Curry & Beer

the apparent messiah in Leigh Matthews swapped Johnstone for the pick that became Jack Grimes so anything's possible

ah yes, the old 'as long as making money is involved, any action, no matter how repugnant, is acceptable' song and dance that attitude is the attitude of the executives of Nike and that's why we have sweatshops. That's one example amongst millions that are responsible for the terrible state the world is in. Yet you believe in it so much you defend it even to the detriment of the footy club you adore

as i said in another thread.. Scully is averaging 15 disposals, 5 of which are clangers which has him equal 3rd for the most clangers in the competition. His ave supercoach score ranks him 17th on the GWS list. Great return on 50K a match.

geeze misplaced optimism here.. we've just turned in the worst start to a season in nearly 30 years, we have hardly put together 0ne good piece of play in 6 hours of football. We absolutely stink at the moment and I would not be confident against anybody.

What are you talking about, the only 'good kid' we gave up was whoever we would have got at pick 20, instead we took Dawes, who has not played yet. Would you prefer another Addam Maric or what? On top of that we got THREE absolute top shelf kids compared to most clubs' ONE or NONE

Whenever you see something in life that is not right, the underlying reason behind it is always to do with money. Hird and the EFC getting a harsh punishment is not good for the AFL's money. End of story.

ok that helps, maybe Jamar will be able to contribute something.. maybe

haha pay that

cannot imagine it it would be like Leonardo Di Caprio turning down Quentin Tarantino to star in a season of 'Home and Away'

It goes to show that when you have a superstar player inflaming a crowd of 80,000 people it is harder for an umpire to put the whistle to his mouth for a 50-50 call. As Melbourne supporters we have no idea about this.

Agreed, as noted above, this is problem #1 for mine.

Agree with all that No real revelations for me, except that -our key backs were even worse than I had perceived at the match. Garland in particular was incredibly bad, he failed at every test. McDonald and Frawley not much better, and unfortunately Grimesy had some bad moments too. Why don't they chuck Sellar up forward? He did OK in the preseason and clearly would take some heat off jamar. He and Pederson are absolutely useless in the ruck.. this I feel is outr biggest weakness at the moment. It is well recognised how poorly the Russian is going, and how N Jones was taken out of the game, this left our midfield completely ineffective. Masten and Priddis absolutely killed us, it is as if we were not even trying to contain them. Clark was not the superstar we all think he generally is. Viney made some blues, but that's excusable. Toumpas, Pederson and Byrnes again gave us nothing. The complete lack of enthusiasm for Tapscott's goal, and the play that set it up was worrying at the time and in replay. It was 16:40 into the term and the Eagles had 6 unanswered goals, smashing our spirit.. that's the reason, but it's not an excuse. We seem to be a very emotional group, when the chips are down we really drop our heads and stop fighting. This is another problem high on the list. The usual chasm between effectiveness at kick-outs, this has been going on for the better part of a decade. I suppose the good news is that it could have been a lot better, the umps cost us a few and simple errors denied us a few.. also the eagles were pretty darn good, particularly some of the shots on goal. Neeld's things-to-list: 1. Emotional strength - he needs to somehow make the group not drop their heads when things go pear-shaped. Tough ask. What is needed are some strong personalities on the field, generating talk and fire.. perhaps MN needs to identify who these players are and tell them that part of their performance assessment from now on will be a review of how they are doing this in matches. This is supposed to be the domain of the captains and leadership group, but clearly it is not happening. 2. The ruck division is appalling. I don't know what has happened to MJ but I hope stern words are being said to him. Unfortunately we have no quality backups. I can't see a fix to this except via the trade table at year's end. 3. FCS sit the group down and have them watch a few hours of top sides handling kick-outs, both creating and defending. Juxtapose these video clips with clips of us getting wrong. Get creative on how to have them workshop the ideas involved, they need to be educated on this aspect as it something that occurs approx. 27 times in an average match and it kills us every week, because we stuff up about 25 of them. 4. The midfield is a joke. NJones carries it as much as he can.. but JV is too young, Trengove needs to do more, unfortunately Toumpas is not a straight-out-of-the-box type. McKenzie back will help, we really need stoppers because we continually get torn a new one eg Priddis and Masten this week. I would be playing Howe as a midfielder full-time, we need some genuine class in there. I agree with other threads in that at year's end we should put draft picks on the line to steal a gun mid from another club. 5. Put Pederson and Sellar deep forward with clark - they are both useless but they demand a player to give space to Clark.. and obviously if Clark is still being double-teamed then the team needs to know to actually USE the decoys. Watts should be down there also, Howe and Jamar part-time.. there is no excuse for us having a vacant forward line when we have plenty of tall options on the list.

I am obviously a total masochist because I sat down and painstakingly went through the third quarter of last week and analysed it. Why did I do such a thing? Because I needed to clarify in my mind exactly what went wrong. Of particular interest was how much effort was being applied and skill errors. LM (loose man) 0:20 - Ineffective tap Jamar, JV concedes free, ball streamed straight out of the middle with no resistance via LM Shuey (Trengove's man) and ends up OOB in pocket. Garland lucky not have gifted a free. 01:00 JV concedes head high tackle (his second in a minute) Hams kicks excellent goal from boundary ("worst possible start" Dunstall) 02:15 Easy clearance from bounce by Masten, LM in Hams (Grimes was too loose), TM out of position on Darling, mark... hits post. 03:40 WC mark on wing from pitiful kick-out play, three LM for WC get it to CHF, long bomb, easy mark then goal Sinclair (Sellar nowhere near it) 05:35 Absurd free aganist Clark in the middle, then his man was let off after being caught playing on. Long bomb, Le Cars gets crumbs, hands to Masten, snap goal. 3 goals in 5 minutes. 06:40 MJ ineffective tap, WC clear, work to the goalsquare, Garland concedes free to Kennedy, goal. Crowd upset, it was just there. 09:05 Jones free kick completely blind bomb easily rebounded.. good passage by us to CS, nobody leads for him in50, Jamar was supposed to be the target and didn't bother, he bombs, uncontested mark WC. 10:30 Jetta blatantly denied free kick. 11:00 Great mark in defence Howe, starts good passage, with Davey hittng Jetta in50 but it pops straight out of his hands 11:30 Garland/Terlich both go up against 1 opponent, ends up Eagles ball, we scrounge it back, tapscott drops a pass short i50 to CS, Byrnes gets it, pathetic shot on goal OTF, should have done something else, panicked a bit 13:00 Le Cras too good, kicks to square, Garland again easily outmarked, goal. 14:00 Pederson in ruck, allows easy Cox-Priddis-Masten clearance straight to CHF, sinclair kicks awesome snap goal. 15:30 dees centre clearance, Sylvia bomb to 30m out hotspot, Clark outnumbered, eagles clear to wing, we get it back in, clark again outnumbered, ends up gathering it loose and having a shot which misses. 16:10 eagles kickout marked uncontested 65 metres out 16:40 great passage, Davey-Trengove-Tapscott nice bomb goal, almost no celebration whatsoever 18:00 Kerr-Shuey clearance too easy, shuey misses 18:30 another poor kickout, ends up being turned over by Evans, free against Pedo. Garland gives away another free, doesnt matter Cox goal (Frawley's man) 20:50 Jetta misses mark, MJones turnover 21:30 Darling mark, 14 blokes touched it, McDonald's man. Goal. Talk about Masten coming of age, this is the bloke that went a pick before Morton WTF is wrong with our development 22:50 big thump to Jamar but again to no advantage.. again downfield MJ taps directly to Priddis, ball bombed to square McDonald's man Darling crumbs off the pack easy goal 24:50 MJones fumble, bomb from Evans to nobody in50 25:50 Sellar pathetic at ruck, ends up with Kennedy, Garland left him free like a first year player, goal 27:10 Byrnes turnover shocking 28:00 clark off the ball free, cost us a probable goal 28:40 Sinclair again easy uncontested mark 20:00 aimless bomb out of back pocket JV, eagles win contested ball, another mark i50 Grimes too loose, goal 30:30 MJ to Priddis again 31:00 Tapscott nothing kick 31:30 frees to Clark and Jetta not paid.. clark gives away stupid free seconds before the bell

mate we are 320 points down, the second half of last week was as bad a half of football as I have ever seen in my life. We are not on some sort of upwards trend.

to me everything DB said makes perfect sense. We have a list that, bar a few exceptions, is not having a red hot go and that is the lion's share of our problem. Anybody can see it. DB's speculation that our captains, and the senior group as a whole, are not strong enough to control the attitude and professionalism of the group seems spot on to me. The thing I can't work out is how the coaching staff - or any of the myriad of others in connection with the club - cannot seem to work out how to get these blokes correct in the head.

can't wait til round 3 next year when posters are saying hogan is a dud and we should have picked (insert whatever rookie in the comp is playing well)

Scully is averaging 15 disposals, 5 of which are clangers which has him equal 3rd for the most clangers in the competition. His ave supercoach score ranks him 17th on the GWS list. Great return on 50K a match.

We've had a ridiculously poor, largely unexpected shock to the season. Everyone is really emotional. Let's not over-react and lower ourselves, because threads like this are a very bad look for the club.

this thread should be locked and deleted if the wrong eyes saw it it could be used to embarrass the club, especially us supporters, badly

hey thickshakes, how good do you reckon wines would be looking if his side was 320 points down for the season instead of undefeated in second place a 5 year old would understand this point

it's a ridiculous leap, another example of people on this site taking a small piece of information and using their imagination to make all sorts of extrapolations and baseless assumptions from it. I find it very annoying.

how stupid are you.. do you think Darling would be performing for Melbourne if we had drafted him? He'd be just another Sylvia Watts Morton

it was 84.. didn't think that needed embellishment

how many completely baseless claims aka guesses were in that post?

we actually led by 10 points halfway through the second, then were outscored by 104 in 75 minutes of footy, someone please explain how this is possible, I am baffled