Akum

One thing we do need to do is to expect that other teams aren't just going to play us on our talent. And anticipate that they will: * Headhunt the cream of our younger players, namely Oliver, Petracca and Salem, and Hogan when he comes back. * Take advantage of our lack of talls by holding off the ball (mainly Watts) and blocking (mainly T-Mac, by far our best remaining tall in a contested marking duel) * See if they can get away with blunting our unbelievable advantage at clearances (where even though we get smashed in hitouts we win the clearances against even the best of midfields) by playing outside the rules. Specifically, they'll try out a blatant illegal act early in the game, and if the umpires don't pay it (and they almost always don't), then they've got us for the rest of the game. We repeatedly seem surprised that other teams don't want it to be a fair fight. We play such a naive game, especially at the start, and expect the other side to stick to Queensberry rules. We need to do what Jack Dyer used to say: "Retaliate first!"

This season we could probably have managed with injuries to 5 or 6 mids. Brayshaw & VDB are already out, and we have ANB, Stretch, Ben Ken & even Trengove playing for Casey, all of whom would be handy backups. We could have managed with injuries to a few small defenders too - of those who aren't already in the team there's Melksham*, Harmes, White, and again Trengove, Stretch & ANB. But we were always going to struggle if we'd lost one of Gawn, Hogan & T-Mac. Not only did we lose 2 out of those 3, but also Gawn's only backup in Spencer. Yes, we could have done better. But it's not the disaster it could have easily been. We're at least getting ourselves into winnable positions late in every game so far. There's just the next step of hauling yourself over the line once we're in that winning position. For a team that's been so down for so long, it's not surprising that we haven't yet got that right, but that's probably the last element that's going to slot into place. * Speaking of Melksham, next time we play North, we use Melksham's "extra talents" and put him on Cunnington. And get Lewis to hold regular master classes for the whole list in "unsociable footy".

I for one would not be praising if we'd done it and won. That was nothing like "unsociable football", that was thuggery orchestrated by a thug coach taking advantage of a stupid MRP ruling made to justify an unjustifiable failure to suspend a favoured player. Unless you define "unsociable football" as thuggery that you happen to get away with. Clarko always defined it as going right up to the line but not beyond it. If we'd done it, it would still have been thuggery, and I'd have been disgusted if that's what it took to win a game.

Do other clubs' supporters show the same level of self-righteousness as this? Or turn on their own as readily? If someone hits you with a throat punch and you're not expecting it (and a coward will only hit you when you don't expect it), you'll probably end up on the ground.

That might have been the one where Higgins remonstrated with the umpire because it was only a throat punch and wasn't supposed to have been penalised. So Bernie hit him back with a (much softer) throat punch and he didn't like it. I won't get into Higgins's character. Just that I know for sure that the Bulldogs were never happier to get rid of any player. We made a massive mistake getting Bernie to tag him and not Cunnington.

So let's think this through rather than just react. If the only other teammate around is Garlett or Kent, he would of course go for the mark. If Pedo or Weed is around, is he better going for the marking contest and dragging in his opponent too if North have an extra man to take the ball away? Because having too many flying for the contested mark and nobody waiting for the inevitable crumbs has been such a successful element of our play this year. Or is he better to keep his opponent out of the marking contest and try to beat them on the ground? So of course he's going to look around to see who else is around to work out what he's best to do in the circumstances.

"Frees for" had about 40% more kicks than any other North player, and at least twice as many kicks as all but 3 of their team. Absolutely dominated the game.

I saw the Richmond captain hit Viney in the head in a similar fashion to Salem, and start a melee, for which he was later cited. He actually got a free kick for it, which led to a goal. Did that deter him from doing it again, or did it encourage him?

Good on you. Brad Scott couldn't have put it any better. We were getting whacked from before the opening bounce. The players think "OK, the umps will sort it out for us, that's what they're there for." About 10 minutes in, they see Oliver flat on the ground, whacked high by Higgins not far from the umpire while play is stopped, and the umpire does nothing, waves it through. If you're North, you'd think, "Beauty! Scotty was right! We can get away with just about anything today! Throat punches! Let's go!" And they do. If you're a Demon, you'd think, "Well, the umps clearly aren't going to protect us. But we can't just cop this. We've got to give something back!" And they do. I'm assuming you're not suggesting they should have just copped all the whacks and "played the ball", knowing the umps wouldn't protect them? Do we want to be known as the club that's not willing to hit back hard when we get hit unfairly? I do agree with your last sentence about "poor leadership and poor coaching" though. Scott, whose only elite quality as a player was knowing how far he could bend the rules and get away with it, would have spent much of last week watching the video of us against Adelaide and working out how to nail us. Were we really so naïve as to not expect them to go the biff (and probably to get away with it)? We seemed to be totally unprepared for them to come out and go the biff from the start. If we weren't so naïve, we should expect this to happen every single game. Just a hint. In two weeks we play a club who desperately wants to beat us, whose coach is probably coaching for his career. I wonder whether we can predict what will happen in the first 10 minutes? And I wonder whether our coach will be yet again surprised when it does happen. Or do you think we could possibly plan for it.

Love the way that Gill comes up with this revelation after, not before, this week's MRP decision. North targeted our younger players and got off Scott-free. They must be absolutely crowing over there. This is just what I mean about the squeaky wheel getting the grease.

And Saty, my greatest fear is that you have nailed the club's attitude spot-on. We have to accept the umpiring, we have to accept the targeting of our young players, we have to accept that the umpires won't protect them, we have to accept the crazy-lopsided MRP decisions that have been going against this club since Trengove on Dangerfield. Or maybe since we nailed the MRP with Viney on Lynch. But there are probably at least a dozen clubs who wouldn't accept all that without saying or doing something to protect their players.

I reckon it all started with Nat Fyfe in his Brownlow year. The MRP turned themselves inside out trying to avoid suspending the guy who was the obvious Brownlow winner several weeks out from the end of the season. What would the AFL PR consultants (who virtually set the standards for the AFL) do if the eventual Brownlow winner got suspended multiple times like he should have been? The docile commentariat, who rely entirely on the AFL for their living, chose to ignore. Since the success of getting away with not suspending Fyfe, we now have favoured players (most of whom play for wealthy or important or noisy clubs - Fyfe, Cotchin, Mummy, anybody who plays for Demetriou's old club) who cannot get suspended under any circumstances and will only get fined. But to uphold the charade that they're not being soft, they have to be hard on other players who will get suspended for relatively minor incidents. I repeat, in most of the 120 years or so that Aussie Rules footy has been in existence, Cunnington & Higgins would have got suspended and Salem got off. This is now a game ruled by PR, and because we never make any noise on behalf of our players, we never threaten their sacred public image. We know our place.

On reflection, Goldstein was damaging, but I don't think he was the difference. It was our old nemesis, the spare man in defence. They had Thompson, Tarrant, Hansen and Mullett against Watts, Weideman and Hannan. I think Goody's game plan is to bomb it to within about 20m of goal, and bring the ball to ground and lock it into our forward 50 until we score. It's worked well this year, we've got a lot of goals that way. It's not the initial f50 entry, it's the subsequent play that gets the goal. That's why Hogan isn't leading in the games he's played this year, that's why Watts isn't presenting a long way down the ground like he used to and is being told to fly for pack marks in the forward line. This works well only if we get it in fast and deep. If the buildup is slowed down by too many handballs, or if it's too shallow and we only bomb it to 40-50m, it makes it far too easy for an organised defence, especially if they have a spare man, to block our forwards from getting to the fall of the ball and allow their spare man to take an uncontested mark. Hansen did hardly anything all day except stop Watts contesting - holding him back or blocking him, and if necessary blatantly charging him in the back. My point is that -once again and again and again - if they're playing a spare man back, bombing it in just plays into their hands. We need to change something - do what most other teams do and man up their spare (who is usually the sort of player who hates one-on-one contests) and increase the chances of "chaos goals" in the forward line, or run it up the ground (of course, when we did that, we got run down from behind more than I've ever seen, because of lack of talking). We're playing a very naive game at the moment. Looks great when it comes off, but cunning teams who plan well can find ways to pick us off. And we are too often too naive to do anything about it. A developing team with a developing coach.

I totally agree with you because that's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking measured, careful, and driven by our duty of care to our players being our priority.

Something else. The way this was presented on the SEN news this evening was with a sense of incredulity that Cunnington and Higgins got off and only Salem got suspended. Now SEN isn't the oracle (of course), but they do reflect the views (for better or for worse) of the football-loving public fairly well. I reckon there's a fair chance that the footy community in general thinks we've been pretty hard done by and are waiting for a response from us. If we don't give one, they'll put it down to, well, "same old Melbourne, soft and naive as usual" and probably won't be surprised.

Yes, because educating our players and not complaining has done so well for us in the past. But the club will almost certainly roll onto our collective backs and adopt the submissive posture to the alpha dog. The thing is: we have a duty of care to our players. Not to the AFL. Not to the hypersensitive feelings of North and their whinging coach. To our players. There is now a significant risk of one of our players getting throat-punched or gut-punched and getting internal injuries, because we haven't taken steps to defend our players against it. North players almost certainly don't have that risk, because they have. And in the process, they've made us look like the perpetrators and initiators. Because we've said nothing.

We didn't even enter the PR battle. We just meekly handed them the initiative, like we did after Lewis's goal on Sunday.

I reckon Goody needs to come out and say that Sunday's game demonstrated the need for the club to take action to protect our younger players from the sort of treatment they were on the end of during that game. Perhaps he could say that our insurer has told us that it's part of our duty of care to our players to do everything within our power to prevent the same thing - or worse - happening in future (if this isn't true, it really should be). He could say that the spite in the game was initiated early on by a 19-year-old player getting throat punched off the ball by a senior player, who was not penalised for doing so. He could say that, unless we take steps now to ensure that this type of thing is sanctioned, we can't guarantee that our players will be protected from more severe injury in the future as a result of such an incident. He could say that it was our reasonable expectation as a club that our players would get adequate protection from the umpires, but clearly this did not happen throughout the game. This is a cause of some concern to us. He could also say that in any other year than this year, the opponents who deliberately punched our players would be sitting out for a week or two, and like the majority of the football world, we are perplexed as to why this has changed, and have yet to receive a good explanation from the AFL about the rationale for this change. He could also say that we like to play the game hard but fair, but that Sunday's game demonstrated that bending the rules actually gets you further. Our acquiescence after the Carlton game has bothered me. Both Hogan and Lewis reacted to something that was said to them. Viney, who was within earshot of the Lewis incident, clearly thought it was inappropriate too, and shoved Cripps into the ground after Lewis hit him. By contrast, Carlton exposed the sledging of Marc Murphy and it actually worked in their favour. So far, our silence and meek acquiescence has just made us a bigger target.

North won't think twice at all. They targeted our young players and got the official umpires / MRP / AFL seal of approval. They were actually rewarded for their tactics.

Clearly our young players aren't going to get any protection from umpires, unless something changes. Clarry got throat punched right in front of the umpire, and nothing. And clearly the MRP aren't going to do anything about it either. I just hope that when a young player gets seriously hurt by a sniper like Higgins or a thug like Cunnington, it won't be one of ours.

Come on, Poita. We're clearly getting targeted, especially the young players like Clarrie and Tracc and Salem. North had a deliberate strategy, knowing the MRP couldn't touch them. We saw clearly on Sunday that they're not going to get any protection from the umpires. Do you seriously suggest that the right course of action is to just ignore it and suck it up? The AFL have clearly given their seal of approval to North's tactics. Scott's whinging is actually part of that tactic, it helps them get away with it. Let's see if other teams will happily just lie down and take it. I reckon it's time for the coach to stand up for his young players and do his best to protect them, not to "call" them and tell them to just cop it sweet.

Poor poor comment. All day that scum of a club have been trying to make out that it was us who went for them. And not a peep from us. We just suck it up like goody-goodies. It was an orchestrated tactic by North to go the jumper-punch, throat-punch and gut-punch, and make it clear that the MRP had already sanctioned them so it's now go ahead. They are the only club to have tried to take advantage about this. The Oliver snipe happened early in the game right in front of the umpire and he did nothing. If they don't pull up the first one, you know you can snipe to your heart's content and you're not going to get pinged. Salem's was the lowest impact of all the hits. Meanwhile, Scott whinges about something every week and no problem. Makes me absolutely sick.

Sounds like Scott has wasted no time to whinge it up as usual though. Never gets him into trouble , in fact it may be why the umps go easy on them. The AFL seems to be hypersensitive to anything that might tarnish their precious image, and Scott knows exactly how far he can push them.

Very good post. With our radically attacking game plan, the only way we can stop the other side's run-on is to somehow seize back the initiative. There's no other way. This will work devastatingly well in another year or two, but right now, it's why we have to wait for a quarter break before we can get back on top (unless the coaches can make a move that creates a shift in momentum, but nothing worked from that quarter yesterday) We seized back the initiative brilliantly in the last quarter, but as soon as Lewis's goal put us only 2 or 3 points down, we ... stopped. Just when we should have really put the hammer down, we simply handed the initiative back to them OK, that's "inexperience", but how many times does it have to happen until it's no longer "inexperience"?

Good post. It's one thing to get into a winning position late in the game. It's another thing to pull off the win, whether you deserve it or not. Even with all our deficiencies, injuries, structural problems, bad umpiring etc, this year we seem to have the first covered. But due to inexperience, it's the second that we're falling down on.