Little Goffy

Courtesy of https://afltables.com/afl/teams/melbourne/season.html Most games won in a season - 16 out of 22 total, in 1990 16 out of 18 total, in 1956 But the REAL record to chase this weekend is our best year in an odd-numbered season. A win over the Hawks pushes us level with 1989 (14wins) and prior to that we go all the way to 1955 with 15 wins.

Looks to me like the beards are trying to attack eachother and both players are just trying to keep them apart.

Ooooh, song lyrics. As per trade week: "Even if you've got Daniel Rich, a trade for Young and Hart is much better by far."

If we lose to the Hawks I will go into a nasty little sulk and not go outside my home for days. If we win, of course, I will have a merry celebration and not go outside my home for days.

For as long as the Demons are doing well I will be looking for games with a chance to inflict at 186 on a 'deserving' opponent. Decapitating the Hawks sounds good to me. And it is time we began getting our attack in shape.

I agree with the sentiment. Throughout this experience there's an awful lot of people suffering a lot more than the people who have been getting most of the attention, public sympathy and support. Unfortunately, it is looking like some kind of case study of political economy; groups of people with real ability to affect their own circumstance (through status, political voice, accountants, or simple cash reserves) are also the people with the ability to influence how help and sympathy is distributed. That decisions are being made on the basis of placating the complacent has directly contributed to most of the errors in managing Covid-19: - absence of serious strategy for safe, large-scale repatriation - absence of a stable, predictable support structure for individuals and communities facing lock down - hedging about spending the relatively trivial additional funds to accelerate the vaccine rollout - constant fiddling of the minutiae of vaccine choice advice despite there being plenty of people happy to take AZ at the first opportunity - lack of coherent system for exemptions, such that 'special needs' applies to whoever can be the best 'Karen' (I hate the term, but it is illustrative here) rather than who actually is in need. The end result is constant knee-jerk reactions whenever the complacent crowd suddenly finds themselves actually exposed to the impacts, with the further effect of constantly undermining perceived legitimacy of the advice and rules being given to keep people safe.

There may be some satisfying irony in that once they go to jail they will be so hated in there they will have to spent much of their sentence in protective isolation.

AND as soon at it gets in, it kicks everyone else out. #bastardcovid I for one refuse to go to any party that little [censored] is going to. Of course, being in Sydney that means I've literally left the house just three times in the last five days and only once did I actually enter any other enclosed space. Toilet paper waits for no man. I've got family down in Victoria who really shrink into themselves at any mention of another lockdown so like most people on here I'm clinging to the desperate hope that the current 'seven in one' cluster is as far as things go.

That spoil by Ziebell with about 10 seconds left was magnificent. And it would appear he ripped a bit of skin doing it because he was bleeding solidly from his hand during the celebrations. Something about that game just felt vintage and I'm sure it will go down in North folklore.

Surely what the AFL needs is salary cap concessions for players over 30 who were traded into their current club after at least five seasons at a previous club. Obviously this wouldn't be a rule just to suit Geelong. It is entirely coincidental that it would apply to Dangerfield, Stanley, Henderson, Tuohy, Jenkins, Smith, Higgins and Rohan.

Southsider! You're skirting around the edges of a major Demonland ban, there. No, in my Canberra days I had the 'great honour' of always being a proper inner-north boy. Thanks to the combination of Canberra public transport and street tree planning, I'm actually a better kick with an acorn that a football.

Pfft. Belconnen? Pfft. Snort. Barbarians from the north. Pfft. Mind you, that's probably 3 BOGs in a row for Mr Steele, to go with a couple of other BOGs in St Kilda wins earlier in the season and many very good games. It is also already established last season that the umpires like him (why wouldn't they?) Could he be the smokiest smoky for the Brownlow?

Just for perspective on how young Petty still is - just two fewer games prior to this year and he would still be eligible for the Rising Star award.

I agree on both your points. It is indeed minor, and a quibble!

Something I didn't fully appreciate until last night's game: Pickett can kick 50m snaps off a couple of steps in traffic. Twice in a game is ridiculous and it is enough of a weapon that it could affect how we and our opponents plan. Welcome back, Kozzie.

Looks like we've got a tall defender factory to rival Adelaide's, except ours isn't a factory strictly for export! ?

I'm not going to get carried away but what I liked the most was that he, for want of a better expression, looked like Ben Brown. As in, he wasn't out of sorts, wasn't hesitant and second-guessing or only half-competing, didn't rush. Throw in some examples of very composed and immediate ball movement with competent kicks, and I feel very confident about his coming contribution. And there can be zero concern about his effect on McDonald's game, that's for sure!

6. Petracca. No butchering this week! Magnificent. 5. McDonald 4. Salem 3. May 2. Oliver 1. Pickett (9 tackles and 3 goals, what more can you ask from a small forward?) Many unlucky, but I don't think they'll feel like complaining.

Well, that day took forever. I'm mildly freaking out. Good times. Final thought before the game; in the three games Ben Brown played earlier this season, both Fritsch and McDonald kicked more than a goal-a-game better than in games without Ben Brown.

I'm currently working on a personal side-project (which might one day become a book) where I'm going through all the classics of military theory and collecting the notes and quotes which may be of interest from a football perspective. It has been a very interesting ride with a slightly surprisingly huge amount of content on cultivating behaviours, understanding the hearts of men, the nature of courage and panic, all that. There's also, of course, an awful lot on using tactics to take the initiative in a battle or at campaign level. In all of that, one thing I've never, ever come across is an endorsement of a tactic which allows your opponent to not have to worry about dealing with a counter-attack. Multiple authors have gone into quite angry rants about the psychological death that comes from having troops deployed in a strictly defensive posture. It is often described as the product of cowardice and (in various terms) groupthink on the part of officers and senior commanders who can only think in terms of simple risk and who are intimidated by the danger to their reputation if they attempt something bold and it fails. Doing the same as everyone else incurs little reputational risk even when it does fail. I think Australian football has very much fallen into that trap when it comes to pressing all the numbers back to defence and leaving a vacated forward line. For this example the situation is precisely the same in football as in the military theory; having a force deployed in a way that can threaten multiple crucial enemy positions compels the enemy to protect ALL of the various positions that force might attack, thus forcing them to distribute both garrison forces to provide delaying strength as well as an 'observation' force at least as strong as your offensive force, ready to respond. The analogy to football is pretty clear; if you have one or two forwards stay 'home' even when the ball is up the other end of the ground, the opposition then has to consider the full range of places those forwards might become a threat. Got a CHF in position? Are they going to lead out to provide a connection? In the corridor, on the wings? Are they going to lurk around the 50m line ready to provide a short lead marking target or to suddenly break towards goal to run onto the long bomb to space over their head? Even on that simple level of consideration, that one forward has just forced the opposition defence to actively consider about a hectare of the field as under threat. A second forward doesn't expand the range as much but it also makes planning that defence even more complicated. Key is - your opponents MUST respond, or they would just be giving away goals every time you broke out of defence. #letforwardsbeforwards !!!

Hf line is all Aussie... Jack Thompson, Naomi Watts, and, um, ah, hmm, Philip Adams? I only ever get two in a set and I'm usually wrong on them, too

Mid-season staggers by premiership winners. Some are definitely there, some are pretty minor and not really worth considering, and some teams had start-of-season problems. Melbourne's 3w 3l run mixes in without so much as an eyebrow raised. Richmond 2020 - not sure if going 1w, 1d, 2l to start the season counts as a mid-season slump! Richmond 2019 - round 11 to 13 - three consecutive losses (by an average margin of 45) West Coast 2018 - round 13 to 15 - three consecutive losses Richmond 2017 - round 6 to 9 - 4 consecutive losses (without passing 75 points) Footscray 2016 - round 13 to 19 - 3w 3l Hawthorn 2015 - another from the start: round 1 to 8 - 4w 4l Hawthorn 2014 - round 5 to 10 - 2w 3l Hawthorn 2013 - no slump Sydney 2012 - round 6 to 9 - 1w 3l, and again in rounds 20 to 23 - 1w 3l Geelong 2011 - round 15 and 16, consecutive losses. Collingwood 2010 - round 9 to 12 - 2l, 1d, 1w (and that draw was to 2011 Demons!) Moral of the story: Calm yourselves.

Devil's advocate in Viney's defence for that particular incident - if he had already said a number of times, "I'm fine, leave it. Leave it. Get your hand out of my face while I'm trying to gather myself after taking a hit. No, get off me," and then she's once against wiped a tissue across his face like he's a snotty four year old, then, yeah, that's reached a point where he would have to push her off. Maybe I'm just a bit sensitive to carer-patient consent after all the NDIS and Aged Care training videos I've been exposed to recently. Of course, it is also possible that Viney was just being a bit of a sulky snotty-nosed four year old. ?

The need for a bit more variety at our stoppages, especially some added class and speed, has long been a concern. Pickett is not afraid of contact and sure knows how to dance in a crowd, so I also like seeing him mixed in occasionally to confuse the opposition. I would assume the main concern is that he is still only a kid with (while crediting his personal initiative bordering on heroic this pre-season) finite endurance so there's a limit to how much we can expect him to be running all over the ground attending stoppages, hence the use just a centre bounces. He's clearly fatigued. He works his horse off every week without a lot of exciting reward and that's hard to maintain. I wouldn't put it beyond being emotional fatigue as well. His individual season has a distinct resemblance to the Demon's collective 2005 after mourning Troy Broadbridge and for a kid to lose his mother and be away from home is a much greater grief. There's only so long you can courageously push through before you go through a period where all you are feeling is the hole in your life. That's all speculation only of course. My main thought from it all is that I'm not really worried about Kozzie longer term and I hope when we bring a tall target back in for him to work with then he'll get to really enjoy football again and the rewards will flow for himself and the team.

Okay. Trying to sweep through the negatives as fast as I can... a few players had absolute stinkers and a few more were well down on what they should be expected to offer. Our forward 50 entries were mostly junk, we frequently didn't have a clear target to kick to, we had numerous brainfart kicks, and even when we had a runner bursting through the wing they had no confidence to kick it to even a one on one and instead kept hesitating and looking for the ' Positives. Hmm. Correcting the forward line problem may yet be relatively simple. Tom McDonald has definitely proven he can play as a roaming CHF and up the ground. Jackson has also once again shown he doesn't need to be plonked up in the forward line to be making a contribution. There is simply zero doubt left that Brown can come in and not disrupt out structure. Even moreso when you consider how often Fritsch was left trying to compete with the opposition's top tall defender. Brown really must come in as the 'when in doubt, at least he'll get his arms to it' target for our hesitating mids, as well as his capacity to offer good leads. Other positives... um, * even when our forward line isn't working and out mids are wasting the ball, our defence is still rock solid. * if our forward line starts working and our mids stop wasting the ball, we'll routinely double our opponent's scores.