Little Goffy

I've had similar thoughts. He clearly is profoundly calm and has terrific perception in complicated situations. He could become that priceless wing/half-forward who can put the ball in unexpected places even when the opposition defence in set up.

I am now more confused than I was before.

I'm thinking of a respectable nuggety red-head? Basically freckles sewn together into human-shaped form? Only other candidate I can think of is right at the other end of the 'conventional beauty' scale and given the spouse at the time the easiest way to identify the boy would be whether or not they are a clear biological advancement on regular mortals.

Yeesh, people getting pretty fired up here. Seems to me like both sides of the argument of 'how much should we expect from Jefferson in 2025' are actually making their points reasonably enough but then interpreting the other side as making the extreme argument. Nobody thinks Jefferson is a soft scrawny kid who'll never make it if he doesn't transform like a pokemon in 2025, and nobody thinks Jefferson is the second coming of Franklin. Personally, when it comes to talls I have a reference point of the 2000 draft. Koschitzke played 20 games in his first season, Reiwoldt played only 6. Tall forwards are strange beasts. Other top ten key position players just got on the [censored] at Carlton and were never heard from again.

As Clausewitz said, practice matches are an invaluable tool for individual players, collaborating portions of the team, and the overall planning of the team to get a grasp of how opponents will react to their methods and to learn to anticipate those reactions. Specifically, ol' grandpa Carl said, 'Warfare is not the action of one wilful agent against an inert mass, but of two dynamic bodies in collision with each other'. Well, close enough to that. It is too hot today to go digging through my notes.

The possum that fell out of the ceiling doesn't count as support staff.

Melbourne football club to 2015; 7 All-Australian selections. Max Gawn. 7 All-australians. Actually, that reminds me that I had a theory that our great problem for the 2000s run (before the wheels came off) was that our team had so many players who were on the edge of greatness but never quite put it together for various reasons. Can you imagine, for example, putting the best periods of Bruce, Green, Yze, Johnstone, Woewodin, Leoncelli, Moloney. Powell and McDonald out there at once as your midfield and mid-sized utility mix? If they had all peaked at the same time the result would have been liquid fire. Particularly frustrating because there would have been times they were all in the side together (except Moloney & Woewodin) and it just didn't quite catch. Two things linger with me; - this pattern of players having peaks and fading and coming back put a pretty serious strain on our salary cap. - if we had had proper facilities and an full support staff for conditioning and fitness and so forth, would these players have had not only slightly better performance, but more consistency over their career so that the magic overlap could have more chances to happen?

If Peter Dutton can get into property speculation in 1991 on a teenage butcher's apprentice salary, surely Bailey Smith can manage it on a professional AFL salary in 2025. Or has inflation been even worse than I thought?

https://www.realestate.com.au/property-residential+land-vic-bells+beach-203989064 Yep, 6ha will set you back $4m near Bells Beach. This may even be the property. So, just barely turned 24, played 100 games, has just missed an entire season, has some documented, uh, expensive habits. I mean, it can cost a lot to have someone regularly scrubbing your Wikipedia page of all sin. Presumably he didn't pay with cash up front, so it is viable. As an investment it'll be great too, because a little birdy* told me that there are some statutory planning changes coming that will make a sudden surprising difference to the accessibility of the property and from the property to the beach, and that there will be some softening of the restrictions on building, too. "Bailey Smith's Mixed Recreational Inn; guaranteed to not be visited by Geelong Police until at least 2032."

This thread has struck me in a weird way - I want to assemble some kind of 'team of the century so far' entirely of players who were never in the top echelon of the team they were in. The depth team of the century? No, that's not quite it. And I don't mean useless, overrated, or draft failures. Players who warrant respect but were definitely never stars. The kind of team captained by Nathan Brown. There's also a few who are in on the basis that if they'd had any kind of a run at it, or if their career hadn't been Neeld'd, they might have been that much more. So, here's a first sketch at it on a few minutes' effort; B: Troy Broadbridge Alistair Nicholson Neville Jetta (vc) HB: Clint Bizzell Adam Tomlinson Paul Wheatley C: Simon Godfrey Nathan Brown(c) Joel MacDonald, HF: Kyle Cheney Cameron Pederson Aaron Vandenberg F: Steven Armstrong Ben Holland Brad Miller FOLL: Paul Johnson Jack Trengove Jordie McKenzie INT: Clint Bartram Dean Kent Colin Garland Matthew Warnock Respectfully noting that Guy Rigoni misses out only because he was more a 90s player. And I just... looking at past player lists and remembering how promising and earnest Troy was, I had to include him. Jared Rivers was disqualified by winning the Rising Star award. Contradicting myself a bit, Trengove was included despite being a top pick because he was just so personally unlucky and this team was really in desperate need of mids. Note also that I support the case for Neville Jetta being in the 'other' team. The living embodiment of underrated. Of our current list I'd nominate Dan Turner, Taj Woewodin and Jake Bowey as very likely to force their way onto this team and to improve it significantly.

I wonder if there might be some benefit to a more multi-tasking friendly environment at games. You know, less of the relentless wall of idiotic noise at every pause in the game? It would be ironic if the AFL's desperate attention-seeking-from-the-inattentive strategy was actually driving the low-attention-span markets away by preventing them from being able to comfortably engage with their other flows of activity. I also wonder if better seating plans and the like would actually be appreciated by the multi-tasking youth just as much as it would be appreciated by the sore-butt elderly? For example, what if the MCG's capacity was 90k instead of 100k, and just that little bit more comfortable for the first 50k seats?

After the resounding success of the X league or whatever it was called, this is definitely a good call commercially.

Personally I believe in using the draft to try to extract the 'star' level talent and then trading to complete the structure or ensure sufficient genuine AFL-level quality across that essential best 25-30. I'm also a fan of having a pretty long list of new kids in the system even if it means a couple from each draft never quite make it, because even speculative 3rd-rounder turnover still brings the chance of a bonus. Plus, this opens up quite a bit of salary cap space to retain that essential core. On the other hand, we should make an enquiry of every single free agent that comes up just to inflate their price for whoever does take/retain the player. ;)

Okay then, I'll bite, can his nickname be a nice simple 'Hammer'?

If we were on a proper statistical chart there wouldn't even be a prediction point, just the probability range bars going from 1 to 18. Personally I think we'll win the premiership, but predicting the Demon's 2025 is a mad game to play.

Got to get in ahead of Tasmania with the 'think of the savings on sunscreen' pitch. Geelong's salary cap must be [redacted] [redacted] than a [censored]'s [censored]. Bunch of grubby cheats.

Speaking of, it must annoy the christ out of Jesus every year. Then again, since the 'restart the clocks, the saviour is in the house' mob missed the mark by a few years anyway, he's probably given up on ever blowing out the right number of candles.

Might be a Tom McDonald thing. Once ypon a time I was at a cafe at one of those fashionable giant semi-communal tables and Tom was sitting opposite me the entire I leafed through the football news and checked demonland on my phone. I was even wearing the scarf. He enjoyed the double-take when I finally twigged as I was getting up.

Have to acknowledge the new administration's rapid action to increase the club's output of weddings.

Maybe you can. It has been proven conclusively that I definitely cannot.

Do you remember that time a $400m joint NASA-ESA mission was destroyed on landing because just one engineer in one sector had forgotten to convert inches to centimetres? Misplaced by about that much.

For the first time ever I've gone 'oh, I know it!' within a couple of seconds of looking. Almost certainly wrong but I'm just going to savour the moment before I send the PM.

The other day I got rid of some unwanted stuff (tip; evaporative coolers do sweet f-a when you don't have the option of also ventilating the space) at Cash Converters and was Christian Petracca there? NO! I get that it was a couple of days before his wedding, but he'll still be married tomorrow while it could be years before I drop in to Cash Converters again. We'll never make finals with this attitude.

A nice touch that it is made of wood, too complete the pointless anchor alliteration.

Mindfulness and mind-set coaching. When it's bad, it's rubbish and actually does harm. When its good, it trains people to be aware of the things they're doing which aren't actually helpful, and to deliberately choose to replace them with actually useful habits. It can also be quite good for learning to not give two ****s about external opinion, including avoiding the trap of reacting disrespectfully just to prove you don't care. Really optimistic about this appointment.