Little Goffy

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.

Possibly an autocorrect trip, or the writer was using Grammarly so it just assumed everything was middle-manager-speak?

You'd think people (or at least Zero Hanger) would have a full grasp of this after the shameful commentaries about Koutafides, who backended his contract to hell twice so that Carlton could cope when the AFL decided to enforce the salary cap on them for a few seasons. But trying to piece together a full picture of the peaks and troughs of player salaries would be quite the task, and nobody would click! Still, Ben McKay, lol. It should read 'Ben Mckay plus the premium rate for not having to use any trade value in the AFL's ridonkulus patchwork system.

It is weird to me how language loses meaning when people pick up a catchphrase or expression without actually knowing the meaning, and then just... use it when it feels good? I guess? 'One of those players with a glass ceiling' must be the weirdest description of a draftee I've ever heard.

I think there is space for a very wide rethink of how contracts are constructed. It all seems very ad hoc, and very much just an accumulated legacy as the league went from semi-professional to professional to 'marketplace'. Doesn't help that the AFL administration is addicted to reactive tweaks. At the simplest level every contract needs to succeed at giving both the player and the club security in an environment where a player's 'worth' can dramatically turn in the space of minutes, never mind years. I wonder how much of the current chaos, minutiae, and confusion could be boiled down to just a few key points?

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but if Langford does indeed get picked round 1 it will be a major early career test of his character. His 19th birthday is the night before, and it is a saturday night.

Yoikes, it is no wonder Simon Goodwin struggles to embed a game plan when the goalposts keep getting shuffled around. One moment Brisbane are missing key players, the next it is the replacements. Coleman, Doedee and McCarthy may well be in our 22, but they wouldn't be pushing our Petracca, Oliver and Brayshaw to do it. Anyway, it is a side argument. You believe that Simon Goodwin is the problem, I believe we've been hit hard by circumstance and have managed to load up on new talent during the storm.