Akum

Stays if Neeld wants him. Goes if he doesn't.

OK - Option 1 is we win every game for the rest of the year by at least 5 goals despite our injury list, and finish (shock, horror) 14th. Option 2 is we lose every game for the rest of the year by at least 5 goals, finish last and get picks 1 & 2. Which of these options gives us more cause to "believe in Neeld"?

Of course I'm not touting this as fact. I'm saying that if we use different criteria, the result may well be different, and "probably" along these lines. I tried to get us to avoid simplistic parallels between the Demonland poll and who's actually going to go, but looks like I was too late. Isn't this whole thread an exercise in "unsubstantiated speculation"?

Like this, although the explanation for the part I've bolded is probably that Bailey only required them to run one way while Neeld requires them to run both ways. You've done well to balance reasons to admire what Neeld is trying to do with some legitimate concerns.

The question is, can he play well to Neeld's game plan? Would have thought so pre-season, but on performance so far in 2012, the jury's out. But it's not looking good.

Great & timely bump.

IMHO this is a much more sensible approach than the free-for-all that this thread encourages. And it reflects more clearly what is likely to happen. But it needs to be coupled with the understanding that Neeld's priority for delisting will be "who is never likely to be able to play to the game plan that I want?" Not "who won't win us a premiership?" or "who is the least talented?" or "who do I dislike the most?" which have been the basis of most of the postings so far. Using the "Neeld game plan" criteria changes who's likely to go (rather than "who I want to go") a fair bit. The most obvious implication is that guys like J MacDonald, Jetta, Magner & Sellar are more likely to stay. It probably means that guys like Cook and Gysberts and even Martin are on shakier ground than we think (and explains the report by other posters that Neeld is "not impressed with" Cook & Gysberts). And it probably means that Bennell & Morton & Petterd and perhaps Moloney are almost certainly gone. And it's harder to assess guys like Bail, Dunn, Tapscott, Blease, Strauss (although he did talk the last two up in a recent interview), Sylvia, and Spencer, because although their performances are ordinary, we don't know how good they've been at following instructions, which will be the criterion on which they'll be judged. Add to this the fact that Neeld has also said that apart from Clark, he's not impressed with any of our marking-forward options, which might mean that all our tall forward options are on shaky ground too.

Except for the bit at the end that says "if you were Mark Neeld". Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The question is a bit ambiguous. It could also mean "who do you think Neeld will cull?" which is quite a different question. And perhaps a much more relevant question. Neeld would be evaluating each player not in terms of "how good they are", but "can they play the way I want them to?" An example in one direction is Jetta. Some may consider him "not good enough", but he's certainly very likely to be able to play how Neeld wants. An example the other way is Martin against Spencer. No doubt at all that Martin is "better" than Spencer, but Spencer is probably more likely to be able to play to Neeld's instructions. IMHO Norm Smith has nailed it in his post, though I disagree with some of his choices.

Can MFC, in it's current circumstances, afford to give Neeld as much time as Hawthorn & Geelong could? That's the problem. If it's going to take 3 or 4 years for Neeld's plan to bear fruit, can the club sustain itself until then? You might be able to, but can the whole membership? For example, I doubt that we can afford to give Neeld the amount of time that Bailey was given - that was 3-4 years. That's got to be a concern.

Great thoughtful post RB. You (and rpfc in his previous post) have set out some good reasons for maintaining the faith, and certainly the new off-field elements weren't there the last time. My concern is, given where the club is, how long can we afford to hang on until we start to see some sort of pay-off in on-field performance?

Pretty sure you're aware that what I mean (about the similarities to 2008) is the exhortation to "keep the faith". Because we have no evidence that the changes have improved performance - so far. Since you brought up the issue of "assistant coach" ... The problem with an assistant coach who makes a contribution to a successful team is that they can over-rate their particular approach, and under-rate the contribution of others in the coaching team. Bailey probably contributed to Port's attacking ball movement (as he may be contributing to Adelaide's). But others in the coaching team contributed to their contested ball, their defensive structures, their set plays etc etc. It's the total contribution that makes success. But it's tempting for the assistant coach to believe that it's their contribution that made the difference. And unless they've spent some of their time as an assistant coach learning aspects of the game that the other coaches contributed, they'll only have one string to their bow. We learned that about Bailey, but it took nearly 4 years. We spent maybe 2 years waiting for him to bring a defensive and contested-ball dimension to the attacking game, until it became blatantly obvious that he was not able to. He has one string to his bow, and it may be that he's again making a solid contribution as an assistant coach with that one string. My concern about Neeld is that he has just about total emphasis on contested ball and absorbing pressure. But the club he comes from are far more than that. Their ball movement allows them to hurt teams the other way, and they have a number of successful set plays. Their contested ball is just one element of what makes them successful, but on it's own, it's not enough. Do we have any evidence so far that Neeld has more than one string? Haven't seen it - so far. Can he learn to play the other strings? Don't know, but obviously he deserves to get a reasonable chance to show us whether he can (and if he can't, I hope it takes less than 4 years to find out). Is he reflective & self-critical enough to understand & remedy his deficiencies? That's the big question, and quite frankly, that's what concerns me about the "my-way-or-the-highway" approach. The trick for an assistant coach is to learn the other aspects of the game that they have no expertise in. A head coach has to develop a well-rounded knowledge of the game, and it's reasonable to assume that a previously successful head coach (whether they're a head case or not) will have done that. So what I'm saying is that it's a risk to pick another assistant coach from a successful team, given the recent experience with the previous coach. I hope it comes of this time, but I have a lot of concerns.

This is a good point. If leading patterns & kicking to them were part of instructions but the players just weren't good enough to do it, you'd expect to see some of them at least trying to do it. You'd expect to see some variability, with some of them doing it better (OK, less worse) than others. But this is not what we see. The long bomb seems to be the preferred option for everybody.

I was worried about the thread title but I totally agree with the OP.

Apart from the part I've italicised, this post could have been written word-for-word about Bailey ca. 2008. "I believe in Bailey" has become "I believe in Neeld". The names have changed but the song remains the same. So far, both Bailey and Neeld both have a track record of being a good - maybe very good - assistant coach. And not every "very good" assistant coach can step up to be a successful head coach, as we found (though it took us the best part of 4 years, though there were ominous signs before that) about Bailey. I'm neither for nor against Neeld. I'm neither an evangelist nor an iconoclast. The club has no option but to continue to support Neeld at this stage, but if we're 0 & 9 again next year, if Neeld has managed to turn over the 10-12 players he wants and it still makes no difference, and if we're struggling to reach 30,000 members, who knows? But I am concerned that Year 1 of Neeld is looking like Year 1 of Bailey. We're in a "double-dip" rebuild. Which is high-risk for a club in our position. And it may or may not come off.

Reckon he's one of quite a few that Neeld's already put a line through.

Quoting (for emphasis) these words from the article "Dees aim to be active trade players" on the MFC website: " “If we bring people to the Melbourne Football Club, it will be to fill specific roles.” Neeld said this was highlighted on the field at the moment, with 192 cm tall defender-turned-forward Jared Rivers being asked to play a key role in attack. “Just because of the status of our list and a few other things due to unavailabilities, we’re asking Jared to go down there and play as a 200 cm forward, which is difficult,” he said. “We need a couple of forwards to stand up and give us a strong contest in the air - there’s no doubt about that.” Apart from giving a clear indication that we'll be making a massive play for Cloke, this is also extremely illuminating in who we might be trading out. Neeld clearly thinks very little of our current key forward options, with the obvious exception of Clark. This includes Watts, Martin, Cook, Dunn ... who else? Maybe Jurrah, Howe, Petterd, Bate. Hence his choice of Rivers, strongly implying in this article that it's because he sees no better options for the foreseeable future to play the type of marking forward role that he wants. So unless these players can win a spot somewhere else (either as one of our best 6 defenders or as one of our best 2 HFFs), they may well be up for trade or delisting. Under FA rules, it looks like the best that Collingwood can hope to gain if they can't hold on to Cloke is a single first-round pick, so their plan B must be to get a damn good trade, and any club that can come up with a damn good trade must be in the box seat. So what about Cloke for Watts plus either of Martin or Jurrah or Howe? The other clubs in the running for Cloke may be able to come up with an equal trade, but they probably wouldn't be prepared to. Why should Neeld have any commitment to any player on the current list, unless they're in the leadership group he helped choose or have been brought in by him.

It's not a matter of hindsight. It's that "good" players in a great team can become great, while "good" players in a cr*p team can become ... well, the odds are stacked against them. Beams and Sidebottom are examples of this, as are the West Coast recent draftees who are fortunate enough to be playing in a team that's gone from lousy to great in a couple of years. How much of the performance of our recent draftees is down to having been in a lousy team for their entire careers? I suppose we'll only know when one of the "good" ones (I don't mean the fringe players like Maric or Cheney or Buckley, despite the fact that they're all showing more than they did with us; I mean the likes of Gysberts or Morton or Blease or Strauss, of whom much more was expected when they were drafted) gets delisted & then gets picked up by a great team. If we do have a fire sale of these types of top-20 draftees who are unlikely to ever fit into Neeld's game plan, it will be interesting to see how many are picked up, and how they go elsewhere. That will at least settle some of the argument.

I'm only just beginning to realise how significant a factor this is - that Neeld doesn't rate the list. Coupled with the fact that Neeld has one (1) game plan only. He doesn't strike me as being too fussed about "Plan B". It doesn't have to be that way, but that's the way Neeld chooses to play it, and he's the coach. Surely the end of this season is his best opportunity to lay down the "my way or the highway" ethos. I doubt that he's too bothered about how badly we play for the rest of this year. It wouldn't surprise me if he's already got a good idea about who can play to his game plan and who can't, no matter how "talented" we might think they are. And I predict that there will have to be huge changes to a lot of "favourite player(s)" lists in 2013, because some 2012 "favourite player(s)" might not be there.

One point I think we're all missing is that we can be fairly certain that Neeld will not compromise on his game plan - for better or for worse. And therefore he will not compromise on the type of player he wants for this game plan. We don't know the game plan in detail, but it's always been pretty obvious the type of player he wants. So those on the line are likely to be those who won't be able to play the type of game he is looking for - no matter how good they are. So he's likely to prefer Tapscott to Gysberts, Magner to Morton - not because Tapscott & Magner are necessarily better players, but that they're more likely to be able to play the way he wants. To push this further, might he be prepared to trade out some very promising players who he doesn't think will suit the style of game he wants, even at the risk of them ripping it up for another club, in order to trade in some established players from other clubs who WILL suit his game plan? An example might be that in order to get someone like Cloke, he might be prepared to trade someone like Watts. Perhaps we should stop thinking about how "good" such and such a player is, and look at our list from the point of view of whether they will suit Neeld's style of game, no matter how "good" they are. In fact, the "good" or "promising" players who are unlikely to ever be tough contested-ball players are the ones to bring in some high value from other clubs, and as such might be the ones he has most in mind. What I'm getting at is that Neeld is looking at the list not in terms of how "good" each player is, but in terms of how well they will fit the style of game he wants. I must say that this is just speculation, and personally I don't agree with this approach at all. But is it the way that things are headed?

The heat does seem to come on poorly-performing coaches at about the halfway point of the season. It grows week by week until either an inspiring win (a la Ratten this season) or the axe falls. If there is no improvement from the current level of performance, it will be inevitable. There should be improvement, but there had better be.

Nah, he's just someone you like to kick now & again.

Does Judd make contact (albeit light and accidental) with an umpire at about 0:16?

Seems that yet again Carlton (with AFL approval, it would seem) are aiming to whitewash bad behaviour by one of their stars, instead of holding them to account for it. You would think that both bodies would have learned from the rolling debacle that was Fev that bad behaviour needs to be confronted head-on, and responsibility admitted. But they haven't learned a thing. There were a couple of dubious and unnecessary attempts to soften the blow - being instructed to not take his previous record into account, and not to apply a 30% loading. For Judd, who's had so much trouble with his own shoulders, to do this intentionally to another player who's had shoulder problems, it's hard to interpret it in any other way as a desire to inflict serious injury. Ignoring the negative publicity it's generated, is this penalty enough to deter the same player from offending in the future? I'd doubt it. If we're back here again in another 2 or 3 years, Carlton and the AFL will only have themselves to blame. And one can't escape the niggling feeling that struggling clubs such as North are again treated more harshly by the MRP & Tribunal than power clubs like Carlton. What would the outcome have been if it were the other way round, and it was Judd's shoulder that was subluxed by the intentional action of an opposing player?

I think KB made a statement last Friday that Ted Richards was in AA form at full back, and Denseham took him to task that Richards would never be good enough to be AA full back, no matter how good his form was. Big deal. Maybe indicates that his colleagues take it as read that this microbe has "issues" with certain people and clubs, and it affects his opinions. Really, who cares?