Little Goffy

What really struck me was how little time Young took to both spot an 'interesting' target and get his body organised to make the kick. The brain is working through the problem in front of him even as he is aware of what is going on closer around him. I'm a little excited and also enjoying thinking of past players with his ability. A bit of Trapper, a bit of Ooze?

It has been a long hard road for pick 6 which, after being truly awful through the nineties, has improved over time and even had a couple of good seasons more recently. But clearly we're talking about one of those picks that only ever shows glimpses of their talent and is forever 'one good preseason away' from being a real performer. 1998 Murray Vance 1999 Damian Cupido 2000 Dylan Smith 2001 Ashley Sampi 2002 Steven Salopek 2003 Kepler Bradley 2004 Tom Williams 2005 Beau Dowler 2006 Mitch Thorp 2007 David Myers 2008 Chris Yarran 2009 Gary Roahn 2010 Reece Conca 2011 Chad Wingard 2012 Jackson Macrae 2013 Matthew Sharenberg 2014 Caleb Marchbank 2015 Aaron Francis 2016 Sam Petrevski-Seton 2017 Jaidyn Stephenson 2018 Ben King

The description sounds very suitable and the highlights support it. Would have the advantage also of letting Casey play with a similar set-up to Melbourne. Although it seems like he might actually be the most flexible and all-round effective of our defenders. I'm still keen on splitting three, especially now we have 8 to keep in the early wave of talent, so count me for the affirmatives.

Cat's are all 'in the now' and clinging on to the chance of a premiership while they still got the ssssuperssstarrrrssssss available. Their minds are fully set to being on top in one crucial month each year. Unfortunely for them that month is August. What I'm saying is, like the US Military choosing not to study counter-insurgency after Vietnam, Geelong can't even bring themselves to think about players who might not be champions this comign August. So them delisting someone doesn't mean much. I know nothing about Buzza except he is big and has a fun name and, allegedly, has a real crack. But that, and people's comments about his VFL-level respectability, meh, whynot throw a rookie spot at him?

Two best 22 players in, one of which is realistically top-10 and both of which fill needs. Frost out is something that people have hugely varying opinions on, almost as variable as the possible value of the 2020 first rounder. I'm very happy with being early in this allegedly 'deep at the front' draft instead of 'somewhere' in the allegedly compromised' 2020 draft, even at the cost of the second rounder we threw in to make it happen. I'm a big fan of the 'high-low' approach to draft that we've (under Taylor especially) used these last five or six years while picking up the likes of Hibberd, Melksham and now Langdon with the 'in-betweener' picks. Very happy. Still some action to play out with the pick trading right onto draft night. I'm sure GWS will be constantly reassing how early they need to be to get ahead of any bids for Green. Wild times.

The Melbourne Football Club has taken a bucket-load of risks even in quite recent memory. Of course, in hindsight they are all either 'obvious' or 'blunders'. Ahh, the past. All so boring and predictable.

Ralph's half-comment about Mebourne was just a bit of noise distraction to interfere with his idiotic main idea that Free Agency is great because hey look sometimes some players use it to move clubs for opportunities and that totally cancels out the fact that clubs already contending for a premiership can effectively pick up additional top-3 draft with proven records and do so for effectively nothing. I wonder how many times that overt lie wil need to be repeated before we all just go with the flow?

Strange to have Kolodjashnij in the same brack at Melkshan and even Fritsch. Strange to have Hunt, Nibbler and Wagner in the same bracket as Petracca. Strange to have Harmes in the same bracket as Stretch, HAnnan and other Wagner. Always going to be very subjective but if even my first glance is picking up a bunch of selections that just seem odd, it must be a little iffy. If there's one thing that I absolutely agree on it is the big gap in the B+ and B range. We have a lot of players that just aren't quite complete. On the bright side, we have a lot of players who could very quickly push into that range. Thinking Petracca, Salem, Brayshaw, Fritsch, May, Melksham, Lever, Harmes and Hore. If being rated just a 'C+' annoys a few of those guys the right way, well, all good.

It just seems to be how the Saints do business. They've already got Sam Rowe, Nathan Brown, Shane Savage, Dan Hannebery, Dylan Roberton, Billy Longer, Jake Carlisle, Dean Kent and I'm sure a few others who aren't coming to mind. St Kilda are in the salary-cap handy position of not having any, any at all, seriously top-line players. Respectable, absolutely, but we're talking Seb Ross, Rowan Marshall, Jack Steele, Tim Membrey. And while you do have to pay 95%+ of cap each year, that is easily fudged by front-loading contracts in, say, 2017-18 so that the gap opens up in 2019 and onwards. See also the Neeld era 'scattergun' - we got a lot of players in then, many of them every bit as respected as the crop St Kilda are brining in. I think it is an illusion and St Kilda are burning their future for a bit of respectability now. They are already not a very young side and abandoning this year's draft is a big risk for the sake of players all I'm surprised Ratten is letting it happen but I guess the club really sees itself as need to show it is turning a corner. A couple more years of wafting between bog ordinary or just kind of pointlessly below average and people will start overlooking the Saints 2000s the same way people overlook the Demons 87-06 copmarative relevance.

Suddenly I have absolute belief that he is a player we will get value out of. Nothing will help our defence more than a bit of extra cover making oppositino entries a bit more predictable. I mean, Lever, May and Hore all lean towards the 'reading the play' style rather than a pure one-on-one match. Golly gosh and gee whizz, I'm getting this odd inexplicable feeling that the club knows what it is doing here. Thanks for sharing the observations Deanox.

Y'know, Tomlinson might also be Dutch. Tall. Blonde. Wore orange. Always plugging holes. Open to trade. Nowhere even close to any tigers.

OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE THE CLUB HAS HIM OUT DOING THIS KIND OF THING RIGHT AFTER SURGERY TERRIBLE INJURY MANAGEMENT HE IS CLEARLY LEAVING NOW JUST WATCH AS THE CLUB ROLLS OVER IN THE TRADE.

Unfortunately as much as the club has tried, we seem to have some kind of curse when it comes to key forwards. Hogan is the only gun key forward we've recruited in a couple of decades (Wow, yep, I think we have to go back as far as Schwartz and Neitz!) and we all know how things are going for him now. But it is not like we haven't tried. This century we've invested first round picks in - Weideman, Hogan, Cook, Watts, Bate, Dunn, Smith and Molan as prospective key forwards, as well as grabbing Mitch Clarke, Chris Dawes and Ben Holland in trades. And after all that, I still have a strange kind of faith in the Weideman/McDonald combination. Maybe I just think we are simply too cursed to keep investing more in trying to get a gun? Because I think we all know, if we did throw the money out for a Boyd-style deal, the player we got would definitely be laid out by gastro the night before the Grand Final.

Hmm. I genuinely wondered so put some thought in. Only rationale I can see for it is a belief that the whole group of young 'ok-ish' or simply not yet ready players will mature into reasonable quality. Think Marchbank, Weitering as tall defenders, McKay and Curnow as tall forwards, Petrevski-Seton, Dow, Stocker, O'Brien fleshing out the midfield. Most of them are well below what might realistically be expected of them in the near future. Right now that lump of so-so midfielders is very much plodding along with low posessions and not much impact. But that's the only basis I can see for believing in their near-term future. From any other angle they look more like Richmond 2006 than Richmond 2016. As for our rating - clearly Cornes has just done an average of our current and previous seasons, because realistically bleep knows what our real form line is for 2020.

The traditional one was always 'hot property tips'. A process much resembling the sell-off of former Soviet state assets under Yeltsin. "It is a public auction. But nobody else knows where it is."

Although it is 50/50 whether the door will be open as he tries to go through it! I'm just being silly of course. Frost leaving is unfortunate but such is life, this is not going to be some team-breaking disaster. As has been discussed, there are significant upsides and downsides to Frost. Whatever the flaws and even if he is at Hawthorn he'll retain my respect as a player who very often made extra efforts that mattered. With the magic alternate universe that Hawthorn trades in, I wonder if we'll get more for him than GWS get for Patton?

Personally I'm really looking forward to his 2020. Has carried a weight on his shoulders for better part of a decade and has never had an 'easy' time. Not least among his burdens is the role at lightning rod the the kind of embittered snark-addicts that can post foul-spirited comments upon hearing of one of the great stalwarts of the club stepping down as captain. Nobody who shows that kind of basic disrespect to a club leader should be permitted to ever complain about club culture again. I hope a properly honored 300-game milestone is in order for Jones, as he refreshes himself making a solid contribution in a resurgent team.

And a Brendan Fevola. And a Luke Livingstone. And for that matter Chris Yarran. Daniel Connors. Can't help wondering what Willie Rioli's issues at the worst possible moment were? Or the baggage for and around Sam Murray and a few known others at Collingwood in 2018. And many of these guys are much less 'problematic' than Martin. My main point being that in recent decades many more games, finals and premierships have been lost because of the damage, than have been won because of the talent, of [censored]s. Good on Richmond for keeping a super talent in line enough off the field to deliver his best on the field. But they 'lost' some four or five young men along the way, some of which appear to be permanently wrecked human beings. How fine a line... how sublte and complex are the increments, from Dustin Martin to Ben Cousins to Brendan Fevola to Harley Bennell to Colin Syvia. That is five of the most talent players of the last quarter-century and five very different but stories any one of which could have interchanged with another.

It is so terrible, and it feels like it happens almost every year! On the bright side, only nine clubs have seen a premiership this century, so it isn't as if we are alone.

I've you're loking for something to monitor for - this remains GWS lowest score ever. Curiously, their other lowest isn't in their early days but in fact from this season, and just a few weeks ago! 4.5.29 is the mark. Imagine... lowest ever score... in your first grand final.

Trivia of the day - even before his first disposal just now, Finlay was doing better than Mumford for meters gained. Finlayson had zero disposals for 5 meters gained. Curious. Mumford has not only metaphorically but literally taken his team backwards today.

In the battle between draft concessions and free agency, I'm going to go with my heart and say "Well, at least Richmond are an actual football club that has some kind of meaning, and at least they actually had to persevere through real adversity to get to the top". I cannot get even a little excited about a GWS win. It quite simply would be bad for football. I'm already dry-retching at the headlines about the big turnouts and 'Giants army coming to training'.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Malthouse coaching academy was all the rage...

Just have to take a moment to laugh at the people implying that Richmond's recovery from being ninthmond doesn't compare to us because of all our draft and recruiting misses. For I believe a six year run Richmond's recruiting was so poor that only the same fifteen or so players appeared in their top ten B&F. Let's me see if I can find my old notes - - - there we go, six years, 2011 to 2015 inclusive. Five players appeared in all six, and another two appeared in five of the six, missing the full set only because of injury. It was a club held together by a core that mature together and were good enough to keep the team at least competitive most of the time. But success came at a rush with just two, maybe three years of good recruiting that came just in time. Dustin Martin is the youngest of that group at 28. So, realistically, the Richmond experience might be comparable to ours if we keep a stable top-10 in place for another four years of averageness and then put on a surge. I don't feel like we are going to follow the same pattern. Personally I'm looking for a kind of Geelong scenario, with our 2019 being their 2003. That would be acceptable!

If it turns out that Frost goes then Tomlinson becomes much more valuable to us, and he also would be absolutely sure of having a role. If the end result is a simple switcheroo with the bonus of getting trade value from the Hawks, I'm quite happy with the prospect.