Grapeviney

I'm a big fan of the Viney clan but Todd sticks out like a sore thumb in that team. A very good player, for sure, but only had a few seasons where he could be considered truly elite. Was a butcher with the ball for most of his career. Max and Clarence are obvious inclusions (goodbye Stynes and Viney) and Trac certainly gets a gig in the emergencies (replacing Wells or Alves), if not yet the final 22.

You were booted off here last time you posted rumour and innuendo. Do it again and there'll be no coming back under a different name. But I'm sure the 'real story' is fascinating. "Kid who moved back home to be closer to family doesn't spend all day of every day at home with mum and dad"

Remember the energy and excitement of the 2018 Elimination Final against Geelong? It’s not a patch on the emotion attached to the world’s best football rivalries. Went to the North London Derby at Arsenal a few years back, and there was just an immense wall of sound for 90 minutes. My Spurs got rolled 4-2 but it was one of the best sporting experiences of my life. Have travelled to Europe twice just to watch Tottenham play, and while I’d love to see the Old Firm in action, my next soccer sojourn will be to Argentina to witness the bedlam below 🕺🏽

Watching them celebrate the past week has almost been as enjoyable as watching them play. Well done to the club, too, for all the content - the pics and videos have been awesome. I love the fact that “Demon Spirit” came to be the umbrella term for everything required to win the premiership, from the selflessness to the camaraderie, to the attack on the footy and more. A social media hashtag that became a creed for the team.

Around the time of the first exhibition matches, Brad Green was asked about women playing a greater role in footy, and he kind of fluffed his lines, responding with :"I'm sure it won't be long before we see a woman coaching in the AFL, or someone with a woman's background." 😂

I think it’s one of the beauties of the world game - mainly because many of them are so damn good at it. They’ve been poached by the American networks now, but I used to watch EPL games just to listen to Jon Champion and Peter Drury. Tyler’s voice still reminds me of my childhood and Sundays spent watching hour after hour of football on SBS.

Not sure if others have seen this before (looks to be from Indigenous rounds) but it shows the self-belief among the group and the joy they clearly feel playing with each other.

I can't believe I';m saying this, because I grew up idolising the man, but I agree with the overwhelming sentiment on social media that Martin Tyler has passed his use-by-date. Last night's game was a cracker but you wouldn't have known it from the call, which was flat and lifeless. Give us more of football's poet, please. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkJDye2LI3G/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I went over to the Collingwood forum to see if they were writing poems about Grundy, but looks like Pies supporters prefer to express themselves using the visual medium. This was from their ‘game-plan and tactics’ thread.

Me too mate. I got no beef with him. Just killing a few mins on a Thursday arvo, and there aren't too many other words that rhyme with 'dogga'

We once had a mate called dogga Who turned out to be a list clogger We wished him the best Shipped him off west And hoped his replacement wasn't such a flogger

How could this happen when there are only 948 gambling ads on free-to-air TV every day in Victoria?

Richmond share some of the blame, too, as they're insisting on holding it there rather than move to a larger venue. Lots of unhappy supporters from both clubs on social media. AFL is also potentially setting a dangerous precedent by agreeing to prioritise home ground advantage ahead of crowd numbers - ie the Geelong home final question, which has so far been off the table.

So impressed by the way the coach and players stayed calm and stuck to the plan, enabling us to get the game back on our terms after a fumbly and flat-footed start. That’s the kind of belief in the system - and each other - which helped the boys triumph last year. Mackin sells candy and steps around opponents like she’s been playing footy all her life. What a jet and a joy to watch. Likewise Bannan. Liv Purcell best on ground for mine. Gets lots of it and always uses it well.

Absolutely pumped. Feeling a lot like I did last year with the men's - a few butterflies, but mainly excitement and confidence that we're going to bring our A game and do the business. As Goody told the players before the PF last year: "Just be us. Just be the way we've been all year ... and the game will be ours."

Watching footy for 40+ years and never been so nervous during a 12-goal thumping. Oh well, no point ruing what might have been, we’ve clearly got the talent to win the thing. Funny to think that had they been able to do it, the women, like the men, would have snatched the minor premiership right at the death, albeit by vastly different margins.

I’m no fan of Ross, but it’s funny to see posters bemoaning his defensive style when one of our own players (Langdon) said not all that long ago that we pride ourselves on making Friday night games boring to watch.

It’s a pleasure to watch this team. There’s talent to burn on every line, and a real connection in the game-play. Between the men’s the women’s and Casey, it really is a magical time to be a melbourne supporter.

I'm just glad it's not at Crown this year, which means I can bring my little bag of crushed up anti-inflammatory powder.

The thing with Bolt is that he uses selective facts and very specific words and phrasing to distort the truth and present a warped version of reality. Here's the first distortion of the truth. Daisy didn't express hatred for our past; she only said there were competing narratives about the impact of the British arrival. That is a fact, evidenced by the debate we're having. Nor did she express hatred for any institutions, including the royal family. On the contrary, she acknowledged and praised the Queen's life and service. The language is important here, as is the use of quote marks to trivialise the significance of the words 'genocide' and 'stolen'. Genocide has a number of definitions depending on which institution or dictionary you use, but Bolt is relying on most people's tendency to think of genocide through the lens of the Holocaust, where the plan to systematically annihilate the Jews was basically written in plain English (German) for all to see. Other genocides - see Rwanda and Cambodia, for example - had different characteristics. You can quibble about the use of the word in relation to Australian history, but there's no denying the large-scale widespread killing of Aboriginal people in the so-called Frontier Wars, something which even the most conservative of historians admit happened. Here's a piece from the Australian Museum which argues that genocide is an appropriate descriptor of what happened in Australia. And here's an interactive map from the Guardian and the University of Newcastle detailing the massacres. Whether it was genocide or not is just semantics. As for Aboriginal people having "some form of control" over half the land, again the language here is important, designed to give you the impression that most of the country is off limits to the rest of us. It's a throwback to the scare campaigns around the Mabo decision and subsequent native title legislation, that Aboriginal people were coming to take your backyard. It's true that large parts of the country are "Aboriginal land" in some form or another, but it's not ownership as you and I know it. They can't just build houses or businesses on this land - in most cases they can't do anything with it at all. Here's a story which highlights some of the complexities around land ownership and tenure, bearing in mind that this is one community of hundreds which was successfully able to secure a bit more agency over their own land - ie they're the exception to the rule. Cultural traditions remain strong in some parts of Australia, with the Yolngu of Arnhem Land being one example. But elsewhere, much has been lost - songlines and stories, customs and traditional knowledge. When the British arrived there were about 250 Aboriginal languages spoken across the continent. Today it's less than half that, and many of those are in danger of disappearing too. Government policy was the key reason for the decline, with Aboriginal languages banned on missions, and children who were taken from their parents punished for speaking their native tongue. This is from the Commonwealth Office of Education in 1953: "There is a need everywhere for a planned, vigorous and maintained drive for English." Linguist Arthur Capell wrote in 1964: "Government policy looks forward to the loss of Aboriginal languages so that the Aborigines may be 'assimilated'.” Read the bolded quote below from the Chief Protector of the NT about 'eradicating' Aboriginal culture. Sentence 1 is really just an opinion - an agreeable one to most - but it's all a matter of perspective really, as Yolngu continue to forage for yams and other traditional foods and enjoy mixing the traditional and modern worlds. But no-one (including Daisy) ever denied the benefits or joys of the modern, western world. Sentence 2 presumes that Aboriginal women prefer the western justice system over the traditional one - where's the proof of this? And even if it's true, so what? It doesn't undo all the other harms and impacts of colonisation. . This is classic Bolt, using a very narrow framing of events to present an inaccurate picture of reality. Just because there hasn't been a court case, doesn't mean the Stolen Generations don't exist. There's vast reams of evidence about the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their homes - a whole report actually, the Bringing Them Home report. You can go in there and pretty much pick any page you want and read for yourself the policy in action. Here's an excerpt quoting the Chief Protector in the NT about 100 years ago: Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white ... Bolt and others will hide behind the "perceived danger" excuse, which is just another way of saying "it was for their own good", a smokescreen for the assimilationist policy articulated above, and in so many other places. Do we really want to pretend that every child taken from their parents was subject to neglect? And really, it's not hard to find people who were members of the Stolen Generation. The legendary Jack Charles, who passed away last week, was one of them. Read his obituary. Here's an excerpt from a speech by another - William Tilmouth. I am mix-matched – a creation by others who decided they knew what was best for me. I am a product of assimilation. I am a product of being denied my identity, my family, my country, culture and my language. In the west I am a success. I was the kid who came good – became a model working citizen, living in my own home, paying my rent in advance, hiding my identity and keeping my relatives at a distance. What you see today, you might think is acceptable – but to me it’s not. Why? Because I have spent a lifetime, along with my brothers and sisters, trying to rebuild and recapture all that was stolen and denied us. I have a good command of English but I can not speak my own language. I have grandchildren but I was denied my mother and father. Sometimes I don’t know where I belong or where I’m going – or who am I? That is a question that you are left with: Who am I? Coming here was hard for me, coming back up north. I was stolen and taken to Croker Island. Minjilang and its people hold some of my fondest memories as a child. There was heaps of nature but very little or no nurture. Notwithstanding the efforts of the cottage mothers who had to spread their love over 12 or so distraught children each. Leaving Alice Springs was hard because I still cling onto home. I am the sum of my experiences and my experiences are such that my life doesn’t have the cultural integrity and grounding that it should have. I’m not recognised in native title. I’m not recognised in land rights. When my father’s traditional lands were given back, my brother and I were not even notified of the ceremonial handback. The apology meant nothing to me – there are too many sorries and not enough truths.

The AFLW attracted controversy last weekend when it ditched plans for a minute's silence to remember the Queen because of Indigenous round. Here's an articulate, intelligent and passionate explanation of why it matters from Daisy Pearce. For all those people who say Indigenous round is just a tokenistic, virtue-signalling concept, here's proof from our skipper that there's real substance behind the sentiment and a willingness to stand up for principles when it matters most. You might disagree with her stance, but there's no denying that she's taken the time to consider her position and has thought about these issues at length. If that's not the purpose of Indigenous round, then what is?

Lol I watched Spurs lose to Sporting Lisbon in the CL the other morning and it was maddeningly similar to watching Melbourne. Wasteful inside 50's, lack of forward connection, poor disposal around goal and and an inability to hit targets!! Son has had a shocking start to the season and the incredible chemistry with Kane has disappeared, at least for the moment. Marcus Edwards (who's an ex-Tottenham academy player) almost scored one of the great all-time goals, Maradonna-esque.. at the 1.25 mark of the video below Edit: haaland hit a nice one overnight against his old club, the guy’s going to kick 100 this year.

This is the exact moment Her Majesty realised she got sucked into buying one of those fake Ricky Nixon footys after last year's Grand Final, the ones with 'Charlie Spargo 8' on them.

I'm hearing that Buddy could be a late withdrawal due to a calf problem.

Nah, the jail is there for a reason.