Webber

On his 2023 form, top 10 selected every week. A pure joy to watch. Wrings every last skerrick of ability and effort from himself.

Brilliant. @Demonstone, your best work yet, methinks (sheepish self-identification notwithstanding).

Extraordinary. Closed shmosed!

Big boy. Wasn’t expecting that.

Having come across @binman in the wild, I can confirm that he looks just like Garry Baker ………………….or does he?!!!!

Just a simple thing. Lauren Pearce played a great quarter, but she can’t kick straight. This is known. Why has there not been at least one option running past her to take the handball ? Not one, not once.

A full return of confidence will win this, not the static reactivity and panicked disposal of the that half. Swap Zanker and Harris through the centre square, and play through them at all costs. They won’t lose a contest, and if we put muscle and run at the drop, with Kate Hore leading from the square, we’re away!

Honest, thoughtful, respectful, grateful and intelligent is Brody. I’m completely SHOCKED the sensationalist, mindless, muck-raking media even considered publishing those thoughts.

In fact it’s one of the defining virtues of Australian Rules Football. Compared to other football codes worldwide, female attendance at games (and via membership) has always been close to parity with males. Which is but one of the reasons it was so frustrating we didn’t have a comparable women’s game until the last few years. So many willing participants, so little opportunity! No wonder when their chance came, at a participant level, the game just exploded. Girls want to play footy, and they want to continue playing as women. Well, duhrrr!! At a personal level, it’s thrilling to be witnessing the evolution of the professional women’s game. I went to the first Dees vs Dogs game at the G - showcasing the best 40 players in the country - thinking, sadly, that the AFL probably wouldn’t commit to growing the game. It’s staggering now to think that a handful of years later, we have 18 teams, all of whom would thrash those first two teams. But I still worry about the AFL’s commitment. Never has there been a better reason to throw everything at a competition, with an excited participant market of half the population. You know, like the men’s game. Fixturing however, in every respect (venues, times, number of games), is still problematic. It almost feels like the AFL is putting obstacles in the AFLW’s path. The old ‘if it fails, it wasn’t because we didn’t give it every chance’ notion, only with the the second bit being rubbish. Given the potential for continued growth (based on the game’s exponential evolution alone), things like needing crowd KPIs to trigger more rounds is just short term, commercially obsessed nonsense. To steal from an arts-cultural touchstone - build it, and they will come - if only cos they’ve been banging at the door for years. We’ve seen how women’s soccer has built what I believe to be a non-fail place in world (and Aus) sports culture, commercially and otherwise. I have no doubt that women’s Australian footy will leap-frog it, it just needs true, unwavering commitment from the guardians. [On a professional note, it was enormously concerning in the early years how prevalent ACL ruptures were in the women’s game (the order of 3:1 compared to men), and I was worried parents would literally stop their girls playing. Even this is now on the slide]

Yep. Her last quarter against the Crows at Casey was extraordinary. She was out-jumping every opponent in the ruck, slamming it forward and allowing Tyla Hanks et al to set up quick entries for Eden Zanker. If she’d been able to play on-ball the entire quarter, I’ve no doubt we would have run all over them (almost did anyway). She scares oppos sh**less, is enormously valuable, and consistently gets underrated for it I reckon.

Sounds good. Strangely enough, I get more excited about going to Prinny Park (Ikon, shmikon!) than Casey Fields.

Yep, my glass is looking oddly fuller now, too.

I reckon Billings is one of those players, like Colin Sylvia, like Jack Watts, who has ALL the abilities required for A grade footy, except one thing - pure, CONSISTENT competitive will. It’s the most important quality in any player (Jason Taylor recruits based on it), which if married with top 10 percentile skill, creates a champion (luck with injuries notwithstanding). Can you develop that at 28 years old, in the last 20% of your physically viable career? I’m glass half empty, but I guess there’ll always be exceptions.

True. None of us know the extent of Petty’s injury, other than it being a Lisfranc disruption, which have a spectrum of severity, even for those requiring surgical stabilisation. Clinically, across epidemiological history, outcomes aren’t great. We used to call Lisfranc fracture-dislocations career killers, but things have improved a lot of recent years, and the chances of them being chronically unstable have diminished greatly. The main concern is related irritabilities and compensating behaviours in the biomechanical chain (foot, ankle, related soft tissues), along with variable responses to progressive and repeated weight-bearing - running, jumping, day on day, week after week. Personally, in relation to outcome consistency, I’d rather do my ACL. So in summary, Petty’s foot could be anything from great to not at all. The MFC know this, and are planning for the best outcome. As they should.

Once again, I’d make a case for umpiring determining the outcome of the game. Too many absolute shockers that went the Crows way. Still, we should hardly expect the W game to be better than the men’s.

I posted at halftime that the game would likely be decided by umpiring. And so it came to pass. The state of AFL umpiring is killing the game. For all the brilliant play, and players, all the work, dedication and teamwork, umpiring is simply making the game unwatchable. Congrats to Collingwood, but we’ll forever know there’s a huge, ugly umpiring asterisk hanging over this flag.

Brisbane’s defensive system (or lack of it), just can’t get their head around Collingwood’s corridor game run from transition. It’s like they’ve paid zero attention to the way Collingwood play. Then again, apart from Quaynor, Maynard and Moore, Collingwood’s defensive 6 are bog ordinary, and Bris get to score frequently from inside 50 entries. So what we have is a high-scoring GF. Anyone’s game from here I guess, but if the umps keep paying high tackle frees for Nick Daicos, that’ll get them there.

Marchons! Marchons!

Fabulous sentiments, layz.

Honestly, how good are Kate Hore and Tyla Hanks? I love watching this whole team, but something about their pure footy ability just makes me smile.

Surely you realise the forward line personnel merry-go-round and accuracy are connected. You might label it a crutch, but that doesn’t make it less than absolutely true. It’s the ‘crutch of truth’ maybe (ooh, I like that). Collingwood haven’t really had ruck issues. They’ve had at least 2 of Cameron, Cox and Frampton available all season.

Murphy aside, they had a very healthy list by finals. Are you talking Collingwood this year? Aside from Daicos, and possibly Adams now, they’ve come into finals also with a very healthy list. Still don’t think they’ll win it though. We absolutely could have won a final with what we had, which is remarkable, in fact should have, if only we’d kicked straight. It’s the sole game-day stat of significance. Turn 3 of our ‘posters’ into goals, and voila. Tweaks will happen, as they should, but there’s just no reason to go fishing for answers to questions that don’t match the plain facts. We had injuries impose on our season, and we didn’t kick straight enough for goal. 1 and 2 on the reasons list, with everything else way further down.

But it’s a relative spectrum across the clubs, layzie. Every club has greater or lesser problems with injuries across the season. Some have a dream run (which are rare), others a horror, and everything in between. I suspect we were probably mid-table for ‘games unavailable’. If we had a full fit list, we would have done better, which obviously means finishing second, or first, and gone straight to a preliminary final, and been odds on for the flag. Then the whole argument of big changes goes away. In truth, we actually did well for our injury stats. Which suggests that big change is NOT needed, and we did well at managing what could be controlled. But, of course, every club seeks to change for the better after every season, and we will. The current MFC is a very high performing club, that I think should be praised for how it managed the season, despite that we all wish it had ended better.

Never, because they’re not an excuse, they’re a reason. The ENTIRE history of footy determines it so. You can blame poor management and systems for those injuries when appropriate (not for us this year), and you can be frustrated with HOW we play, inconsistency and the average ups and downs of a season, as we all are, and none of us are immune to it, but NOTHING, and that means NOTHING determines success, W/L percentages and ladder position more than ‘games unavailable through injury’. Clubs do their absolute best to work around them - depth, ‘mirror’ players in the VFL - but it’s still the truth. It’s the most reliable indicator of relative success, bar none.

And yet a fit forward line of our best available would have seen us in the preliminary final last Thursday. THAT is what we know. Doesn’t fit your hyperbole though, I suspect.