PaulR

If we were playing 1980’s style footy a big bulky man mountain with burst speed, solid hips and great mits would be the go… and Ah-Mu would be in demand. But it’s not, and he’s a long way of the athletic profile and capabilities require to thrive in the AFL. Even Plugger would struggle with 2026 style footy, given the effort required up and down the field all day, and that you can no longer bulldoze players dropping into the space ahead of you to “clear” your space. Curious what others have seen in Ah-Man’s brother..?

All Cudos to Shane MacAdam, he is resolutely pushing through the long hours, days and weeks of often solitary work required to build his body back up, so an can impact on the field in 2026.

Watching Carrie closely for the last two seasons, trying to work out what had changed from his great years, I concluded that whatever had transpired behind the scenes with him had reduced his awareness in congestion and his ability to create like he used to. Just a beat slower at critical moments, a second guess, an unawareness of his space. I’m not convinced fitness alone will have him regain this. We shall see.

Bring Max, Kozzie and Rivers in and distill to our best 23 and we're not far off the mark. Many great signs.

Liking Howes game so far. Reliable on the wing. Windsor on fire.

Both Windsor and Langford super damaging coming into our F50.

Blue team clearly our 1st team atm. JVR, Jeffo and Mihocek working well together.

Loving the Blue team's deep switch, working well.

Its back.

Feed is dead for me.

Contrary to many above, I'm both optimistic and desperate for us to have success this year. Essentially because I see this season as year 3 of a MFC program to refresh and re-position our list to play the current style of footy. The goal is to bounce back into serious contention while we still have some genuine and experienced A-grade champions on our list. My view for Goody's last 2 years was he was trying to re-engineer our team to play quicker, more attacking footy, with our recruiting we were looking for dash and delivery, BUT our aging Aces in Trac and Clarrie were holding us in our old style, and Goodwin was unable to evolve their games or make the new game work around them (and others). King has inherited a team thats been working to implement his (King's) preferred style for several years, so while the outside view may be that we're a while off, I see that we're very close and with the off season changes, we have no excuses.

We need experienced leaders on every line if we are to progress in 2026. Melky is smart, damaging and, as mentioned, has a precise long raking kick that would have Fritter or Myocheq salivate running back into the forward line. Smart killer kicks are gold. And so is Melky!

Is training at Casey or in town this morning?

I imagine Mathew’s’ eyes light up when he sees Xavier Taylor on the burst exiting the backline with dash. Reckon we’ve got a great haul of new players to the club. Latrelle and Kozzie…

Predictions for the 2026 season are in part based on how you view the past, and how this can be used to point to a possible 2026. Since 2021, when we won the flag 😃 we finished top 4 in 2022 and 23. Then we tumbled and finished well outside the 8 in 24 and 25. As a result of these poor finishes we changed coach and exited several players who didn't want to be at Melb, or Melb no longer wanted. Without further revisiting all the details and issues of this period, it must be assumed that the MFC powers deemed 2024-25 as underperformance, identified and remedied the issues, hence the changes, and that with these changes made, we should improve. Reality may not support this, but the club's logic and strategy are clear. If the clubs assumptions, strategies and changes are correct, we should rise and the top 8 be clearly possible. I'm open to believing that 2024 and 25 were the aberration, not the norm. So with the changes made, we're gonna rise like the phoenix... Go Demons.