Grapeviney

Absolutely shattered, but how good is it to be back playing in front of 85,000 people?!

Well, look at that - Martin's crying! That's twice tonight!

So sick of hearing about the bloody Essendon drugs saga. It's bad enough that there's even one thread still devoted to it already - we certainly don't need another.

Very pleased to announce that MFC women's team marquee player Mel Hickey will be our special guest on the Demonland podcast on Wednesday 26 April. Hickey is one of the game's more decorated players - she's a 2 x All-Australian, a 6 x Premiership player with the Darebin Falcons and in 2016 made the VFL Women's team of the year. If you follow her on social media, you'll also know that she's a very proud Demon and a great promoter of the club and the game. We'll be speaking to her about the season just completed and also getting to know the person behind the player. If you've got any questions you'd like to put to Mel, you can call in on the night, or post them here and Andy and I will endeavour to get as many of them answered as possible. Put it in your diary folks.

Here's a pic of Jesse warming up for the music festival listening to the Demonland podcast.

If anyone doubts just how young and inexperienced we are, consider the fact that Jayden Hunt went and saw the Batman movie this week - dressed as Batman.

With regard to Obama gags, one of the better ones came from The Onion satirical newspaper, which ran the following headline during his first presidential campaign: BLACK GUY ASKS NATION FOR CHANGE

Love the way he nailed that goal from 50 in the first quarter - there was someone free slightly closer to goal (Jesse?) but he just sized it up and took on the responsibility himself and it never looked like missing. Captain's kick.

The club seems to have abandoned the #myheartbeatstrue hashtag in favour of the new #raisehell slogan on its social media accounts. Whaddya reckon? Obviously it's fiercer, but it's an interesting strategy to move away from the link with the theme song, and something with which people are already familiar and is ingrained and habitual. Given that most people use several hashtags anyway when posting on Insta or Twitter, I guess the obvious question is "porque no los dos" - why not both?

Your constant forum critiques are getting tiresome, and in future will just be deleted.

Thankfully Andy had the 7-second delay technology working and we were able to filter out most of BBO's swear words before they went to air.

Goody footy? Nah.. King has already christened it "Simon Says" I like it.

Demonland: "I wish the club could get a BOJ sponsor." Also Demonland: "I wish the club would stop promoting sponsors to me."

Yeah nah.. Unless you were typing in invisible ink, you didn't say any of those things or make any of those points. Nice try though.

This is a first and final warning to you and anyone else who wants to post this kind of rubbish in here - it won't be tolerated. It's not 'descrimination' but it is disrespectful to our players, who don't deserve to be objectified with lame jokes from a social dinosaur.

In the past few years, the Hun has lost a lot of older footy journos - Sheahan, Trevor Grant (who just passed away last week), Daryl Timms, Geoff Poulter and Bruce Matthews - who had a much longer perspective of the game and its champions than most of their current crop of journos. It's a huge loss of institutional memory, and things like this suffer as a result. Of the 9 panellists, only Jon Anderson and Malthouse are old enough to have seen the full careers of the champions of yesteryear, like Flower and Wilson.

The overuse and reliance on spin is one of the main reasons people are turning off the major political parties and flocking to straight-shooters such as Trump and Hanson. They're sick of the cliches and rehearsed lines and want plain-speaking politicians who mean what they say. I've worked on both sides of the news fence (journalist and spin doctor) for 20+ years and like Fifty-5 reckon the club has handled it well. Only thing I would have done differently would have been, as Binman said, to come clean in week 1. The alternatives would never have cut the mustard. You can't pretend he's injured when he's in full training. You can't pretend you're giving fringe players a shot when you're selecting close to a full-strength side, and you can't pretend you're trying new things when it's clear the only new thing you're trying is not playing Watts. That would have been farcical. The media commentary has been pretty subdued all things considered. Had we tried to cover it up, and then been exposed, then we would have had a full-blown PR crisis on our hands and endless speculation and articles. So far, the only place that's happened has been on here, which is to be expected.

Viney had tape and a plastic guard over two fingers at the season launch the other night. He said it was a flare-up of the earlier injury, but nothing to worry about. If he has had scans, I'd imagine it's just a precautionary thing.

Was a good night. Hosted by Robbo, who struggled to get laughs, but all the other speakers did a good job, Bartlett mainly thanking all the various stakeholders and sponsors, PJ focussing on footy only and saying he was pleased that the club was now in a position to be able to do that (focus on footy) and that good times are ahead. Gus did a late-night-talk-show thing with the two skippers, with Jack repeating old stories he's told before, such as falling off the roof while pretending to be Batman, and how he moved out with his girlfriend into a place just a few hundred metres away from his folks, which he loved at first (mum doing his washing and cooking) but now regrets (Todd's always there playing with his dog when he wakes up). Gus asked both for their breakout player of the year; Jack nominated Clarry, Jones said he was going for a smokey in Dion Johnstone. For those who doubted (or still doubt) whether Clarry was in the naughty corner at the start of pre-season, Jack confirmed it, saying he "got a lot of feedback", and had taken it all on board and trained really well after that point. Goody said he's confident about our prospects and repeated his mantra about fearless team football. For what it's worth, Viney confidently told me he expects Weideman to play round 1. He doesn't know me from a bar of soap, and even if he did, I'd hardly expect to get the skinny on selection news when we're 3 weeks out, but he was far more circumspect when I asked him whether we'd be playing 2 rucks. Random part of the night was a performance by an Indigenous hip-hop group to kickstart proceedings, highlight for me was, as always, seeing the great RDB, who turned 81 last week but doesn't look a day over 65. Bluey Adams, Noel McMahen, and Hassa Mann were some of the other legends in the room. No word on the back of jumper sponsor.

The League Cup Final was a cracking game, shame the Saints couldn't get the chocolates.

Let's nip this in the bud right now. Whenever a player is sidelined or injured mysteriously, there is always speculation about "off-field issues". It's an easy rumour to peddle with no proof whatsoever. This kind of rumour, speculation and innuendo is not welcome on Demonland, which doesn't deal in fake news. Any posts that hint at these sorts of allegations will be removed.

I wasn't a big fan of Tony Leonard when he first started calling, but he's definitely improved over the years. He and Tim make for a good combination, and I particularly enjoy listening to them call a close game. Thanks for posting. Edit: Just on the crowd noise, if you look up at the radio boxes in the Olympic stand you'll see that they have mics pointing out the window to capture the atmosphere. It works in our favour because we own that side of the ground.

That rests on the assumption that journos read every single post on every single fan forum. I'm sure they monitor these sites, particularly at trade time, but there were only a handful of posts here which followed the original, and that was in the post-match discussion thread. Why would a reporter even bother wading through all that? What would they be hoping to find? I think people on here over-state the extent to which journos read and re-hash what they read on Demonland and other fan forums.

It wouldn't surprise me if there was some substance to it - hearing his speech at the B&F last year my impression was that he seemed extremely self-satisfied, more-so than others who took the stage that night. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Jack - if you're out there, it'd be great if you could Skwosh these rumours.