Little Goffy

Will be fun to see who is left by round 19 against the giants. But, hey, you never know, the Bombers have been on the cusp of a big upswing for about 13 years...

That'd be a basherer degree, yah?

Really hard to know what to expect from Gold Coast. They've had such a strange preparation. First they had their opening round game postponed. Then they traveled to Perth only to have their opponents forfeit on arrival. And now they're coming off a bye.

Okay, full credit to Bailey Scott, astrophysics is pretty tricky stuff. I gave it a try but all my comets smacked into Jupiter and my contract didn't get renewed. Good to see anthropology isn't dead, too. I think I might have to like this Lawson Humpries kid; "Uni isn't necessarily hard, but it's something I might not want to do all the time, and it's good I have to still do it and force myself to do something I might not want to. We're pretty lucky as AFL players, we have a pretty good run, so it's important to do other things." With Humpries' Anthropology and then Barass being the only one studying Philopsophy, I wonder if there is some special link between the humanities and defenders? I guess it does take a certain deeper perspective.

These days they like to use 'developed' and 'developing' nations. They don't have a term for 'going backwards at a rate of knots' nations. Another popular one is 'NICs'; Newly industrialised countries, which is a blanket term for countries which have added industrial capacity by underbidding developed country industry thanks to shooting anyone who asks for a pay rise and not minding if their is heavy metals waste in the mains water. Basically 'growing GDP, no civil society'. An old one from 'Yes, Prime Minister', is of course TLPACs. 'Tin-pot little African country'. Never caught on in the mainstream, for some reason.

Yep, on a PC, a pretty compact laptop. I don't actually think there is any design or format problem and I'm pretty sure I'll adjust within days. Nothing more to my comment than wanting a couple of extra cms in the middle where the main action is. (That's what she said.)

Everything has gone vertical. Freaking me out. I'm going to make one practical suggestion, which I understand might be an absolute shirt-sew to adjust, but having a slightly wider text space in the threads would reduce scrolling a bit. If the centre panel can be widened just a little, or maybe the profile images in posts adjusted so there isn't as much blank space along the left side. But these are quibbles and tweaks. I thought it was a nice update. It was a nice update, I thought. I bet it looks super snazzy on mobile.

That or getting Essendon's soft frees. Either would get the job done! So far Port have been a little bit lucky that Essendon are the footballing equivalent of a tepid bath.

I had this game flickering in the background and thought I was basically impartial, but then Port kicked a goal after Essendon had held the ball in their forward line for most of the game for just two behinds, and I swear the laugh that came out of me was somewhere between Nelson from the Simpsons and Emperor Palpatine. Guess I'm not quite impartial.

See, that is what people are asking for when they complain that Goodwin's interviews are just talk and don't share any plans of how we're going to turn things around. (ducks for cover)

To do what with it, exactly? Look. Just look... and be silent. https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.9252021,145.188542,3a,75y,93.27h,82.76t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMweE_SzF8FBEJ0D4VrBZ_TadKvDa66p-OANMdx!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMweE_SzF8FBEJ0D4VrBZ_TadKvDa66p-OANMdx%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi7.23781784686372-ya203.26877647104587-ro0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMyNC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Strange this thread transitioned from bananas to racehorses. The closest thing to a crossover I can think of is MarioKart.

Hee heee heeee haw haw haw. I finally twigged this morning when Simon Goodwin once again went out if his way to admit he overdid it mentioning Gawn's off-field strain. We had a ten goal loss against a comparatively low-rated team on the weekend and four days later the media lead is still "Does Goodwin love his Captain too much?" F'n genius 5-D chess media management. Hilarious stuff. And here we all are playing our part, kicking up a stink like we're back at the old banana tariff protests.

So, can there be a general round of 'ayes' for, at the very least, playing Fritsch one-out in the goalsquare? Nobody, literally nobody, can reliably beat him in a one on one contest with three seconds of time to pick the lock.

Can't get excited about any of those. They all peaked within their first two seasons, Hinkley's teams choked in finals and Longmire's teams choked in Grand finals, and Simpson left the Eagles in the worst condition of any club since 2013.

Jesus Christ he's literally just summarising bigfooty rants at high speed.

Here's something lighter to distract ourselves with. My sister-in-law (from Vietnam) has been practising her English with me in afternoon video calls recently, and, would you believe it, somehow, mysteriously and to the whole world's surprise, I ended up raving about how Australian football is the greatest sport in the world and all that. It was actually really refreshing because in a second-language conversation like that you're never going to start talking about all the garbage meta-game and politics and irritating rule tweaks - it was a conversation about the purest joy of our insane game. I recommend the experience. Anyway. The point. She did a really good job of pretending to be interested so I promised I'd share some material that would help her understand what the hell this game is, how it goes and why it is so glorious. So, this thread is a call out to share links and whatever else you've got that can be offered to support the claim that Australian football is the greatest. Or, at least, help someone grasp what it is. Anyway, the obvious thing to include is of course the moment Australian football achieved perfection.

A new coach would need a couple of seasons to focus our recruiting first on getting a stock of tall forwards who can begin developing their bodies, and then on acquiring mobile, smart decision-makers and good kicks, ideally an inside mid with an attacking mindset capable of also playing forward, and then begin transforming our game plan into a more aggressive corridor approach which would expose us to high risk while players adapted, and possibly see us hit with some very bad results when the cogs jam and morale drops. Ultimately, this coache's challenge would be to sustain the unity of the players and hopefully get the new kids up to reliable AFL standard and the new style firmly embedded before the current group of veterans fades too much. I shall call this mysterious new coach, Monis Wingood. Hopefully the new tenure will buy him some time to bring about the transformation without having cabal's of restless fans angling for his head.

I only twigged today about how perverse it is for certain people in the media to be having a go at Goodwin because his comment might be seen as exposing Gawn to certain people in the media having a go at him. I actually heard a property develop once say that buyers were to blame for building defects because if they hadn't bought from the plan then the property developers wouldn't be able to get away with making off-contract variations so easily.

Uh oh.

Whittling away, whittling away. Another five posts and you'll just be saying "I'm not wrong" over and over. Chaplin is a highly regarded assistant coach who mobilised a potent young offensive unit which punched above its weight the last time he coached the sector, and then masterminded one of the best, premiership-winning, whole team defensive systems of the modern era. If that is an 'utter rubbish' 'joke' to you, well... that's fine.

I see what you're doing Werridee. You made a fool of yourself claiming that coaches had to have played a role in order to coach it. When someone decisively refuted that by posting the current list of forward line coaches, which showed only about a 1/4 of them to have forward line player backgrounds, you made frankly silly claims about the ones with 'forward player to forward coach' being superior. Now that claim has also been entirely debunked you're shifting attention onto just one player and rewriting the timeline of Fritsch's form slump, and doing so in an inflammatory way in the hope of getting a rise out of @Ghostwriter which you can then escalate and send the conversation on a new and rowdy path in the hope nobody will remember the string of demonstrably wrong claims you've made. All because at some point you decided the most emotionally satisfying way to cope with the distress of a bad game of football was to commence a vendetta against one person. Troy Chaplin is one of the highest rated assistant coaches in the game, and his resume already includes teaching a young and disheartened team to become a dynamic attacking force.

In a city full of dirty cops, the officer who won't take a bribe will be mistrusted. Sports betting, poker machines, sexuality bigotry, and general misogyny - we're basically the closest the AFL has to a cleanskin on these things now, and it is not a mirror they like to look into. At both a tangible and metaphorical level - if you choose to love Maynard, you can only resolve the cognitive dissonance by insisting Brayshaw isn't worthy of care.

Full credit to Adrian Hickmott, Carlton utility who was often used forward but never kicked 30 goals in a season, he has the small-medium squad at Hawthorn purring along. Says it all really. Xavier Clarke was strait up not a forward. He kicked 49 goals total in 106 games, with season bests of 12 and 10. Says it all really. Gold Coast is the most underperforming team to ever exist and has hosted a parade of top pick forwards who have either left in pursuit of better opportunity (Rankine, Lukosious) or been so one-dimensional that it undermines the value of their primary role (King, Ainswerth). Says it all really. Meanwhile, Stuart Dew only became Brisbane's forward coach in 2025. For their premiership, the Brisbane forwards were coached by a guy named Murray Davis, who never played at AFL level and who, coincidentally, had recently been moved to the forward line after being defensive coach for an extended period. Says it all really. And to witness art in life, here's what the Brisbane supporters had to say about that, roughly this time last year when Brisbane started the season very poorly and were on their way to being 2-5 and smacked by 54 points in round 7. Says it all really. Did I mention somewhere else about my pet peeve of people who make big announcements of how certain they are that they're right, but who simply haven't done the work?

I'm getting more of a Jonathan Frakes vibe from some people.