Little Goffy

He's a high quality young player. but he's at a club that needs him more than we would need him, and he would cost more than would be appropriate to pay (in pick-equivalent and dollars). I think our trade-recruiting should be very focused on picking out specific players who meet our specific needs, and I don't see Parish as in that category. Overall I think we should also be very much looking at managing salary cap and keep a stash prepared to go after free agents, because that bypassing of trade/draft 'cost' is a huge bonus for building a list to reach the very top. Plus, I'm expecting pretty significant turnover from the tail-end of our list at the end of the season, so I really think we should be trying to hold onto multiple good draft picks to make sure there is some serious quality coming through the new kids.

What I want to know is, can he book travel and accommodation, take the minutes for board meetings, and answer calls at reception?

Nah. I could argue the point, I even typed it out, but now I've deleted because it is just going to end up being one of those odious back-and-forth threads where gradually people become more irritated and actually pump up their original soft opinions into more extreme versions just to annoy the other person who is annoying them. So just, nah. Brayshaw good. Better value than what we'd get in a trade. Our inside midfield is not actually that deep, either, so not an area we should talk about trading quality players out of.

Funny thing is, there wasn't anything like the level of crackdown or heavy-handed tactics wheeled out to deal with people getting hopelessly trashed and hurling abuse or starting punchups at Auskick and other kids-level footy games. Local community clubs were practically left to handle it themselves. And the 'behaviour' thug squads at Docklands didn't seem to do much to actually stop the really serious incidents of people dishing out constant vileness at anyone around them for a whole game, thanks to true gits lathered up with some generous 'preloading' of alcohol and kept slippy by the stadium's complete failure to actual do any basic responsible service of alcohol checks. Nobody looks at the chest-puffing lurkers the stadium calls protective and thinks 'oh, I'll ask those friendly looking fellows to come over and use their extensive training in conflict resolution and dealing with unruly behaviour, I'm sure they can take the heat out of the situation effectively and calmy'. No, lets not have any effort directed at the actual problems in the crowds. We've got themed rounds for all that [censored]. Meanwhile, I see the social injustice warriors have decided it is all part of the neo-marxist militant feminist gaygenda. Whoopeee do. One might almost think that the AFL knew they'd get away with anything, thanks to the right kinds of nuffies getting worked up and making it about their own wacky persecution complexes to the point where nobody else wants to go near it.

Hmm.. let's see... how much longer before it becomes a mathematical impossibility, even allowing for crazed gains in percentage? Current situation is we need, over the course of ten games: +4 wins (and %) over the single worst performer of Brisbane, Fremantle and Richmond, AND +3 wins (and %) over ALL of Port, Essendon and St Kilda. +2 wins (and %) over ALL of Hawthorn, Kangaroos and Bulldogs. If you accept the realistic view of our percentage then you need to turn those figures into +5, +4 and +3. Does anyone need a more solid 'nope' than that? I do! I'm just going to keep saying 'one more win' to myself until the end of the season. Like the players and coaches should be, except I'll also be maintaining my mad delusion.

Odd numbered year. Always in trouble. Been 28 years (1991) since we last won a final in an odd numbered year. 10 even-numbered-year finals wins since then.

That piece of news popping up for some reason made me go back and check his playing career stats, and awards. Also spent some time just reminiscing about his playing style and roles. Setting everything else aside for a moment, is it just me or would Adam Goodes be the precisely perfect player to add to our 22 right now? Plenty of goals, a huge load of goal-assists, really effective at getting the ball to dangerous places and doing it quickly and decisively, good at offering leads backed by top workrate. And as a bonus he contributed most of that right from the start of his career (hence the 372 games). Oh, and uh... just for the people still splurting on as if his 'playing for frees' was an actual thing and not just a shameful beat-up... his career average for 'Frees For' was one a game, which doesn't even put him in the top-100 for 2019. His highest season average for frees was 1.3, which just barely sneaks him into the current top-70 for 2019... and that average is when he was playing primarily as an undersized ruckman/mid. If he was flopping and diving for frees an unusual amount, then clearly it was also the one and only aspect of Australian football that he wasn't elite at. Oh, to have a pick 43 the likes of Adam Goodes.

Come on, he's got us winning all the way through to the premiership. That's just crazy. ?

Geelong choking in finals again would be funny. Fremantle, from 8th, eliminating 5th-placed West Coast. The Port Adelaide football club going into fits of self-hate after missing the finals with nobody to blame but themselves. Ditto Richmond. Demons going undefeated after the bye, for 13 wins total and a 7th placed finish, ahead of the Dockers and five other teams all on 12 wins with better percentage than us.

I haven't seen as much of our games as I'd like to, but what I have seen sometimes makes me think of the bit of fun at the end of a training session where people are competing to kick the balls back into the wheelie bin they are stored - trying to bring it down neatly from above. One thing you can definitely say for Melksham, his typically low-angle kicks usually have an intended target and even if they miss they are still moving towards goals. Lot of other players, if their kicks were just left to drop on grass, they'd be as likely to bounce back on the arc they came down on. Doubly easy for defenders because all that extra air time lets them get into position better, and when the ball comes down it has no momentum towards goal that crumbers and troublemakers can try to use or protect. It means that most of the time our crumbing efforts are facing away from goal when trying to get the ball, so to take a meaningful snap requires either an extra couple of steps, a full change of direction, or an extra disposal, and that lost time is a killer.

Now There is a tangent I'd follow; does a senior coach really only need to be smart enough to understand (and humble/practical enough to actually listen to) the collection of other smart people around him? Mind you, there was also once upon a time a sci-fi novel which featured an entire species which had been selectively bred for good luck. Some kind of lottery process, and over a few thousand generations it produced real results. Maybe we need some of that. (some would say, it wont be any slower than our current progress to our next flag, ha ha ha uhhh)

I'm going to look at it as a hurdle requirement; you need to pass a certain level but beyond that it becomes less important. I must say, it is weird not just seeing Buckley at the top of Matsuo's list, but realising that I'd probably agree. If I had to pick an AFL coach for a long session of free-ranging discussion of the world, it would probably be ol' Nate. I'm on the cusp of not having any real problem with Collingwood (except a segment of their supporters), soon I'll be calling the Queen's Birthday game a 'jolly good show against a worthy rival'. Scary times.

Ahh, the memories.

Lol. Next up, there will be talk of trading picks to get Sam Day (the free agent not currently getting a game at the Suns).

Let's pretend for a moment that Bruce isn't a prizewinning -thingthing- and imagine that what he means by that is... "Geelong's five best players are all past or near 30, and a sixth is almost certainly leaving at year's end, they currently have the league's second-shortest injury list with no key players missing, they also have a big group of already fully-mature quality players aged 26-28, and while a bunch of their kids are good, none are of the quality of the veterans even in that second rank... so if they don't take home a flag in a year like this where everything has come together just right, they probably wont get another chance'". Seriously, if Geelong choke again this september, it'll be worse than all of Port's famous finals chokes combined. And even funnier, too.

Trouble is, the way modern society and especially economic oportunity is compartmentalised and all access is held by gatekeepers, with significant costs of entry. So, hypothetically, you could right this moment eradicate all racism from society, and it would still take a century (or indeed, forever) to see anything resembling equality on all those indicators you mention. If racism has been eradicated just a few generations ago, the relative fluidity of society other than discriminatory barriers would have meant that meaningful practical equality/equity would have been attained at a much faster pace. Like some kind of hideous paradox, where one barrier has been going up even faster than other barriers have been coming down. Meanwhile, in the opposite corner, if the statistics began recording 'bogan' as an ethnic group, they too would appear as very severely disadvantaged. And with the new modern barriers becoming so much more solid, their real experience of insurmountable disadvantage is looking more and more like discrimination too. I just hope we don't keep on with this drift to the American style of race-politics, where a nation hypnotised by the mythology that 'opportunity is everywhere' and it is a character flaw to be poor, turns to all kinds of brands of sectarian greivance-politics and populism to insist that their group is being particularly targeted (all with some degree of valid claim), with nobody left actually confronting the new 'modern' barriers which will block progress for any and all of the currently excluded people.

What's funny is, in almost any other circumstance, the treatment dished out to Adam Goodes would be labelled political correctness gone mad.

I believed it, and then your comment gave me hope too... but alas, a forlorn hope, it turns out. https://www.stadiumbusinesssummit.com/thestadiumbusiness-awards-2019-winners-announced/

To save time and ensure boo-equity you could have your phone divert to a recording of 'please leave a message after the Booooooooooooo!'

But... but... I'm confused, is Marvel a different stadium to the old one I remember at Docklands from a couple of years ago, I think they called it Etihad. You know, the one that managed to have wind whip through the seating even when the roof was closed, where giant concrete pylons obstructed the view from chunks of the upper decks, where the way in and out is an absurd bottleneck, and where the general sense of being inside a hollowed-out asteroid lit by mining truck lights? The same one?

Unfortunately yes, the booing of Goodes expanded to a level I've never witnessed in any other game for any other player. Not even single occasions, after some particularly ugly early incident in a game where a player was booed for the rest of the game. I have literally never heard the kind of booing that Goodes received. It was the calling the girl out, it was the dance, it was that he didn't back down on it when the nuff-nuff army demanded it. Ugh, I'm still recalling the sick feeling up at a Sydney game, when the Hawthorn portion of the crowd ramped it up. The ball was out of play, nothing was happening, people where I was were looking around and up at the replay trying to figure out if there had been a trip or someone had been thrown into the fence. Nope, just Goodes, not even involved in the play, happened to be standing near a segment of Hawthorn reserved seating. There was a tangible sadness across the rest of the crowd (including, maybe especially, many other Hawthorn supporters) as they realised what was happening. It actually sucked a lot of life out of the crowd atmosphere for a while. Not like any other booing I've ever witnessed. Acknowleging that more than a few people out there in the poltiical world have run off with this to use it as leverage, I'll try to run through my own thoughts in the spirit of honest engagement and all that. Other indigenous players generally weren't booed or abused (well, less so since the late 90s at least) because they weren't being, shall we say, 'uppity'. There's a pretty obvious unwritten code that you'll be welcome as long as you keep within the nicey-nicey political correctness realms. Think 'theme round' and special guernsey designs. That 'keep it nice' issues kind of answers the next question, about Goodes fanning the flames. No doubt it did increase the sense of confrontation, even if it was wildly overblown by the people so 'offended' by it, but I suppose the question Goodes might ask is 'why am I expected to have to worry about fanning such a stupid flame?'. Bizarrely, I think Goodes found himself in the bind that mostly people with quite opposite views find themselves in; you say or do something a little controversial to begin with, the twitter storm erupts out of all proportion, everyone starts volunteering any excuse they can to heap more confected shame upon you, and if you don't back down then you officially become the worst person in the world. As for 'how racist is Australia really'... definitely not as racist as many like to claim, definitely more racist than others like to claim. Thinking hard here... hmmm... on the one hand, Australia has made such tremendous progress on racial and cultural issues in just a couple of generations, and could make a realistic claim to being the world's least racist nation overall. Trouble is, that isn't a smooth result and there are still many filthy horribly racist corners, and there are still some really obvious racial glass ceilings. But because it tends to happen in one organisation at a time or one group of bastards at the end of the street at a time, it has very low visibility anywhere else. One way to put it - it is no longer 'normal' to be racist in Australia, but, for Aboriginal people, it is still very 'normal' to come up against really horrible racism in both personal and professional life, and to be left on your own to deal with it. So then Goodes comes out and says 'racist' - the backlash comes from not only the grubby core of actual racists (and society's layer of people who just like to hurl abuse at anyone they can find an excuse to), but also a share of the people who are proud of their own improvement and their country's improvement and don't appreciate being told that colelctively they still suck. For Goodes, the personal experience is one of having society tell him he hasn't experience the racism which he most definitely has, and then Goodes gets publicly abused and ostracised for the very act of saying what he is experiencing. For the rest of the Aboriginal community, they see that happening and are reminded that society will deny the racism that does exist, and punish them for mentioning it. Anyway, I quite agree that the documentary is unlikely to hit all these nuances, but at least it might help more people realise the normality of experiencing racism, even in an ostensibly not racist society. As you say, the mea cuplas from Gil the Dill and the like do nothing - in fact they even reaffirm the starting position 'oh yes, we have totally learnt and wont be like that again, for real, I don't invite racists to any of my dinner parties'. And this pathetic 'leadership' takes us back to this easy, cosy pattern of he comforting, plausible, not-racist image of Australia, which has still not come to terms with the idea that experiencing racism is still quite normal for Aboriginal people. You could say, Australia is not a racist society, but it is a society where the remaining racists can often expect to act our their noxious attitude without being penalised, and where the lifelong victims of racism feel that if they speak up about it they will be penalised. And that is pretty much the heart of why Goodes felt so alienated at the end of his career. And why the AFL should be so ashamed that they failed this simple test of solidarity, even as they kept decorating their brand with Indigenous-themed confetti.

Gibbs is still is high quality player (ask Clayton Oliver about the third quarter the other week) but he has clearly dropped off in form from the sustained excellence of most of his career. Has always been short of the star expectations people have about No.1 picks, much like Murphy and Kruezer. Has always been picked out as looking a bit gentle on the field, despite pulling his weight for things like tackles, contested posessions, and all that. Bizarrely, it looks like even though Adelaide would probably now be regretting giving up two first round picks to get him, Carlton at the same time would be unhappy with what they ended up with, although that has more to do with the way they used their picks. I once had the pleasure of sitting opposite Gibbs at a cafe, without actually realising it was him. It was right before the trade, and the public talk was that the move was for family reasons. Coincidentally, it was the really delightful way this unknown man was having lunch with his toddler (a freak'n angel kid in appearance and behaviour) that made me look up and smile, long before I realised it was anyone significant. Moral of this story, Gibbs moved to Adelaide for family reasons, and his family is doing fine over there, and we don't even have to think about whether we want him or not because it isn't going to happen. He even has another kid on the way. We can all just sit back and wish the best to a nice guy who is doing fine. Nothing to trouble ourselves about here.

Matsuo Basho, we have a problem - I completely agree with you! Practically word for word. I'm sure this worries you every bit as much as it worries me!

Maybe we can turn this into a tangible debate about which of Cameron or Whitfield we'll take as a free agent next year?

There's no arguing with magic. Is Harry Potter available as a category B rookie?