Webber

Brilliant high intensity win at an oppo fortress. EXACTLY what you want heading into finals. As for the Lions, they embarrassed themselves tonight with their ‘tough guy’ rubbish, and they’re winning nothing with Zorko as captain (couldn’t be a worse leader) and players like ‘Floppy’ Joe Daniher and ‘Slo-mo’ Harris Andrews running around.

I don’t get to do it often, but when appropriate I remind the ‘irrelevant’ accusers that the original rules of Australian footy are the “Rules of The Melbourne Football Club”, which they can see displayed at the National Sports Museum. No MFC = no footy (a long bow, I know, but never fails to shut them up). We couldn’t be MORE relevant.

Sneaky suspicion the Saints will have a very Saints-like win over the Swans…..just to give their supporters cruel hope for next season. They’re better when there’s nothing to lose.

Depends how fast you run I guess.

Happy to memorialise, anoint or erect @binman‘s nudey-run onto canvas if he (or anyone who commissions) so wishes. Done nudes before, so shouldn’t be a problem.

Yep……grrrrrrr.

Once-in-a-blue moon footballer. Had to laugh at his interview with Ben Gibson. He says all the right things….off the team script as it were, but there’s just no point trying to get someone like Kozzie ‘explain’ the way they play the game, or the nature of that game. He is a genius of pure competitive instinct, basically bred to become one with the ball, willing it into his possession and doing the best thing with it - scoring. It’s that simple, and why I love this game. It also makes me laugh when occasional critics say he shouldn’t fly for outrageous marks, or runs over the ball too often, or tries to take on too much. No, no and no. That’s the instinct, and it should never be second guessed.

Nuh. Way too sensible.

That wasn’t luck CBF. It was superb judgment and nerves of steel against 3 opposing spoilers. One of the best contested marks you’ll see.

With 3 of their 5 best midfielders out. We have only 3 of our entire list unavailable, only one of whom is ‘usually’ best 22. If we’re a genuine premiership contender, 2 games out from finals, we just wouldn’t have got over the line with just 11 seconds to go. Still, things can change, our best could be yet to come, other contenders might wilt, etc, etc….but a LOT would have to change. Just looks very unlikely from here. I do love this win though. Week by week……

Great to win as always, but that game told us everything we need to know, and sadly I can’t see how it ends in a 2022 premiership. How are we not just making up the numbers? Either way, as a wise man once said……”It’s a funny old game, footy”. GO DEES!!!!

Like watching a really slow car crash…….

This left side kick out of defence to Max is becoming just so woefully tragic in its predictability and result. It beggars belief they keep doing it. That alone makes us undeserving.

Just a limping shadow of last year. Carlton without Kennedy, Cerra and Hewett should mean this game goes one way. And yet they’re making us look slow, uncertain, fumbly and secondary at contests. Their plan for this quarter will be pressure, turnover, forward at speed. Ours will be the predictable usual, allowing them to set up that manic contest again. Like last week, we won’t get it done that way.

We really are uniquely dysfunctional at the moment. We’ve been utterly worked out. Pressure us hard, race the turnover forward to space and 1 on 1’s and our panicky backline does the rest. Carlton, well off their best 22, are just doing the Collingwood thing to us. And it’s gonna work.

13, our 4th highest.

Nor me. It was way too simplistic, and frankly a bit ‘grandstandy’. (If you can have your fabulous motto, I can have grandstandy 😊).

My point mo is that it all depends. The very likely situation here is that he had a bit of ‘run of the mill’ joint bruising/irritation that they thought would improve over the early part of the season, whence he could still play, and that the ‘chondral chipping’, if related (big IF), occurred in that 1st quarter, hence need for surgery. Once again, risk-reward in a situation where all wins are vital (don’t we know it). More specifically, they would have assessed the risk as such that he plays. The other possibility, just as likely, is that the 1st quarter injury was unrelated to anything he carried into the game. Imperfections and unknowns.

I get it, and feel your frustration, but it’s always a line-straddle, just a matter of how you look at it. I think Burgo’s ‘advertised’ play-through-imperfection policy was frankly just a bit of honesty. Not really new and certainly not a point of difference.

Your ‘reckless’ argument in this thread is constructed on assumptions and hindsight. Injury management is galaxies from being an exact science. It may have been perfectly sensible for them to put Salem back on, if they were thinking he’d just jarred the knee, and could run it off in game time. In this way, it’s a form of injury assessment. This happens. All players carry niggles throughout the season. If I had $5 for every time I’ve advised a sportsperson - “now let’s just suck it and see” - you know the story. Rarely are players niggle free, particularly as the season runs on. Ergo, the decision to rest-play is a risk-reward scenario. You seem to be suggesting they should always honour the risk. That’s never going to happen. There are obvious advantages to the team and player to playing through imperfection. Also, you (and others) seem very confident in assessing who is injured, and it’s so often just based on form - Maxy, Salem, Jordon, it goes on. The number of times I read ‘he’s obviously carrying something, they shouldn’t have played him’ is immeasurable, and mostly a rationalisation to explain a variety of factors influencing form. This belief that the MFC are somehow defying convention by having players play through soreness and mild injury is also nonsense. All clubs do it. There wouldn’t be many players running around if they didn’t. It’s just a risk-reward policy exercised over a very imperfect, multi-factorial game and season.

For this reason alone, I’d be genuinely embarrassed to be a Collingwood supporter. Happy also to relay this to my Pies supporter friends, who agree but just shrug. Inconceivable, based on their manic attack, particularly in the last 10 minutes on Friday night. Was like they were drug-fuelled (cue rumour mill!). Added to this, EVERYTHING went their way. Horrible horrible free kicks in front of goal (definitely brought by crowd affirmational bias), once in a blue moon accuracy. It was almost comical how the stars aligned for them. Not to discredit the performance, they deserved the win and will have enormous trust in their ability to get it done, which up to a point they will. Just not sure where or when that ‘point’ will be. Sooner the better though.

I just watched the hit for the first time, over which Leigh Matthews was on commentary saying - “I suspect that was incidental contact”. Wowee! Thugs never die I guess. Incidental of course to the fact he wanted to maim Ah Chee without having to look at the ball or make any attempt to take possession of it.

Demonland is both my safe place and my unsafe place for Dees related feelings, depending of course on how they’re doing. Nothing like engaging in irrational devotion-frustration-joy-anger-celebration-murder-deification with peeps of a like pathology. That, and it’s obviously a fabulous place to observe the varied weirdness of humanity!

I know this thread will likely run 4-6 weeks, but there’s a better than even chance it’ll run longer.

Just want to say to Andy, binman and George tonight……..good luck!