Rogue

Haha, absolutely right. Blame the Clubs - they agreed to the compensation formula. I still can't figure out why, because it was a dog of a deal. It seems none of them considered the impact on their own lists until one of their big names looked like going (ie. Geelong and Ablett).

My impression is that most people don't mind the current alternate strip.

I think the young group we commonly mention as future leaders are not yet ready to Captain. We need someone capable of holding down the gig for a little while, and unless that person turned out to be outstanding we'd want to move the captaincy on within a few years. If we choose someone around Moloney's age to warm the seat that could be awkward when/if we decide to give it to a younger guy a little later.

Are you kidding? I'm honestly not sure. Johnson was shot. Fletcher is the exception, not the rule.

I mentioned Malthouse. You must have missed me ask whether he'd be signing with a new Club before finals. Ditto Clarkson...would he be likely to sign with a Club (that isn't Hawthorn) before the end of the season? If not, even if we want to change coaches we don't need to move before the end of the season. Is Thompson really 'available'? I'm not sure he is on the market, but I don't have any inside info so maybe he is. If not, we - again - don't need to move before the end of the season. Roos is one I overlooked. There's one we could miss if another Club beat us to the punch, but if I were Roos I'd want to see what opportunities were about and wouldn't feel rushed into signing with a Club unless it was the gig I wanted anyway. However, maybe there's some incentive to get into the market early for Roos. Even if that's the case, it has to be weighed against the negatives of a mid-season sacking.

Maybe they would have been much better hanging onto him for another year? Hah. The fact they're struggling this year lends credence tot he fact they should have started making a transition to a younger group in 2010, rather than hanging onto Eagleton and Johnson (plus Aker?) a year too long. (Obviously it's easy in hindsight though! I understand why they wanted to have another crack).

Should Sylvia be allowed to play if he's been offered a contract and hasn't signed it? Should we have sent Davey to wallow in the VFL for all of last year if he'd been offered a contract some time during the season? etc.

Yeah, and I'm absolutely sure I was replying to the OP, who was talking about coverage of the game.

Haha, nice.

Is Malthouse going to sign up somewhere else while the finals are on? Okay, so who are these other 'good (proven) coaches'? Laidley? Williams? Sheedy (hah)? Matthews (hah)? How were their Clubs travelling when they left?

...and?

It's also about who deserves to come in and which players will give us the best chance of winning on Sunday.

Not that I've seen him play (), but I thought TMac would be more likely to play back.

In regard to the future, we'll see (most players don't make it). You might have read that in another thread I suggested Strauss playing in the backline could release Tapscott to play further up the ground. However, the post I replied to in this thread asserted that we should get Tapscott out of the backline now, and I'm not sure that's the way to go at the moment.

Zing! PS. Hi.

'Humiliation': 139 Ess > GC 123 WCE > WB 119 Carl > GC 96 Melb > Adel 90 Melb > GC 88 Coll > Melb 87 Coll > North 78 WB > Bris 75 Coll > Port 71 Coll > Rich 71 WB > GC Just some perspective. I know a few people have asserted that we negatively compare to North and Richmond, so I was interested to see that they also got spanked by Collingwood. PS. Have I missed any 70+ margins?

This.

I reckon it's pretty easy to have a dig at the umpires and focus on the MFC performance, given the number of active threads on Demonland. Anyhow, Gieschen highlighted two instances in which we should have received 50 metre penalties. One was in the first quarter when we were ~12 points down, and another was early in the second when we were 16 points down.

->

I thought he was a fringe player who, despite being older than a fair few guys who got called up before him, took a fair while to be brought into an injury-ravaged side.

No. ...to another thread on Scully.

Zing!

The end can come very quickly for players. Who's to say McDonald would have kept up his form of 2010? Who's to say he wouldn't have had injury concerns equal or worse? Were the WB helped by having Johnson running around last year?

Discussion has turned to this idea many times on the board - and not just this season.

No.