bing181

If only that were true.

I'd leave Stretch in myself. Give him some consistency, and it's not as if we have players banging the door down (for the moment). Also, given the reduced time between games, pool of possible replacements is already low as some will need resting.

Very hard to see Tom Mac playing - if his recent interview is anything to go by, he's only due to start full football work this week. And people here were bitching about players who were "rushed back" last year as one of the causes of all our woes.

Agree on all that, though I'd take Tyson's "can get a clearance". Not to be scoffed at.

Except that our "A grade talent" are all re-signing. Got anything else?

Disappointing result, but then they're not the reigning premiers for nothing. A well-oiled machine in full flight, they did to us much as they did to Adelaide in the granny, and if they keep that up, hard to not see them doing the double. More than a few positives from the night, Lever's best game, Melksham, Jetta and Hibberd were back to something like their old selves, and Weideman did enough to justify his inclusion. But at the end of the day, the difference between the two sides was that their bottom 6 players are so far ahead of ours it's not funny. I get the players over the back/outside bit, but if we didn't turn it over so much, it would be much less of an issue. It's the reason that they can get that run of players going and we can't ... somewhere in that chain there'll be a Harmes or ANB who fumble the ball, or misdirect a handball and then it goes back the other way with interest. And ... still think Viney's absence is hurting us a lot more than we realise, it's not for nothing that we're not doing as well with clearances as we did last year.

Says a lot about how to encourage developing players.

Oh yes I can. Exhibit A, the Bandwagon Effect: "As people come to believe in something, others "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence." And there's plenty more where that came from. The work of 3 Nobel Prize winners, Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman (with Amos Tversky), and Richard Thaler, comes to mind. We are, as Dan Ariely pointed out, predictably irrational.

Oh no there doesn't. There are a whole series of cognitive biases around group/sheep/herd behaviours. And this goes back a long long way. We're social animals, and the pressure to conform to the group (from both self and others) trumps rationality every time (almost).

Surely Tom will have a game or two at Casey - he played the first JLT, but match fitness?

Expert or not, no-one can predict with 100% certainty how the human body will respond to any given treatment.

Laughable.

Latest update. Progressing nicely, but McKenna "setback". Wonder if we'll ever see him in the red and blue. Sounds like Tom Mac is a bit ahead of Viney. http://www.melbournefc.com.au/news/2018-04-10/viney-mcdonald-continue-to-progress

Because people who are autistic aren't human ... Normative BS, right up there with "gays aren't real men" etc. etc.

You missed out on cures all known diseases and walks on water.

What part of "that's all we could get for him" isn't clear? We only had one (one) offer and had to take what we could get. If we only managed "near on nothing", then the place to look for the reason is with Watts himself.

Yes, because all injuries/pathologies follow exactly the same course, and all bodies respond to treatment in exactly the same way and because the club always knew exactly when Jack would be back but are keeping it from us.

Watts had a reputation? Yes, but not the one that you're talking about.

We have the real truth, you just don't want to hear it.

No it won't, because even if he performs well at PA, you can't assume that he would have done the same at Melbourne.

A 26 year old player of Watts' type wouldn't have performed at his peak in a Melbourne jumper this year. Any more than he did last year.

Tom McD had ankle operations, this is toe. How to see how they're related or how he "tried to come back a bit too soon". Given the load their bodies are under, coupled with it being a gruelling, contact sport, injuries and breakdowns are just going to happen. There aren't always going to be "reasons", much as we'd love to attribute them.

Perhaps, after 8 years, the penny has finally dropped with Jack. If so, good for him, though even if it has, it doesn't alter that the decision to move him on was the right one. On other subjects (though not unrelated), notice that Trengove didn't play - unless there's an injury, not a promising sign for him. Sad to see if that's the case.

Nothing. Other players are ahead of him. Main knock on Frost was his fitness - that other teams had worked out that they could run him around for 2 or 3 quarters and then run off him once he'd knocked himself out. Whether the reason he hasn't been included is (just) because of that, impossible to know. He's probably going to need one of Lever or Oscar Mac to go down to get a game.

The danger with that though is you start to normalise extremism. This false equivalence is what gave us "but the emails".