Cheesy D. Pun

I'm thinking pretty similarly but I'd be giving ANB another crack. I'm with you on Bedford but unfortunately, Melksham is somehow the golden child and can't be removed.

Suffice to say, I disagree. He is a big part of the reason we are having some early season success. Along with Spargo and Kozzy, he applies huge pressure on the opposition. If you judge him against his job description, today was his first poor game of the season.

Spot on. Agree with each and every one.

He won’t be dropped as Fritta will get a week, so need a midsize forward Is there a precedent for a fend off report?

He has set an incredible standard. His work out of contests was as good as ever but he didn't use the ball well at all. It was great to see our 2019 draft crop turn the game in our favour today. In future, we may look at that draft as a pivotal moment for the club.

To be honest, I'm a little unsure of where to go with our lineup. I sense that a Brown/Weed combo might make us too sluggish for our game style, but I'm going to run with it anyway on the back of the Tomlinson injury. Out: Baker, Melksham, Tomlinson In: Weideman, Sparrow, Bedford TMac to stay back. I wouldn't have a clue whether this works or not. Gee, it's a tough job picking the team at the moment. Nibbler was very poor today but has some credits in the bank.

For the love of God, yes. I can't fathom how he continues to get a game.

6 Jackson 5 Pickett 4 Fritsch 3 Langdon 2 Salem 1 Oliver

I'm not sure about this. Not all forwards are the same and if they were, you'd have genuine problems. I think the Weed does a good job if mixing up his lead up work with his stay at home stuff and I can see fitting in perfectly with either Brown or TMac who, as you say, lead up and take the ball at its highest point.

I don't think there's too many disagreeing with this. I love what TMac has done. It's more around the future. Are we prepared to go into the next couple of years with two ageing key forwards and send Weideman to Collingwood (or elsewhere)? It's very unlikely that the Weed stays without playing a significant number of games this year. It's something that has to be dealt with. Sure, we might end up with an injury that masks the problem in the short term, but this not going to go away.

If they all stay fit, one has to go. It's a really tough situation. They're all high-quality AFL players and all are in form. Given that we have to choose one, I'd still be trading T-Mac at year's end. There would be a few teams regretting not taking him in the off-season. That said, we still don't know how Ben Brown fits into the side, so there's a caveat on that call. I think letting the Weed go is the one that would have the most potential to come back and bite us. There's nothing stopping him from becoming a force and if we then have a recurrence of injuries from the older two, we start to look a bit silly.

Yep. His workrate is phenomenal.

Harmesy?

I like it.

While I agree with all of the points about Robbo being half-cut, and generally difficult to watch, I'm going to play devil's advocate. I think he provides some value, in that he represents a fairly large proportion of the football watching community. While slurred and poorly-delivered, he does ask questions and make statements that wouldn't be out of place in the local pubs of the outer suburbs. In general, that kind of representation has its place and to be honest, my main critique of Robbo is that, at times, he attempts to sound intelligent. Strategically, the partnership with Gerard makes complete sense - one representative at each end of the social spectrum to soak up as broad an audience as possible. Ok, I've had my fun - you may resume normal programming...

In a general sense, you're right. One of them has to go and if we added another genuine small forward, we'd be near unstoppable. Tricky to manage though. Tommy is right now, on form, the best/most dynamic of the three players and we're winning with him in. It's a moot point until season's end, anyway.

I vaguely remember this fella. Was this down Gippsland way?

Haha...very good. My words, not his.

Yep. He's been a good acquisition, by all reports. Cheers for the bump?

I agree with you, 100% - we're seeing better kicks to advantage. I'd argue that decision-making and trust are the key drivers of that rather than the development of kicking skills. Our structure behind the ball probably helps too. In the past, a shanked kick meant a fair chance of a goal the other way. Now, there's not quite as much riding on every kick as the opposition still has to find a way through a very miserly defence. That has to have some effect on your ability to maintain composure with the ball.

Pivotal play.

I put very little of our improvement down to individual growth as players. The system is working because they've decided that they have no choice but to trust each other. It's very difficult to make good decisions when you're trying to work out whether the guy next to you has got your back. We're not kicking the ball better or contesting harder. Our boys are quite simply in the right place at the right time, more often because their decision-making has become instant. It looks like our pressure has lifted, but again, this is not about a willingness to tackle - that's been there for the last 5 seasons, at least. It's about the speed in which players make decisions. An extra half second here and there because you have faith in your mate, means everything.

Probably true. We can't keep them all on the list and clearly we didn't want to going into 2021.

I worked as a reporter for the Herald Sun and left after being asked to coerce a source into saying a particular thing and recording it. I did it, asked the editor not to add my byline, went home and never returned.

Yeah, I think you milk the current setup for all its worth, then when it looks like teams are starting to work us out, we have some alternatives up our sleeve.