Little Goffy

Countless times I've had the thought of how lucky it was to end up, by near-random chance, supporting the club which I would be most proud to support if I had to pick one on careful consideration now. It's like meeting a sibling you never knew you had and discovering that they are your favourite person. Ben Brown is certainly a part of that. He is somehow visibly one of those 'generous of heart' people who you would want your kids to spend time with and who can probably stay patient and cheerful in a dementia care environment. But, interestingly, one of the things I like about the club is that two radically different people (Brown and McDonald) can both be important and tightly connected parts of our premiership forward line and also each be excellent human beings in their way.

I suspect McDonald will be given a job to limit Moore, because staying tight on the opposition's key reader of the play is a great way to get your brain back in the right spaces, and because Moore's limited preparation will minimise the impact of any lingering preparation lag for McDonald as well. That said, in general I'm too much of a fan of the negating forward because I deeply hate watching the inside-50 -> turnover uncontested mark -> rebound 50 routine.

I'm far from excited but I guess with both Dunstan and Melksham doing ACLs 😭 there might be a need for the extra mature mid-sized body around. Rarely goes goalless. It is always hit and miss with the top-up type players; Dunstan, Grundy, Hunter, Tomlinson, Brown, and Langdon being our recent run, which you'd have to say has given us a great overall result for very little trade cost. A side thought on this is, if we are already bringing in an additional depth player through trade, just how many list spots do we think we're going to have open? Who is on the retirement or trade out queue already?

I for one applaud WCW for pushing through injury for the team, and hope she is able to spend most of summer sitting in dappled shade drinking sangria and dangling her foot in a cool stream.

Yep, that would make him a successor to Hibberd, but not to May or even Lever. Hibberd successor types is one area we have a lovely harvest coming up! I'll return my focus to the draft, even if my draft-crush Curtin isn't likely to make it to us!

If we recruit him he goes straight to the lookalikes thread as the Tradie Undies guy.

Found some footage of teenage Tayla Harris from before her AFLW career allowed her to channel her aggression.

Tall forwards starting to get a run on and the midfield starting to believe that if they get it in there the results will come. Positive feedback loop looking dangerous now.

Also showing as 'P. Paxman' in the broadcast stats.

I'm thrilled at the karmic smack Freo got for their arrogant attitude to the trade, but I'm also quite sure that the mostly young and mostly very good Freo side (particularly the midfield) will rise up and be a serious challenger next season, and that they won't regret having Luke Jackson, either. So my conscience is clean. From this day forward, I wish all the second best to Fremantle.

Or are they moonboots of invisibility? Could be a hand piece of kit on match day.

A while back I joked that Jye Amiss was having the career Bailey Fritsch would have had if he had been 8cm taller. Josh Schache is doing exactly the same, except the comparison is being 8cm taller than Michael Newton!

Science has confirmed that Fritsch's hair is the universal constant of physics. Observing it is the only known way to gather information about the contents of a black hole. Just Google 'Black Hole Fine Hair'.

Five dogs is a lot to manage. Should've gone for the Viney option - one dog, but five times the size!

Fingers crossed because normally when a woman is appointed to a top corporate position it is a poisoned chalice with a vast collection of unresolved potentially catastrophic issues ready to boil over... wait... okay. At least in this case she isn't being blindsided. I've barely seen anything of her but the little fragments I've dug around since the announcement suggest she is capable and has a bit of relaxed charisma. Could be a very good selection. I'm just glad my worst thoughts weren't realised after seeing a headline saying 'Kane appointed...'

Good Matrix-dodge on the there-their-they're trap, though!

Yes, indeed, and how are they reacting to the Fritsch speculation?

I feel like he's a player who will clock up a whole lot of '4ths'. 4th in a Rising Star award, a collection of 4ths in Best and Fairests, a 4th Premiership medal, all that kind of thing.

Joel Smith will have an important moment for sure. James Jordon will step up as a late-game sub and provide a valuable boost when a game is tight. Couple of smothers, maybe a run-down tackle on Pendlebury at a crucial moment that results in a 12-point end-to-end turnaround. I believe in small heroes.

From the footage it seems like the MRP got this one right enough as far as Weitering's brief incidental contact. Definitely not acceptable but short of a suspension I would have thought. Meanwhile... Toby Green had a player in an arm lock by the throat and was using that lock to drag and twist the player around after play had clearly stopped. So for me the real story here is the verification that the 'Toby Greene good guy transformation' is a full whitewash.

Just because they claim to be rebuilding but also didn't have a single player in the 22-under-22 team doesn't mean there is anything wrong with their drafting and development. Just ask dodo. Escape is survival! Basically Essendon club politics is a Resident Evil spin-off.

Melbourne to make everyone's spidey-senses tingle by smacking Collingwood. Carlton over Adelaide. St Kilda and GWS to continue in a state of unobserved probabalistic uncertainty with neither being fully eliminated until the semi-final when someone finally looks and the wavefunction collapses. #quantumtipping Brisbane over Port.

As much as he is a quality player now, I think getting Parish would clog our pipeline of development for younger players. At the same time, I don't think he'd be able to take on the physical load the way Viney exemplifies and Oliver and Petracca also do so well, so wouldn't even be contributing to that 'protection' factor either. So from my perspective, Parish doesn't offer enough 'value over the alternative' to justify stalling the process of giving Rivers more time in the middle, for example.

It has really been a twist in my gut ever since watching Melksham having to hobble his way across the field while play continued right around him despite three stoppages in that time. The sheer loneliness of it was horrible. I've been thinking about it and reached the conclusion that Jake Melksham's career would actually be a really interesting documentary. He's been intimately involved in two of the most dramatic stories of the least decade of football - the Essendon horror show and the Demon's return to power, full of characters who can be interviewed while Melksham's honest and direct style would provide a really good central thread.

Truly creepy space but if it works it works, I guess. If a xenomorph chestburster emerges from the cheersquad at least we'll know whose cryosleep was interfered with.