DeeSpencer

He’s played well at Hawthorn. I’d still like to have him, he could take Nev’s role and give us a tall and super quick defensive group. We’ve been lucky at this stage Tomlinson is more suited to key back than I expected. Hopefully it lasts. The super restrictive AFL rules on future picks meant we had to trade out a player to get a pick in to do the Kozzie deal. That and salary cap management that probably wasn’t ideal. Spending too much on certain players that could’ve been banked. Jason Taylor’s not perfect - he seems to struggle to get depth talls and outside mids but he’s clearly very good. The new question is whether Tim Lamb can keep shaping the list. Need to resign some big names and then manage some tricky trade ins and outs to keep building.

Really? Injured now but played well against us and pretty much every game he’s played in. Young and Serong were the safe picks in that draft but sometimes you need to take risks.

Both teams lost because they gave up the chance at Bont! But really I liked the move of 2 down to 9, we needed a more mature player to help immediately and we had to stop putting all our faith in 1 early pick. I always thought we gave up way too much adding pick 20 for only a late 40’s pick in return. For 2 we should’ve got 9 and Tyson out right. As for Kelly - he’d kill it playing for us on ball and on the wing. Maybe we’ll grab him if he can give up on his 8 year 8 million extension!

Underwood isn’t my cup of tea but she’s not the worst. Also it’s a more difficult job calling when watching on tv at a studio. Derm’s team is clearly the Giants. He knows all about them but what shocked to discover Ed Langdon is a good runner. Healy wasn’t too bad by comparison but hopefully he can return to his main hobbies of watching West Coast and complaining about teams not working hard enough.

Jones does some good by knowing where the ball is going and can link up well. But he mixes in refusing to take the first option and he does things that do my head in like standing and watching a May kick roll out of bounds for a deliberate where if he jogged over we get the benefit of the doubt. The unchanged team has also been nice but squad depth is important too. If injuries hit we can’t be needing a raft of guys without recent top level exposure. So I’d go Jones for Melksham this week, with Jones the sub and guaranteed his spot back the following week. Then it’s on Melksham, Sparrow etc to compete to stay in the side.

6. Langdon 5. Pickett 4. Gawn 3. Salem 2. Jackson 1. Viney

Jetta did it to opponents for years, if you've got the smarts and lower center of gravity you can control the contest. May usually has a similar weight but he does it to inexperienced young talls who have the best part of 10cm on him. Apart from one of the early 4th quarter goals I thought May did very well on Greene. Credit to the coaches as well for taking Jetta off him and redoing the defensive set up.

Both Davis and Coniglio aren't what they used to be but they were important players if the Giants were to sustain their game plan of flooding back, taking intercept marks, keeping pressure on us then counter attacking. They had a path to make it hard for us and were doing it. I'll rephrase. Surely no one is giving tonight a distinction. Some may give it a credit. I thought it was a pass. About 55%. Come back next week for a far tougher exam.

They did for a while until they started pinging Clarrie for retaliating. Proud of the way he composed himself. Not proud of his putrid kicking technique. Help him Choco!

Was using effort in the overall sense, but I thought the mental effort was lacking pretty much all night. Got jumped at the start. Coasted to a minor lead. Then gave up 2 goals to start the last. We ran hard and we had a crack but that’s the bare minimum. Skills and smarts were both poor for the majority. If the Giants didn’t have any injuries is any confident that we even win? They lost 3 leaders and important players.

They came to play but half of their side was heading to the bench by half time. If our players thought their effort was anything more than the minimal required we’re in trouble next week.

Biggest concerns to me: 1. GWS only had to switch once or twice to then open up all sorts of room on slow plays. Geelong will kills us if we’re so loose. 2. There’s still a lack of trust with the defenders especially when the ball hits the deck. Too much zoning rather than sticking one on one. Rivers has to stick tackles and Lever particularly has to know when to get up on his man. He gave Himmelberg way too much space all the time. Get up on him and halve a contest and trust team mates to cover back. Same goes for May when taking a small like Greene. Back Lever, Tomlinson etc to do the aerial contests if you aren’t in best position and stick on your man.

It was his best game at the contest and he went 1 from 2 on his long runs. 1 disaster. The other one hit Fritsch right on his eyes and he had his head whacked and no free. A lot of his other disposals were neither terrible nor great. He has to nail the big runs because they put our defenders all out of shape but he did adjust on the second one.

He’s played 2 or 3 practice games and he only twanged a hammy and was back running in a few days. Both general fitness and match fitness can’t be excuses. He would’ve played tonight if they thought he was best 22.

I’d give him another chance too but it was disappointing to see him in really poor habits - not jumping, going with 1 or no hands and then shirking one late. He had chances after half time without Davis on to kick a few. Too many fend offs and never turning left as well. He has to work on his smarts with the ball to distribute to team mates which will get his confidence up on quiet marking days.

Stating the obvious really but I don't see Brown, Weid, Jackson, T Mc and Fritsch all in the same side. Can we even get 4 of those in the same side? Or are we best off with the current 3? I think Fritsch, T Mc and potentially Jackson can rotate through the wings so that gets us to 4 in the same team. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a great forward line or an embarrassment of riches though. I'm still not sure we have any truly elite well rounded key forwards, and the guys who can play a more mobile smaller role are talented but not special. Same goes for the smalls. Everyone's rightfully pleased with what Kozzie, Spargo, ANB and the resting mids have done so far but they aren't world beaters. They'll be ups and downs with those guys.

I wonder if Rosman's role will be sprinting back to the goal square within 10 seconds to avoid free kicks for not following the anti density rules. Draft a guy with elite speed and endurance just to avoid falling foul of this new restriction.

It's not my council but I understand a bit of the area and don't get me wrong I'm aware of the wards, and the boundaries of those wards, and one particular boundary particularly. I wasn't pasting that tweet as an endorsement, purely a news announcement. I also asked about which ovals in particular because I certainly didn't think Aussie rules was the issue. Footy has it's own problems with government funding but the one thing it usually does well is make sure junior footy is cheap and available. There's no academies and special selection criteria that jack up prices for parents. It's usually just mums and dads having a go for their kids to play sports.

Thanks for that, very interesting. It looks like from Hinds' article that Fitzroy would go close to ticking all those boxes. Makes me laugh when they're probably more diverse than the councilors pushing these initiatives. A small increase in fees might not be unreasonable but they've picked such an awful time to do it coming out of Covid with local sporting clubs really struggling. It would've been better to announce either a freeze on fee increases or a possibly small rise this year, followed by giving clubs 12 months to meet targets to ensure they aren't disadvantaged next year.

They've relented for now. Will be interesting to see if they try to push this through again in a few months or if they come to their senses.

Name the ovals. I'm happy for Fitzroy FC to have BSO a few nights a week for training and all of Sat/Sun during games. They'll use it and use it well. $6500 seems about the right price too, not $30k. If that's 4% of maintaining an oval and changerooms for a winter then someone's getting ripped off. Same goes for the cricket club at 31k per season. That seems about right given maintaining the pitch is costly. 100k a season would have to be the MCG, there's no way it's a 500k a year facility. If the ovals are too busy it's because they councils keep gladly adding apartment after apartment without sourcing additional green space.

The amount of new apartments in Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy should see the council absolutely stacked with funds. Somehow they aren't. Lack of parking fines money has created a huge deficit in their budget. People build 1000's of new homes in Casey and they've got enough money to build a whole new Casey Fields complex. Obviously they have the land for that expansion, but the same kind of benefits in Yarra should mean upgrades and wonderful facilities at the ovals they maintain. They've also introduced a glass only bin that is completely unfeasible. It's led to people putting tonnes of paper and plastic recycling in the garbage because they have no room for it in their smaller recycling bin. They've ignored the fact that most people buy milk, juice, soft drink etc in plastic or cardboard food boxes and that to fill a glass bin you'd have to be an alcoholic. That's the kind of ideology over reasoning this council loves.

This notion of discounts for diversity and inclusion just staggers me. The clubs have thousands of kids playing. That's your inclusion. Diversity should be fostered and the clubs should be punished if they aren't abiding by codes of conduct to allow everyone who wants to join to join. There should also be some kind of program for kids of lower socio-economic backgrounds to be covered. Usually most junior clubs do this informally without any fuss. Everyone knows the kids who's parents can't or won't pay. But what process will they have to count the diversity? Are they really going to go around and count the number of kids with a certain skin tone or surname? To me that's beyond a joke. That's pushing a political ideology at the expense of thousands of parents and kids just trying to play sport. And their solution of jacking the rates just seems incredibly stupid. Clubs will have to pass some of that on to parents which will in turn mean there's more of a barrier for new kids joining in. Absolutely shooting themselves in the foot.

I thought Ratten was pretty honest saying the Saints made a lot of forced and unforced errors on 360. Those unforced errors put team mates in terrible positions and lead to huge swings. We know that as much as anyone. The question we don’t know is whether our pressure caused the forced errors and the unforced errors by creating a perceived pressure on every kicker. The other thing Ratten said was Pickett changed the momentum of the game and then pretty much said the second half was a holding pattern. I hope we don’t have to rely on it but it’s nice to have both game changing talent and also a structure that makes it hard for teams to find easy answers.

We did 8 for 26 and a future first. Then did 8 for 10 and 28. Pick 8 was really just a placeholder as we moved up a year in the draft. Assuming we did the first trade with the second trade in mind the whole time we really shouldn't even worry about Serong. We can also likely assume we would've taken Rivers all long with the 2nd round pick. So Pickett vs Tom Powell who North took this year and will be a very good player. Who knows how it works out but it looks like we made a clever move to get in to the draft at the right spot and target a needs based selection that was also the right price. I'm hoping our list is more balanced in the future and we don't need to make needs based picks with high picks but if we are to do it we did it the right way.