown into the clearances muchmore as other mids tired. The idea, which worked so well so often, was that any given opponent trying to match up on Petracca's strength would be completely overwhelmed if Trac also had significantly fresher legs. The result was of course our trademark strings of high quality clearances and even repeat centre clearance goals which seized momentum in games kept tight by our brutal defence. Bang bang bang was not an accident. Obviously with the big hit to fitness caused by good guy Moore's 'reckless severe impact' effort Petracca hasn't been able to replicate that this season. It is still reasonable to hope he'll be back to being a genuine weapon after a proper pre-season.

Fair enough. I tipped to the smart{@} side for a cheap smirk. It would seem just from the old stats that he was one of those unfortunate young players who got stuck being subbed in and out and getting just a few chances here and there.

Couldn't get a regular game and was cut from the list at the Eagles... Now looks like a solid AFL level contributor with attributes that add unpredictability to our mix both in the contests and up forward. I suspect he would also be another person not keen on getting Adam Simpson as coach!