Little Goffy

I'm just gonna leave this here and not say anything... Matthew Bate. Clint Bartram. Dean Terlich, Matt Jones, Jordie McKenzie...

I'd guess it is related to Pia's career, filming for Home & Away. Good luck to him, I'm sure he'll find plenty of sun and surf up that way. Cross stepping in would seem a good fit.

Lamb fondant, a chicken cake, and chocolate was slow roasted ragu.

Wow, McDonald came to a halt in the votes. Nice to see that by round 17 there's still a pretty close group. 4 players 22 or under in the top 10 is a nice touch, too.

Uneven competition!? Bah humbug. I mean seriously, the bottom five teams managed almost one win (or draw) each against teams in the top half of the ladder. Just because almost 1/3rd of the teams in the competition are bordering on irrelevant for an entire season... I remember doing a bit of counting a few years back, which teams had played how many finals. I think I worked out that there were six teams who each individually had more 'finals per year' in the last decade than the bottom ten teams combined.

Ouch. Show of hands now, all the nuff-nuffs who were saying we should trade him. What a trooper. Get this man a premiership.

Yep, I fear that is the real formula for how PP and compensation picks are allocated. 'Amount of stink kicked up' balanced against 'amount of stink that would be kicked up'. Calling it a compensation pick for losing Kruezer/Luenberger/Frawley is the expedient way to do it. Personally, I don't care so much. Carlton and Brisbane are definitely swimming in the fecal lane and a priority pick may be needed just to get them to a point of being viable. Then again, they should each be dumping about 12 from their list, and have a whole lot of salary cap space. The AFL is in a slow-burning crisis, with as many as five teams completely broken in 2016. It is confusing that Melbourne probably isn't one of them.

Jeff White is another. Coincidentally played exactly 1 more game for Melbourne than Lovett.

The AFL made a huge mistake in two ways - 1. They kept the priority pick allocation to a secretive, mysterious, unaccountable and fundamentally 'at the whim of the executive' system. 2. They failed to develop a way for compensation (for Free Agents, priority picks, anything) to be made incremental, instead bungling it again such that a club might do a little bit of tweaking resulting in a big jump in value gained. Let's be honest, last year we should've ended up with two extra picks at the end of the first round (PP and Frawley compo). Now the whole thing has been knocked out of balance again because the AFL Executive just... can't... stop... meddling. It's all about them, in their minds.

If there's enough good trading and development in the off-season to have us arrive in 2016 able to be dangerous and get a sniff of blood, the effect on the 'scarred' players of our recent history could be electrifying. Can you imagine the likes of Garland, Grimes, Watts, Dunn and Trengove all playing with real confidence, boldness and focused aggression? Genuinely difficult to picture, but oh it would be a sight to see. Also intriguing to think that those five, plus Jones, will be just about the full count of players still at the club from as little as four years ago. Might not even be that many.

I could've just 'liked' this but I feel it is important enough to quote it and underline it. Would be a tragedy to delist honest but sub-AFL workers like Bail and McKenzie just to replace them with some other club's clanger-ridden list clogger.

Ha ha, if it comes out as a tie, the two will spend the next half a decade being compared, like Naitanui and Watts. And the comparison will be almost as one-sided. Melbourne kickd 225 goals this season. Hogan kicked 44 of them and had 16 goal assists. That's more than a quarter of our scoring coming through him, and even so, he spent a lot of time well up the ground providing links. Like the 'Us v St Kilda' thread, having to make this comparison of Hogan v Cripps is a real pleasure and gives me confidence for the future. Hogan is it, a true champion player at the Melbourne Football Club. At last.

It could be an awkward fit with Gawn - both are definitely rucks first. Then again, to reduce rotations maybe we'll end up actually having a true 'resting' ruckman right up in the goalsquare, demanding an opponent and giving the long bomb option with Garlett at his feet. 50% total game time rucking isn't far short of what a first ruck does at the moment anyway. My obsession lately is with making our list and play style more 'dangerous', forcing opponents to be accountable and giving ourselves more belief we can turn a game around. Lifting the mentality of being under siege. Kruezer, fit, is definitely dangerous. Can take a contested mark, too. It'll be an interesting medical report, no doubt. If he is given the all-clear I'd be thrilled to have him on our list.

Cripps is a first-rate midfielder, already in the top 50 of the game and deserves full credit for that in a rubbish group. Hogan is already in the top 5 of the AFL's key forwards, delivering at least on a level with the likes of Hawkins, Walker, and J. Riewoldt. It is an easy 'win' for Hogan but we'll just have to see which games the selectors have watched. Either way, I don't think there's a lot at stake here!

The only one I'm really troubled by is Burgoyne. He is mysteriously and seriously overrated in 'official' and media circles, has been for years. But I can't say I'm very concerned. It's all a bit of a grab bag. One of those things where it is nice to get it but not upsetting to miss. Next year we'll have Hogan, Viney, McDonald, Gawn and Salem all under consideration. That's one in every area of the field. I promise!

I'm sitting on the fence... which coincidentally is the only opponent he's ever beaten. And that was at training. In 2012. He is an 'extrovert' though. And a good size. Maybe exactly what we need.

I've said before and I'll say it again, St Kilda haven't even finished going down yet. They've drafted well and have had good selections on account of losing Goddard, Dal Santo and McEvoy. But they are massively dependent on their older players, in particular one of either Montagna or Riewoldt has been their best on ground in almost every game. I've been doing some end-ofseason reviewing of my own (an 'article' of sorts will come soon, I'm sure everything can't wait). Melbourne have had a very strange season. The four losses against other bottom 6 teams (st kildax2, Essendon, Carlton) mean we come out with only two wins over the bottom six, the equal lowest of any club. But here's the rub - the bottom six teams between them only managed 12 wins and two draws against opponents outside the bottom six. And Melbourne accounts for five of those wins. St Kilda, in contrast, only managed one win and one draw outside the bottom 6. I'd rather be having embarrassing lapses against bottom teams than be stuck relying on a handful of venerable champions to drag us over the line against other poor opponents. Contrasting us with St Kilda is possibly the best way to get me in a good mood about our future. Also, Shane Crawford and Tim Watson are so far from astute it is a comfort to be written off by them!

Ragnar Lodbrock. Moves fast, aggressive at the contest, good skills, natural leader. And arrives in a shallow draft! (heh heh, just a little shipwright humour there) Gee, my trade season fatigue is setting in early.

Redact! Redact! Emergency! Nobody knows about that, the law says so!

Of our ten youngest players, only Jayden Hunt, Max King and Christian Petracca were missing today! And none of them looked like duds. Maybe a couple of years from now we'll be having the 'drafting or development' argument facing the other way, deciding who to thank more out of Taylor and McCartney.

Ad hoc thoughts - - Between Hogan, Gawn, and Harmes, we may end up being the top contested marking team in the game. Petracca also? - Great arrival by White. Part of a very reassuring group of kids who seem to have decent disposal - Salem's return is particularly convincing. - Ben Newton was out there doing his job well today - being a threat. - Brayshaw's had the same interesting stats balance all season - fairly low disposals, but then the combo of high tackle count and lots of inside50s/goal assists. Works hard defensively and then uses it to dangerous effect. - Entertaining farewell MOTY by Howe. Fitting farewell act of courage within an exceptional overall game from Cross. - Happy that Nathan Jones returned to excellent form for the final game, after a rough final period of the season. - Hogan is an actual, right now, AFL top-5 key forward. It is just too weird, totally messed up, topsy-turvy nonsense that we have two wins total against the teams below us on the ladder, but five wins against teams above us. If not for playing against us, both St Kilda and Essendon would be on 4 wins! 3 out of their 11 combined wins were against us. I'll look into it more thoroughly, but I think this season has the longest 'tail' of any season I've known, with the bottom six teams having just 30 wins between them. hash[censored]tag #equalisationisworkingwell

Crowd estimate on radio is under 10,000... one even suggested closer to 5,000. I wonder how many of those are GWS supporters?

Every extra player who steps up and shows serious potential around or before our pick makes me happy. I like Curnow's profile and I'm convinced that strong mobile half-forwards who can take a mark and work hard will be made all the more important by the reduced interchange rotations. Gotta have a target. Hogan, Gawn, +1 more contested marking player will give us a lot of confidence to go long to 'arms' when midfield 'legs' wont carry us the distance late in games.

It has been creeping up and creeping up, but never quite getting there thanks to one or two close games, but... Could this farcical final round be the one to reach an average winning margin of over ten goals?

I feel like this mattjm character who has signed on to demonland is either a jilted lover of Watts' or is actually one of other demons having a lend. Or possibly Jack himself experiencing episodic dissociative fuges. It is possible that Watts will be traded, possible he will leave under free agency next year, and possible that he will be a one-club player with 100 games left in the red and blue. It is possible that he will be put in a box with an unpredictably decaying radioactive isotope. We wont know until after the lid is opened.