binman

Well in addition to being rubbish at trolling you're obviously equally rubbish at sarcasm. Champ

This is seriously the worst troll attempt i have ever read on DL- bloke has his best game for the MFC and you reckon he was poor? Are you an AI trollbot?

Good call.

I'm not sure of Adam's contract status, but if he is out of contract at season's end i'd be very surprised if he gets another

Great post, and you make some great points. A couple of thoughts in response: i take your points about Latrelle, but King's game plan is based on running power and simply does not work without players on every line with genuine leg speed, particularly striding speed over distance - and every player needs to have a massive tank. For that reason, i can't see Latrelle being dropped anytime soon (meaning he'll almost certainly be dropped this week!). I also think Latrelle's the future and we need to get Latrelle to that critical 50 plus games of AFL footy ASAP - i could see them playing him for the first 5 or 6 games then give him chop out and send him back to Casey to work on his craft Based on what i saw against the dogs in the VFL game i'd be very surprised if we see him before, at a minimum, round 7 or 8 - he's not ready physically and i suspect not mentally either Heat aint coming into the ide anytime soon either - i can't see him playing in the same side as Maxy, in large part because of my first point, until perhaps the last few games of the season; and then only to get some AFL games into him If AMW is good to go i reckon he' straight swap for CJ this week

Yep, agree on both counts. That said, in the first half we copped some shocking frees against us, and perhaps more significantly, frees not paid - the amount of throws, HTBs and scragging of maxy let go was infuriating.

He rucked well too I reckon

Couldn't go - was away. Just finished watching the replay. Go redleggers!

I think that's exactly what will happen, and I suspect that might be a big factor in both th selection of cross and riv being dropped. It also mean Koz can have more CBAs

Yeah, I agree it's unlikely to be pace alone. Who knows, Riv might have been given a specific role or task he didn't satisfactorily complete, or break a non negotiable team rule. Or more likely, despite having reseonable disposal numbers, King, like all AFL coaches uses bespoke data and metrics to set KPIs for specific players and inform his assessment of their performance. One such KPI would almost certainly be pressure, as evidenced by tackles (and pressure acts, one percenters etc) In other words King perhaps king and/or the coaching panel wanted to get some more pace into the side, needed to drop somone to make that happen and decided riv was that person because he didn't perform to the level required.

What he doesn't have, and nor does Rivers, is genuine leg speed. Watching Cross up close last week, he's quick, and he's also an excellent runner and super fit King's game plan is built on fitness and leg speed. I suspect that King wanted to pick the fastest team he could this week to exploit Carlton's lack of leg speed and spread. We will try, and I think succeed, to run them off their legs.

Bingo

Note to self - get past the 25 minute mark

Do you mean he doesn't use the ball pretty well and isn't a decent runner who can run and spread defensively (and offensively)?

A pod for the true believers (aka dees tragics)

In my opinion this game will come down to which team can best mitigate the other team's strengths. The blues major strengths are winning contest, contested possessions and clearances (ball winning). I can't believe I'm able to say this, but our strengths are ball use, leg speed and our running power and transition the ball quickly from D50. I reckon Cerra is significant out for them - agree he is no world beater, but he would have helped them mitigate our strengths (and their key weaknesses - their lack of leg speed and running power) because he uses the ball pretty well and is decent runner who can run and spread defensively (and offensively).

If we can shut him down, he might crack the Saads.

Thanks YA. Funny you should note your four-year-old yelling out 'go petracca' because I've been experimenting using Gemini to interrogate the wheeloratings data (my instructions were to ONLY use data from that website). At this early stage of the experiment, it throws up way, way too many hallucinations to confidently trust or use the data (though i have found it useful to explore themes and as a tool to test and/or challenge my reasoning and hypothesis about various aspects of the game) - perhaps a paid version might be more robust (in questioning why so many obvious errors, the LLM's response was there were issues reading the tables) One such hallucination, one that felt like being trolled, was in response to a prompt about comparing our player ratings between round one and round two. According to Gemini our standout player this season has been, drum roll, Christian Petracca with 31 player rating points in round one and 22.3 in round two! I'm glad Gold Coast are paying his salary.

Thanks for the feedback Demonted, appreciated. In terms of me interrupting, I'm conscious its bad habit i have and i'm working on it. In terms of tactical analysis that covers all aspect of our performance including offence, defence, contest and transition, and is 100% football focused, you could give my standalone Freo stats file pod a whirl. And as an added bonus i don't interrupt anyone coz it's just me. It's only the second one, and there won't be another one as ridiculously long or deetailed as i overprepared, (happily) got lost in the numbers and analysis, chose not to watch the time and wanted to cover all the things i had been ruminating on in my head about the game. I didn't have time to redo it, so it stands as a monument to my obsession about trying to understand game plan, method, tactics and what happened in the game - something that is particularly exciting this year as we have a new coach with a new approach. Apple PodcastsThe Stats Files Rd 02 2026Podcast Episode · Demonland Podcast · 24 March · 1hr 8min

Unfortunatley

I'm an iconoclast - rules are meant to be broken, especially my own

AMW and XL aren't competing for the same spot. We've lacked a quailty small lockdown defender since Jetts, though as pointed out to me Hibberd essentially played that role too - AMW will likely play that role, and I'm excited for what he'll bring. Noone really plays that role atm - we use our mids, HHFs, and whatever you call the role/position Langers plays to get back on defence and win contests and ground ball inside D50. I think XL is minding Bowser's spot, so not sure who AMW replaces. Ultimately, XL, as he did as a junior, will likely move from the HB into the midfield, possibly when Bowser comes back. Either way he's not coming out of the ones.

An excellent point. A bit was made of the fact that our average age was a tick over Freos. But the key difference is how many of high end talent are 24 or under and/or played less than 50 games.

My tolerance to main training was always very low - might explain the very undizzy heights i got to in my junior footy career.

Does anyone know how Disco broke his hand?