Inner Demon

Yes he has. He just didn't play last weekend. He was BOG the week before.

Nobody else on the trip had played the week before and was playing the week after. Either way, if anyone is seriously suggesting James Strauss was invited on the camp and begged off because he's soft and didn't want to be punched or anything remotely like that, then there's probably no reasoning with you anyway.

Not factoring in the circumstances around a player's performance is called "an uneducated opinion".

He didn't play the week before. He had no recovery to do.

I thought Miller played really quite well against Collingwood. He worked very hard in a lot of contested situations to hold up the ball when there was nobody ahead of him, often against 2-3 opponents. The kind of stuff that isn't reflected in stats. Furthermore, unless my memory has totally failed me, he kicked 2 goals.

There's no way he was given the choice of going or not. He would've had a compulsory recovery program to complete between VFL matches.

If our captain, and potential B&F leader to this point in the season is fit, he plays. You're getting carried away with the excitement about McKenzie's potential if you think he deserves a spot more than James McDonald. As teams improve, getting dropped doesn't necessarily mean you have underperformed or are no good, it just means you're not (yet) as good as the player who is taking your spot. In this case, James McDonald & Colin Sylvia are better players than Jordie McKenzie & Jack Watts.

Hmmmm, my first reaction to the part about qualifying for VFL finals was, "how ridiculous", but upon further consideration I wonder if there might be something in this... I don't know how many games the qualifying criteria calls for, but if it was few enough that rotating a player like Watts just a couple of times through Casey might be worthwhile in giving him exposure to finals games once the MFC season is over. Obviously you'd only do this if his (lack of) form warranted it and there was a player deserving of promotion, but it's not entirely without merit.

IN: Sylvia, McDonald OUT: McKenzie, Watts

We can't effectively change the emblem this season so there's no way we'd bother revealing it until we can actually use it.

Well there you go, you're absolutely right. I guess I'd lost track of time. Greeny does turn 30 next year. In light of this, I would say the heat turns up decidedly on the retirement of one of Junior or Bruce.

Yes, it was because he had a year not on any AFL list that he was eligible to be re-rookied.

Clubs can only retain one player on their rookie list for a maximum 3 year term. Spencer's rookie list time is up. He's either being promoted or cut. The prevailing leaning at this stage is we can continue to develop him and he's worth a list spot. If you're of the belief that PJ's time is up, then that double the argument for promoting Jake.

That rule has been changed with the new franchises compromising the draft and upgrading rookies counts the same as taking a ND pick.

Also please remember that neither Junior nor Bruce open up access to an extra draft pick. They are on Veteran's List and nobody on our list is eligible to replace them next year to open up the senior list spot. The only benefit of either of them retiring is that we would be able to elevate a rookie at the start of the season to fill their spot, ala Fremantle with Barlow.

Bell & Johnson free up the spots for promotions of McKenzie & Spencer. In these cases we're 'trading' a midfielder and ruckman who didn't make it for a developing midfielder and ruckman. I'm happy to alter my analogy somewhat however. If a player is poached by GC, that happens before we finalise delistings and would satisy our minimum turnover rate and also open up our 1st draft pick. From there I stand by the train of thought which would see us weigh up further delistings the same way you would consider trades. This time you're looking at an uncontracted player in return for a Round 2 pick, and so on. The point I'm really driving at here, which I've made in another thread before, is that it's too simplistic to just say, "We should have 3 draft picks so we'll have to delist 5 players, one way or another". For each delisting decision it must be considered what we're giving up and what we're getting in return, in this case, another draft pick.

Hmmmm, seems I was too quick to praise everyone's reading comprehension in another thread. Try again kids. Perhaps trace a finger along the screen as you read how I justified the analogy of Brad Miller as being released for a 1st round pick.

I saw that passage of play too, but I saw it as Jack arriving to the contest a moment too late and taking the option to not hit the player who had already secured the mark late and give away a 50m penalty in front of goal.

I think 5 delistings is an ambitious target given the youth and freshness of our list. Bell & PJ are the consensus delistings. I can't see anything changing that. I would agree that McKenzie & Spencer will occupy the spots opened up here. From this point we come down to making decisions regarding whether the player potentially being delisted is of more value to the team than the correlating draft pick they will open up. It might help to consider it like a trade. Brad Miller for 1st rounder - roughly pick 8-13. I love Brad, but nobody in their right mind doesn't see the value in that. It's unfortunate for him. Tommy McNamara was recontracted last year for an unspecified period along with Bartram. I am speculating that these players were put on 1 year contracts with a 2nd year activated by meeting performance targets, ie. senior games played. Bartram would have activated his 2nd year but things don't look so good for Tommy. This brings us to the question: Tom McNamara for 2nd rounder - pick 27-30. On the surface it seems another easy call, but I don't know what kind of players are shaping to be available at this stage of this draft so it will be a decision that would require a fair bit of analysis. According to the records the only other questionable ones like Cheney, Maric, Martin & Dunn are contracted to 2011. I'm not sure whether the 'delist and rookie' trick used with great success on Newton & Meesen last year is so simple it can just be freely applied to any of these players, and we know the club isn't going to just cut players loose under contract. The dark horse here is the impact of GC which could make our decision for us by luring any of a number of players we would otherwise recontract like Rivers, Bail, Garland, Petterd, etc

Must be a quiet day. Nobody sucked in yet. Or perhaps the critical reading skills have improved.

I would suggest that if a couple of injuries was enough to knock a team out of the Top 12, they weren't a premiership contender to begin with. The crowd thing is somewhat of an issue, but really, are the teams out of the race with 5 weeks to go pulling good crowds as it is??? Playing beyond the 17 to a full 22 is a commercial situation. This might not be 100% ideal, but this is a reality of what keeps our competition going. The league needs that money.

Home game issue fixed easily. Rotates year to year. We play GWS in Melb in 2012 and we play them in Sydney in 2013. And so on. For the last 5 rounds it's randomly drawn, obviously 3 home and 3 away for each team.

I'm not advocating the conference options. I'm talking about every team playing each other once for the first 17 rounds then the league splitting into 3 divisions for 1-6, 7-12 & 13-18. 1-6 play to determine the Top 4, 7-12 play for the last two spots in the finals, 13-18 can play off for draft lottery balls. Obviously the dead games in the 13-18 are an issue, but it's only 5 games and I would contend that those teams have usually given up anyway by that late stage of the season and are just planning for future and disrupting the integrity of the finals composition.

Don't they already?? Teams that low on the ladder that late in the season give up anyway. They just wind up manipulating the makeup of the finals by lying down and getting flogged because they're blooding kids and sending veterans off for surgery and so forth. Let them do it without disrupting the integrity of the finals series. No longer will teams on the edge of finals get lucky by running into poor teams at the end of the year while another contender gets knocked out because they ran into the best teams at the same time. The bottom 6 can play off for draft pecking order or maybe some kind of lottery system.

Why not?? Don't you want a solution to the inequitable draw issue??? I understand the 'leave the game alone' argument, but we're not talking about rule changes with frustrating, inconsistent interpretations. We're talking about finally removing the biggest yearly issue in teams getting a perceived advantage over others in the fixture.