Prodigal Son

Neale's time is now. We have the best group of players I've seen at Melbourne, although Neitz and Whitey can't last much longer thanks to CAC and his recruiting team we do have potential replacements and we have the most stable club we have been for decades. Bomber's cats blew a premiership 2 years ago and they are now pretty unstable down there. Personality wise Neale has grown into the Job- prior to 2003 he was media shy now he is a bit of a personality, whereas Bomber has gone the otherway. As far as good coaches I think Northey was one of the best going around and he did'nt win a premiership because he just didn't have the cattle but he certainly got the best out of them.

Interesting article on Chinese footballers by John Harmes I have pasted the bit about Dannie Seow http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfoo...1174134585.html The most nominated player by a long way was Dannie Seow. He was nominated by a number of members of the Hong Kong Dragons AFC, where he still plays occasionally. Sam Pang, who was in the Collingwood under 19s when Seow was at the club, had always claimed Dannie was not Chinese. The Pang thesis was soon quashed when Dannie emailed — from Shanghai, in Chinese. "Ni Hao, John!" he began. "Wo hen gao xing ni gei wo da dianhua. (Or should I say, 'I'd be happy if you gave me a call'.)" So I did. Dannie's father is full Chinese. His grandfather is from Xiamen and his grandmother from Beijing. After 18 games with Collingwood and seven with Melbourne from 1986-90, Dannie took a football scholarship to the University of North Carolina as a wide receiver but wound up the punting coach with a degree in economics and Japanese. He lives in Shanghai where he owns a media and entertainment company and is studying Chinese law. He signed his email "Regards, Xiao Xiong". (I'm not sure Sam Pang got that one right.)

Michael O'sullivan is a friend of mine and he once told me that as he played on the other wing to Robbie he had to man him up at training. After about 2 years of never getting a kick at training he said to Robbie how do you know where the ball is going and he said he could tell by the way it was falling to the boot. Mick was always gratful to Robbie because from that day on he'd say left or right to give him a head start to at least give him about a 20% chance of getting a kick!