Little Goffy

Adelaide - Disinterested except for our games, and occasionally watching for specific players. Brisbane - No interest. Brisbane bores me to the point of not even looking at their players for fantasy football. Carlton - Whole bunch of friends/relatives follow them, so I know the team and club news well. Secretly find the club irritatingly self-important. Collingwood - None of their achievements seem important because so much is stacked their way. Their failures are also shallow for the same reason. A liability on the game. Essendon - A mix of my Collingwood and Carlton attitudes. Feel a lingering rivalery on account of mid-2000s games. Fremantle - Interesting watching club evolve. Personal football experiences have included some great Demons-Dockers games. Geelong - Have had a lot of respect for them in recent years, of course. Mostly because of their mostly excellent job sitting on Hawthorn. Gold Coast - Fun to watch. I still hate the AFLs approach to expansion for the most part, but this club seems intent on building with flair and professionalism. Scary. GWS - I find them boring and irritating. How can a club with nothing on the board and total dependence on excessive subsidies also have hubris? Hawthorn - Some individual players at Hawthorn are interesting and seem like strong characters. But mostly they reek of FIGJAM. North Melbourne - Are a football club. Sometimes we play games against them. Sometimes Caroline Wilson plays games against them. Port Adelaide - Like Freo, Port seem to experience continuous culture change, for better and worse. I'm intrigued by the extent of the home ground advantage/disadvantage between Port and Demons. Richmond - Now they they aren't a tragicomic foil to real football news, I'm worried I won't find them as entertaining. All their top players are just so cliche. St Kilda - It's ok to laugh at St Kilda because they are a bunch of [censored] Sydney - Fine upstanding citizen. Nice to have around, though lately starting to seem like noisy neighbors who are just never quite irritating enough to actually complain about. West Coast - Ho hum. Soft-serve ice-cream with sprinkles to amuse the kids. Western Bulldogs - I miss their good old days. Like them, but haven't been much excited about them lately.

Well, Ita Buttrose was only given the award as a cross promotion for a TV series, y'know. Actually, I have sometimes mixed feelings about Ita Buttrose, in that some of her magazines were hardly the vanguard of women's rights or even dignity. But, crucially, they did at least generate conversation about topics which a lot of conservative-raised women had never been able to express or hear about before. Besides, we can call the award to Ita a kind of belated award for smashing the glass ceiling, and a very belated nod to the generations of women in Australia who worked so hard to create a meaningful career at the same time as being expected to meet all the demands of 'womanlyness'. Maybe there's a bit of that to Goodes' award too. Although on that count you'd think they'd give it to Michael Long... except he is disqualified for the hit on Troy Simmonds in 2000 GF.

thread has imploded. I hereby invoke Godwin's law.

Moneyball Z? In which Brad Pitt plays a data analyst who has to run from screeching hordes of dream-team players afflicted with an insatiable urge to eat differentials. "Civilization has never been tested by a regression analysis like this before" In the end, we are all saved by a secret society known only as the 'Chi Square'.

Off one step, straight through the big sticks.

Come to think of it, I'd be more comfortable if Adam Goodes received such an award in 2031 instead of now. I feel like any 'national award' should be given for either a truly extraordinary achievement (did the Australian team who led the smallpox vaccination campaign get one?) or a lifetime of persistent effort. Which I think is something we are sure to get from Goodes. So maybe the main problem with the award was that it was premature?

Australian of the Year is an idiot award because it tries to pretend that there is any semblance of a unified idea of what a 'real true blue dinky di you beaut Aussie' is supposed to be. It's an embarrassment that the award list is peppered with 'celebrities' who have reached that status because of achievement in pretty banal fields. Pat Rafter, Steve Waugh, Lee Kernaghan, Mark Taylor. Flannery was an obviously politically motivated error too - the man is a not-especially-effective and poorly disciplined science communicator who's self-promoting overreaching has set back the vitally important credibility of climate science in Australia. I say that as someone who was mortified that the climate commission was cut and a firm supporter of the task of the independent climate council. Anyway, regarding Adam Goodes. He never actually 'went after' the 13 year old - his entire message from minute 1 of any contact with media was 'it is so sad, she probably doesn't really know how hurtful it is or even why, it's just so sad to see that this young girl has being raised in an environment, at home or at school, where saying things like that is seen as appropriate and clever'. Other than that, he's one of the top players in the AFL for the last decade, seen as the quintessential leadership figure at THE club in the AFL known for it's leadership culture, and an all-round nice bloke who gets involved in the community. so, good for him. And for those implying that the award has been given on skin colour and politics, you've missed a chance to back up your great mate Cory Bernadi because 'obviously' this award has been given to Goodes as a part of a leftist conspiracy to make it look like children of single parents are regular human beings who aren't actually going to become criminals and vagrants.

Which in turn emerge from the classic 'no point putting lipstick on a pig'. I love a little etymology now and then (entomology? well, actually I quite appreciate that too but sucks when I get them confused). Wait til you find out where the expression 'taking a crap' came from. :D

Despite the massive accumulation of a great variety of data, and conversation about football using statistics more and more as dream team / supercoach become ubiquitous, Australian football remains fairly resistant to analysis or prediction by statistics. Statistics can confirm or deny, inform, point in interesting directions, but never 'answer the question'. Three cheers for that!

I just... I just... is this a joke? It is almost in the realms of reverse causality. I'm going to try to explain it one more way and see if it helps - The statistics of a game of football are fixed only at the END of the game.

Lingerie football is demeaning to women in that it identifies their sex appeal as their principal value. Consider this simple fact - a lot of women much better at football than any of those taking the LFL field have no prospect of playing to a TV audience or on a major 'stage'. Same as it would be demeaning if turning up to work in nothing but designer lingerie was the only way to be a woman lawyer, doctor, brickie's labourer, salesperson, journalist, pilot, police officer, teacher, politician, morning TV show host, weather reporter, assembly line worker... and so on. There it is, that's the 'objectification' issue in a nutshell. Not hard to understand and surely irrefutable. Also, yes, of course it is time to sack the Richmond Board. It is ALWAYS time to sack the Richmond board.

Dud pick, hasn't even played a game. We should trade him for Heppell. (double points for spinning together two ridiculous hyperbole spouts in one line) But seriously, what I liked about all the descriptions of Salem was the presence of good skills and the absence of significant weaknesses, so we should at least have a solid player who can contribute.

2009 has already been noted, and there was a moment when 2008 looked like the best draft ever - when Jack Watts was still 'the next big thing with time' when Blease looked like he'd be a speedy crazy attack machine, Jetta and Bennell looked like steals, Liam Jurrah was sending the crowds crazy, Jordie McKenzie was a tackling machine and Rohan Bail looked like a handy hard-running player. 2007 looked like a long list of steals and smoky wins, from Morton and Grimes to Wonneamirri and Martin. Sigh. But I do still feel pretty confident about this crop. Perhaps because there are more 'known quantities' in the mix, like Vince and Cross and to an extent even Tyson.

My curiosity is on the quiet midfield weapon we've acquired, Dom Tyson. Anyone have more detail on his situation and progress?

It's an interesting one - Collingwood's inside 50 rate is a product of the forward press, which emphasizes cutting off opponent's rebound efforts and firing the ball straight back in. Results in a lot of back and forth across the 50 line, and neither side gets clean breaks so much - it's disposal heavy, handball heavy, and results in a lot of snap shots on goal. In that context, Cloke's 4.5 marks inside 50 a game are a priceless component, and in fact his (comparatively) accurate kicking at goal is about the only thing keeping their goal accuracy above 50%! It tells the story a bit that their next most 'prolific' goal scorer is #$%$ Jamie Elliot, who has a serious talent for putting through the opportunistic goals with surprising accuracy.

Well put, I'm annoyed I didn't make these points myself! I think we'd also agree that there are other players out there who have been left 'underperforming' because of a lack of coherent, directed effort. I'm particularly interested in how our rebounds from defensive 50 will improve once proper rhythms are in place across the middle and flanks. An extra 5% disposal efficiency across there can make such a dramatic difference to a team, and for individual reputations. I'll specifically have an eye on Tom McDonald, who I think also is a natural 'first option' player but keeps getting left thinking 'oh come on, give me something to work with'.

I refer you to my post (65), beelzebub's post (67), Stuie (63, 58, 12), and dpositive (33), Let me know if you are still struggling after this collective assistance. Also, a nod to those like Jnrmac (4) and The Master (12) and daisycutter (9) and monoccular (22) who in various ways just rolled their eyes at a combination of 'stating the bleeding obvious' and 'ho hum, statistics discussed in isolation'. Curry & Beer, your error has been pointed out by multiple people, multiple times, using various methods. You can't then pretend that all that is going on is people muttering 'you're wrong'. Dammit. I've fed the troll.

This blows my mind. Curry & Beer, you really need to get your head around the fact that what you are saying is just plain wrong. The opposite of right. Not correct. Fallacious. Erroneous. Mistaken. Stupidity is one thing, but constantly telling people to learn 'grade 3 maths' and moaning about how 'painful' it is having to explain to people your completely incorrect base parameters, well, that starts to look a bit crazy. I just hope nobody reads this thread and is sucked in by your apparent certainty. There could be some very confused 3rd-graders around. Not a good way to start the school year.

I met a guy once (friend of friend) who started playing as a ruck in Darwin about the time that both Daveys and a couple of Motlops were running around up there in the same midfield, before they got drafted, obviously. Described it as hardly worth his while winning a tap. Sharked. Gone. I bet there are ruckmen who have nightmares about being surrounded by speedy little guys who evaporate when you try to grab them.

I've illustrated that it is only a correlation, and that different game styles, most obviously that of Fremantle under Ross Lyon, can produce high level results without anywhere near the inside 50 or goals-per-game rates of some other top teams. 'Likely' is far from the same as 'set'. 'Average' is far from 'actual'. There has been a remarkable consistency of the overall aggregate scores for seasons (a little over 90 per game on average, and about 4000 points per team per season... on average). Despite that, in 2008 there was a 'spike' up to 97 goals a game. But that means sweet diddly-squat on a team-by-team and game-by-game basis. For instance, 30 seconds looking at this year's ladder and hopefully anyone would notice a few things, like - Geelong and Hawthorn have higher scores both for AND against, compared to the next three teams on the ladder. For total volume of scoring, the difference between the grand finalists in 2013 was 800 points. 800. Eight hundred. Eight-zero-zero. That's equivalent to six goals a game. Lower in the 8, Richmond, Collingwood and Essendon have almost identical 'for' scores but a differential of 250 in the 'against' column - that's an average of two goals a game. Just out of the 8, Carlton and Adelaide have very similar percentage, but Carlton's games have seen 150 more points scored than Adelaide's. Meanwhile, North Melbourne, sandwiched between the two, see another 100 points a season on top of Carlton's. The Bulldogs and Gold Coast have the same number of wins, and close to identical 'for' scores. Bulldogs have 170 extra points 'against'. Down the bottom of the ladder, GWS scored 70 more points over the season than Melbourne did, and also had 300 more points scored against them. Close to 3 more goals per game were scored in GWS games than Demon games. Just one final factor for consideration; change within one team, year on year. A pertinent example for Melbourne's consideration might be, say, following a change of coach to a more defensively oriented one? Fremantle 2013 For: 2035 Against: 1518 Total: 3553 (161 per game, equivalent to 27 goals per game) 2012 For: 1956 Against: 1691 Total: 3647 (166 per game, 27 goals per game) 2011 For: 1791 Against: 2155 Total: 3946 (179 per game, 30 goals per game) 2010 For: 2168 Against: 2087 Total: 4255 (193 per game, 32 goals per game) Conclusion: Goals per game is not a static figure, scoring more goals does not reduce the number of goals your opponent will score, and the total scoring taking place each game can vary considerably from one season to the next for a given team. Can we call this one wrapped up?

Watts has sublime moments of vision and finesse but also stuffs up when he gets caught thinking... I'm not convinced he's as 'soft' as people say, but he often hesitates to go in when he gets caught thinking... He's also quite a good shot at goal, but sometimes sprays it completely when he gets caught thinking... So, what I'm saying is, Watts can be a great player when in a good mental space, calm but alert. I wonder where we'd find a coach who was right into fostering that sort of thing?

We will win more games if we get drunk at a bar in London.

I assume you mean because the style of game in the NT often emphasizes quickness, agility and creative play, such that young players with great talent who have grown up with football all around them might be able to show up even the more experienced players?

You also must have missed "grade 3 stats 101" - for every goal we kick, our opponents lose a goal. That's why it only takes 4.3 goals to balance a -8.4 goal differential. EDIT: Oh dear me, this thread is so bizarre I feel a need to clarify that I was actually agreeing with The Red Fox and noting the absurdity of the OP proposition.

She's American. Professionally.