Akum

I agree with this to a point, but "grunt" players with good disposal are precious & rare and will become increasingly important as we climb the ladder. This has to be where the main part of our improvement will come from. Jones and Moloney are great ballgetters, but their disposal will always be a liability that reduces the value of their ballgetting ability. To become an elite team, we need a majority of our "in-and-under grunt" mids to also have line-breaker disposal skills. Scully seems to have both, and maybe Trengove; I'm hoping that Blease has both; other current grunters may improve their disposal and step up into this group. But it was great to see another new player (Jordie) with the potential to have both, and he is one to keep an eye on for future. So to answer the part of your post that I've bolded, I'd say that we definitely do not want any more "grunt" players who lack disposal skills, but we can do with any number of "grunt" players with high-quality ball use.

Remember that Blease & Strauss will be virtually new draft picks next year. That makes 4 new mids all with massive potential, and best of all, all great disposal skills.

This may need a new thread, but yesterday's game really highlighted our terrible field kicking, especially into the 50. We will never be a top team unless this dramatically improves, either with new players or existing players When we move up the ladder, how many of the experienced players with poor disposal skills (that haven't improved over 2 or 3 seasons) can we afford to carry in any given game? Two? Three? Next year we should have an influx of young players with potentially great disposal skills including Scully, Blease, Strauss & Trengove. With the influx of say 3 out of this 4 next year, how are we to prune our current crop of serial offenders down to the number we can afford to carry?

Totally agree, though he's not as slow as some. Definitely AFL standard, definitely worth his place, that's the most important at this stage. How much better he gets is up to him. Really liked his use of the ball today. With so many midfielders at the club next year, quality of use of the ball is going to be a critical factor for who gets the game.

Thought Bennell showed plenty today. Seems to have a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and seemed to use it well. Like all the young guys, needs to bulk up plenty though.

TB, I'm with you! As you do, I want us to get Scully just as bad as anyone, but without tanking. Our foot skills were terrible, yet we were in a winning position with Wheels's goal. IMO all that kept us in the game was our intensity and attack on the ball, and a team that tanks does not play with that level of intensity. I really think that Miller & Newton (and the others) were actually trying to kick goals but they just didn't kick straight. Let's face it, it's not like they're reliable set shots most of the time, Newton would have about 3 goals 10 for the year. They haven't sold their soul yet.

Best way to explain Cale's game today is 10 touches but 7 1%ers. Showed plenty today. So did Jordie, very clean by hand and foot, he's definitely AFL standard. All that stood in the way of a win today was truly dreadful kicking for goal - sitters missed by Miller & Newton (2 or 3 each), PJ & Bruce. Field kicking, especially delivery into the 50, was terrible too, yet we could have easily won.

Get it now. Great signs for 2010 though, if some of the kids do well in a game we look like losing.

Good show on tanking on ABC1!!!

Not sure what u mean here Jaded.

Two goals & 6 scoring shots in a half of footy? What's the story? On the other hand the score matters less - how's McKenzie going?

IMO German is a huge asset to the Dees. The alignment with Casey has worked on so many levels, the two clubs seem to mesh so well. Casey showed yesterday that they can beat a team with a lot of AFL players without too many of their own, but the Dees players really put in when they're there. A number of Dees have gone back to Casey, worked on parts of their game and come back much better and now actually look like they might be something - Petterd, Dunn & Bartram come to mind in recent weeks.

Didn't see the game, how did Bucks, Spencer, Zomer, Liddle, McNamara go?

I was prepared to stick up for her last week. I'm getting used to her voice and her comments, cliches etc are OK, no worse & no better than the run of the mill. Her problem is that she knows nothing other than Geelong. If they're dominating the game she's OK. If they're not, she just doesn't know the other team and there's total silence. Not good enough.

Yeh, I'm with you in the "couldn't care less" about what the media actually writes or says. What I meant was that, with the current amount of chatter everywhere in the footy world about tanking, there will be so much pressure on the AFL to check out our "outs" that it won't be possible for even Vlad to ignore it or turn a blind eye, and we'll be asked to "please explain". If they're not all genuine, we've got a lot of explaining to do. On the other hand, it may be a brilliant ploy by DB, because if they are investigated and found to be all genuine (and I'm certain they are), it will lower the temperature of the "tanking" chatter so that everyone can relax a bit.

I agree, but not in the way that I think you mean it. He's done much too good a job at the difficult and painstaking task of player development over the past two seasons to want to throw it away with the most ham-fisted and incompetent attempt at tanking imaginable. If this is what you pro-tankers mean by what we need to do to tank, you're kidding yourselves. If we're trying to tank, I can't believe we'd be so ridiculously lousy at it. I would say that every one of those "outs" would have to be genuine (and therefore we're not tanking), because if they aren't genuine, we're in deep skite.

If this really is tanking - by which I mean if any one of these injuries etc aren't genuine - expect us to be in serious trouble. There was enough media chatter about the 5 changes, now that there's another 2 unfit to play, it's going to come to a crescendo. There's no way the media will let us off the hook, there's bound to be a "please explain" from the AFL. And if it really is tanking, we've showed appalling incompetence being so blatant and ham-fisted about it, especially in a game we're likely to lose anyway even with all these players available. If this really is tanking, I'd be ashamed that my club is so damn incompetent at it that we'd risk the AFL taking a PP off us, or worse. I don't think the Dees are that incompetent actually; I agree with Paul Roos that we've actually done very well with player development and I can't see that we'd throw it all away. I prefer to take it at face value - it's much more likely we've just hit a terrible week for injuries.

Would that be Father Mick by any chance???

Absolutely right HT! If this was Round 2, or if we were top 4, these guys still wouldn't be able to play. There's a tendency to see tanking in everything when it's not there. Is dropping Robbo tanking? Or would it be tanking if we left him in the team? If you want to see evidence that we're tanking, you can see it anywhere you look. As others have said, Green has an injury that has the potential to cause lots of trouble, and which is notoriously hard to detect in its early stages. He needs to be given every opportunity for this damn thing to heal, even on 198 games. Same principle applies to Grimes. And Brock apparently injured his knee against Port and played injured last week, and we all saw how he played - so did we tank last week by playing him injured against the best midfield in the comp??? You guys who want to see tanking everywhere, you're going to have a really enjoyable few weeks, because you'll see it everywhere no matter what happens. Have a great time. Those of you like me who want Scully just as badly but who want us to get him without selling our soul, rest assured that we haven't sold our soul (not yet, anyway). My hope is that whatever happens, in 2010 and beyond we'll be so far up the ladder that there will be no more tanking threads. There's a huge difference between tanking and a dark cloud that happens to have a very clear silver lining!

The other point relates to that saying that to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is not a tank team!! These are definitely genuine injuries. We've known about Grimes' & Jamar's injuries earlier this week. We saw Grimes land awkwardly and struggle to get up (usually a player who's on his feet extremely quickly) when Ablett got his first goal by getting into his back when he was about to take a mark his back got bent backwards, the wordst thing that could happen to someone with a back problem. He played the rest of the game but his back would have been very sore once he cooled down. Jamar's been battling a quad on & off for the past 6 weeks or so. Brock apparently carried his sore knee, which he hurt against Port, into the game against Geelong and had a shocker. Does that mean that we "tanked" by playing him injured so that our midfield would get smashed even worse, against the best in the business? Or are we "tanking" this week by leaving him out even though he could play injured last week? And Green injured his wrist a few weeks back, nothing showed on X-ray so he kept playing, then a further investigation (possibly a CT or MRI) revealed the fracture of the scaphoid. A scaphoid fracture is notorious for doing that - not showing up on initial investigations but showing up 2 or 3 weeks later. It's also notorious for not healing or healing badly so that the pain is ongoing, and this is one where playing injured may have caused a problem for him longterm - I hope not, he's definitely one of the best at the club. So did we "tank" by playing him injured, knowing that this tricky fracture could be a possibility? This is not tanking or list management - it's a shocking week for injuries. If this had happened in Round 2, none of these players would be playing. Even Jack Watts is out with a chipped bone (i.e. fracture) in his thumb, which needs to be treated very carefully. Of the other 4, Grimes is 50/50 at best for next week, the others are all out next week and probably the week after. And are we "tanking" by dropping Robbo? Or considering his recent form, would we have been "tanking" if he'd stayed in the team while Miller & Newton are doing well at Casey? We're "tanked" if we do and "tanked" if we don't! The problem is that with the current hysteria about tanking, our supporters and the media call everything tanking. Sorry to disappoint all you who are drooling for the club to show us signs that we're tanking, but it's not this week. About all that could be said is that the footy-gods are doing what they can to help us!!

Agree with this, except that if Melbourne becomes Carlton (i.e. try to buy success by always doing it the easy way, cheating the salary cap, tanking on the field as well as off the field, dubious pay deals involving major sponsors for key players) we'd be much worse off. Carlton IMO is a club that's sold its soul over and over and still has nothing to show for it, the worst possible example to follow.

Same applies to Strauss, whose disposal is if anything even better, though he has played this year & seemed to have trouble picking up the tempo (or perhaps his shoulder was bothering him more than we realised). And there's a tendency to forget Jetta in these lists, he's coming along very nicely too. Perhaps what this thread shows is that there's well over 5 that we'd really want to hang onto, I find it too hard to narrow it down. Great discussion though. And in the light of Hannabal's "top-6" theory, we're really pretty well-placed for the future.

Great thread

Geez Adam, bit of time on your hands? Loved the bit about it becoming slowly obvious that we can't play all of Moloney, McLean & Jones in the mid at the same time. "Slowly" is definitely the right word. What concerns me about our midfield is its inability as a unit to exert any pressure on the other team's midfield when it's dominant. It seems that we can't do anything other than just hand over the middle of the ground. There's no defensive pressure whatsoever from the midfield when they're getting smashed. As you imply, there's no point just sitting back waiting for the coming of our midfield Messiah. This IMO badly needs fixing before Scully gets here. So two things. The first is that to beat the better teams in the comp, we MUST have a reliable tagger or two in the midfield. Geelong, for example, know that they can effectively obliterate the game of the best opposing midfielder via Ling, so their opponent is one mid down from the start of the game, a huge advantage. The obvious candidates are Jones & Bartram, on different types of players. Are there others who can do better? We really need to find out. The second is that we need to try players like McKenzie & Valenti to see if their defensive pressure is any better - i.e. can they give us some drive even if the opposition midfield is on top? Because at the moment, it seems to be only Moloney who can do that. For the forwards, I'd like to try Stef as a key forward changing in the ruck, to see if he shows anything there. I think he's going to be great one day, it's a matter of where he's going to be most valuable, and it's about time he was settld down a bit and not have to change with each game. And I'm afraid too that Newton deserves another go on his Casey performances, though maybe he's better to stay in Casey working on the parts of his game that need to improve. For Juice, 2010 is either his last year, or the year he finally becomes a player, and if he stuns us all and becomes a player, he'd be a huge asset, so it's a matter of whether for next year it's better for him in the seniors or in Casey working on his game..