nutbean

No position is considered easy however - HBF - generally regarded as the easiest position on the ground to play - not naive - coaches have often quoted this - out of form players get confidence back playing HBF- can follow a man and see the ball coming at them.

Change your tax lawyer. Having said that, if I was a gambling man I would put money that the loan was asked for and given for no other reasons that it was "easy" and possibly other avenues of finance may not have been open to him In hindsight I tend to agree that these types of arrangements made in private companies where the owners answer only to the owners is different to an organisation like the MFC where not only is actual financial propriety essential but the appearance of financial propriety must be paramount (it may be 100% kosher but how does it look to the members who are forking over good money every year)

Hazyshadesoftheguywhotendstothegarden?

Its just not that hard to understand this - its called marketing - pick the one thing that is going to drive the most donations and it isnt an altitude room. World visions' $1 a day feeds 3 children for a week resonates more than $1 a day helps World vision pay for staff to keep the charity operational and help defray the cost of advertising.

The company I work for is not publicly listed and provides all sorts of interesting packaging that even with the FBT, offers benefits to the those in the highest tax bracket especially if the employee is not 100% PAYE. FBT has been nothing but another interesting challenge. I will concede I have little knowledge of the public sector or pucblic organisations and as such am not aware of how difficult or easy it is to creatively salary package.

Common practice in the corporate world - forms part of the salary package and depending on how it is structured it can have tax benefits.

I was once in a pizzing competition but I was found to have rorted the pizz salary cap so I lost my top two pizz draft picks for the next pizz season

edit - Brett Lovett for an unheralded player was one of strongest players through the hips I have seen

or if you batting for the other side of the poll, a worthless exercise in delusion

my thoughts exactly with an added " I ain't gonna lose a minutes sleep over it"

Thats where your argument lost credibility.... point me to any post of that nature ?...(wee attempt at humor)

Brett Lovett - probably the strongest player through the hips I have seen. Never ever went to ground and stood up in tackles and dished the ball off. Greg Wells in the coaches box ! We could use Ricky Jackson about now.

I was hugging randoms in the street all the way back to my car. My foggy memory tells me it was a tight first half and then Robbie lit it up in the beginning of the second half and gave us a comfortable buffer. Then we all had our ears glued to the radio listening to the Hawks and the Cats.

Sgt Pepper taught the band to play

Maybe I see things a little too simplistically. CS has presided over an administration that has removed our $5M debt - to get a true comparison- there are a few clubs that have tried the same "eradicate debt" campaigns and havent come close to what we accomplished. You can throw up how much of it was the Stynes factor but bottom line is CS was CEO during this time. We have re-aligned with the MCC and have new facilities and finally have spent money (wisely or unwisely remains to be seen) on a football department. We can put this down to sponsors, supporters, members, partly previous administrations but CS has presided over all this happening. Reading the criticism's of CS I note that he has not been criticised for his performance in administration matters but interferring in pure football matters. Jimmy aludes to this in his book. Simply put - keep him out of pure football matters and is he not very effective ? I'll have another go at the energy watch sponsorship. This witch-hunt reminds me of so many posts on here on drafting and retrospective naval gazing. People looking at this sponsorship after the company started to unravel not at the time we (and others) took the deal. Good thing Visy dont want to sponsor us as they have a checked corporate history. Lastly -as mentioned by others - that we have any sponsors is a minor miracle. Taking off our Demons bias - at this point of time what do you think that Mr and Mrs Joe Public would take more notice of- Kaspersky on Buckley's shirt or Neelds shirt. We are not only trying to get sponsorship from companies who may not want to get into sports advertising, we are competing against other sporting clubs who in honesty are a lot more attractive than we are. Sitting from the other side of the fence I can only conclude that he has done a good job.

The point of this post was hopefully to flesh out my theory that the membership in fact is not dying. Given our bad 2012 and even an underwhelming 2013 preseason and trade period what will happen - we will shrink from 35k to 32K ? Bad I know but not the death knell of the club - all we need is an ounce of excitement in the offseason and lots of promise that suckers us all in and we should hopefully remain around 35K. Any half sign of improvement and 2014 could see us pushing up to 40K members.

That's the spirit !!

The problem with Jordie is not so much the role that he plays, and yes, he is limited , but there is no silk around him.Not everyone in your midfield can be an Ablett (we dont even have a Nathan Ablett). Cameron Ling - very much in the McKenzie mould (although later in his career he did start kicking goals). I am not bagging Ling but he had a plethora of gems around him to dish off to that enhanced his reputation.Lings main role was not racking up possessions, was not as an extractor (like Mitchell)- he was a shut down king BUT he could find a bit of the ball whilst tagging and McKenzie finds a bit of the ball too which is very much in his favour. edit-as a postscript - I think that a McKenzie would be invaluable rotating in a midfield like Collingwood - imagine him sitting on the oppositions best midfielder and get his 20 possessions and feeding it to Beams, Swan and Pendlebury. Carrazzo started life that way and has the shackles removed a little and look how he has turned out - playing a very valuable third fiddle to Judd and Murphy - the silk.

We paid top dollar for Clark and he hasnt taken one mark in the second half of the season...NOT FREAKIN ONE....pfffttt

A question without notice. There are believers on here that our membership will die. I am a first generation member and have brought in two daughters to the MFC fold. If each member brings in a wife, gf, bf or kids does that not mean we grow ? I understand that we need success to keep the members but I am of the belief that there is an underlying hard core of membership who stay the course and this grows and can also slightly shrink - the cream (to get to 40,000) depends on success. I would consider landers the hard core members - how many members have you brought in ?

I took exception with a tweet from Morton last year after a big defeat - "difficult day- learned alot" - I tweeted back - you didnt learn anything yet - you saw alot. How you play next week and thereafter will determine how much you have learned"- to his credit he tweeted back and said "agree!"

Problem is - i dont think that it was intentional to give such an insipid answer. I understand they are kids and will cut slack - but Collingwood had a reality check on the weekend -we had more of the same check.

here we go 1/ As of right now NN has impressed more the JW- (anyone wanting to knock NN - just wow - he is an excitement machine and will be anything !) - therefore we got it wrong 2/ NN in my opinion would have gone back to WA (or GWS) after contract one - so we got it right 3/ I try to never judge players that are 21 and not yet developed so therefore I have no idea if we got it wrong or right - time will tell. That is all.

heyyy !!! I resemble that remark.

Apparently we got the wrong assistant from Collingwood we should have got Watters - his team has done much better than ours.