Little Goffy

Well, that's 40 minutes of football that has probably ended Luke Beveridge's coaching at the Bulldogs.

I think it is kind of funny that for all the glory of picking Fritsch so late in the draft, we actually took Spargo a few picks before him. Personally, I think Spargo is on the cusp of a breakout, and the more he shows the more he will be used. He is so effective that if his numbers pushed up to even the high teens instead of the current 12ish disposals per game, he becomes a serious menance. He's already getting a goal or goal assist with almost every third disposal! We may even see our whole game style shift if the Pickett-Spargo-Chandler small forward mix comes together the way I suspect it will.

Crows are so bad I'm already thinking about the big game - Freo v North.

So I guess now we can expect to see Jack Viney go to maximum intensity for a while? Should be interesting.

4-2-6. Really, it is as if he just wants to embrace all the classic Demon traditions.

Bump.

I found it interesting that once we decided to go all out attack we barely let the opposition move it forward either. Keep them unsettled with relentless attack and it just encourages them to rush it and bomb it to the loving arms of Lever. We experienced exactly the same mental paralysis in the two bursts where Brisbane got runs on against us - far too many hurried, thoughtless kicks 'away from where they are' rather than purposeful attacking 'to where we want it'.

Wine casks? That's how he labels himself!

Clearly the solution is to add the remaining 12 minutes to our round 18 return match, and allocate premiership points pro-rata across both games. MCG should at least be able to find the fuse box.

I thought I could smell something familiar about this game. I was indeed one of the 3,772 people who had the pleasure of watching of overrun Brisbane nine goals to three in the second half back in 2021. At Homesbush of all places. Honestly, except for about ten minutes late in the first quarter where we were clearly rattled by the loss of Gawn, and Grundy in particular had visible fog coming out his ears, we've been able to keep it even despite a number of our better players being awkardly off their game.

A headache in the loins sounds like a Dayne Zorko thing. Or would that be a loins-ache in the head?

Profoundly talented players last longer. If you compare, say, Alex Neal-Bullen and Christian Petracca, who are 5 days off each other for age, nobody would doubt that if each of them experienced the same amount of physical wear-and-tear as they age, Petracca's career could realistically last 50 more games than Nibbler's. For Nibbler, if he loses 10% he drops to the fringe of selection, but for Petracca he'd stay solidly best-22 long after that. I actually think this relates to a misconception people have about 'age profiles' of premiership teams being older. It isn't that you need to have older players in your team as a factor in itself, it is simply that if you have great players and in particular smart players, they are going to make it into the 200+ range and still be going strong. If your team is stacked with average or mediocre players, they aren't going to push for a premiership and they aren't going to be burning through milestones either. Personally, I think there's a great chance here to recruit for a bit of speed and agility in the next couple of years so that our overall mobility continues to be well balanced as the new kids zip around and the older guys just keep stomping anyone who come near a clearance. I'm very happy with our selection of some very mobile future forwards, for example. Of course, if Freo can continue their first round efforts, we might as well just stop worrying about it until our new boy Harley Reid hits about 28-29 years. Wait... wrong thread?

Hey, that's a picture of me trying to guess your quizzes! And here's one of Demonland collectively;

Is it possible that we recruited Grundy as a favour to Jeff White, just so he knew that his kid would have the most impossibly high-level ruck mentors in the history of ruck mentors? I wonder if the AFL will change the father-son rules to make it more difficult for us?

Right now Collingwood (Rnd 13) and Sydney (Rnd 3 & Rnd 24) look like the main rivals for the premiership so they will be games of interest. Two games against Carlton will be interesting for getting their measure. And, no, I don't think anyone has any idea of how Carlton is actually going and if someone pretends they do, don't let them suggest a place for dinner either. I'll be keen to see us raid the coasts and go all Lindisfarne on Geelong down at Goomba stadium, ideally putting their season in a final death spin. But for me, the most tantalising prospect is doing a full 186 on Hawthorn in the second-last round. Who knows, maybe they'll even be in a kind of late season 'showing some promise for the future' mode and we'll get to crush that hope as well. A full demonstration of ruthlessness pre-finals is always welcome.

I'm picturing the 'this is Sparta' meme except the guy doing the kicking slips over and ends up just kind of bundling into the victim and barely nudging them off. 'This. Is. Carlttooo - oo - oo- on. Phew."

So, something I didn't realise until the commentators pointed it out - apparently Geelong are the reigning premiers.

Darcy, Darragh, and Dayne. Brisbane's ins look like someone tried to cheat on a word puzzle game. Meanwhile, our ins could each stake a claim to being in the proverbial best six at almost any club. It is a little scary. At some point this season our whole team is going to have an 'up' game on the same day and it simply won't matter who the opposition is. (Although personally I'd like to see our two games against Hawthorn reach a combined margin over 200)

Got to feel for Tomlinson, but if May is available then clearly he goes in, and if Fritsch is also available then there's not much of a case to shuffle any key defender forward. Presumably Melksham will be sub again as we've added more height with the changes anyway, plus he is so close to 100 games he can probably taste the Menevit tablets already.

So we got Fritsch AND the share of Grundy's salary not being covered by Collingwood

Really? Halo has Petracca as the main character.

Needs to dye his hair blonde.

That is art.

I can trace the origins of this thread to the mention of Cam Rayner in the 'What they're saying at Springfield' thread. Humans are fascinating creatures. Anyway, if Watts had been taken at 31 we'd love him and if Fritsch was taken at 1 we'd probably have burned him for 'underperforming' for the first three seasons of just being good. Of course, NOW we can say that pick 1 of the 2008 draft got us one handy third tall swingman for a decade and then the games' best mid-sized forward who kicked 6 goals in a grand final and is realistically top-3 in his draft. It's like an MFCSS therapy session in here.

Mastery of the understatement. He's going at a tick under 2 goals a game for the Lions, which taken as an isolated fact is pretty good, but he was supposed to transform their attacking game. Last season was kept just outside the top-40 for contested marks/game (kept out by Harrison Petty, I'll note), and not even in the top 200 for marks. Instead of being a dynamic forward target that creates chances, he is just consuming their forward 50 entries for a basically adequate result. Daniher had 5.26 score involvements per game, of which 3.3 were individual scores (2 goals, 1.3 behinds) Hawkins had 8.7 score involvements of which 4.4 were individual scores (2.7 goals, 1.7 behinds) So Hawkins, the benchmark for team-oriented key forwards, generates double the scoring activity for teammates than that of Daniher who is probably on similar money.