deejammin'

I remember Grace’s three games being pretty outstanding though. I imagine the plan coming into the season was for Kate to play more forward with a more stacked midfield but injuries to Purcell, Mackin and Beasley have prevented that. If she gets her game ready I suspect she’ll be in.

If that’s true it’s absolutely shameful. You couldn’t have kept him for one year and seen how he went with King then traded him for a junk pick next year? Trac’s salary and what we were planning to pay Judd going off the books isn’t enough? Nup that’s trash. GAGF Tim Lamb.

Luke Jackson goes alright

Mate we want Trac to stay. King especially. He will not trade him for a bad deal. 7 and pick exchanges doesn’t get it done.

I agree about Oliver but Kozzie’s last two years of gradually building up midfield time have been super impressive. His clearance numbers and even pressure in there is great. If he stops these dinky little upwards kicks into the forward line that rarely come off and starts drilling his passes he’ll be elite. I think his running patterns are really quite good.

I really think if we take enough of his salary on we will get 12. Let’s see.

Look, I love Clarry, I wish we would keep him on and he would get back to his best. However, I think it’s clear there were some learnings from 2025: Harvey Langford is a jet and will be one of the leagues best mids in no time, he plays midfield/wing and will do it more and more next year. Kozzie needs to be in the middle as much as possible. Windsor is a mid/wing maybe a mid/hf he’s NOT a HBF as he tried to play the first half of the year. He must play more minutes in the guts next year. Lindsay is a gun, can play HBF (needs to improve his defensive stuff but has time), wing and increasingly mid in time. Rivers offers a lot as a mid and can be tried in there with Lindsay/Howes coming into the team at HB Jai Culley makes us better, plays HF/wing/mid, he plays AFL all year next year. Viney, Langdon and Sparrow are good role players and will do whatever it takes to make the team better. Jake Bowey is our best HBF and must be the running/kicking HBF into mid role. Add to those learnings some wild cards like Salem, Tholstrup and maybe even Laurie and all of a sudden our midfield mix is pretty competitive. What King was clearly telling Clayton is he doesn’t see him clearly playing his role in a midfield of Trac/Humphrey, Kozzie, Rivers, Langford, Windsor, Langdon, Lindsay, Viney, Sparrow, Culley potentially Tholstrup and Salem. I don’t know if I agree but I can see his thinking and if that’s the case perhaps we are better freeing up some cap room bringing in a draft pick and giving a club champion a chance to play his role at an AFL club rather than fighting for a spot with younger stars.

It’s a brave new world. Trac was professional and did a good job this season when he was much more “out” last year apparently. If GC don’t rate him enough to part with a player and it’s just picks then I think King will bank on himself being able to get Trac on board, and the club will tell Trac we’ll trade him next year if another club gets serious. King is still an unknown but he doesn’t lack confidence and with Clarry, McVee and potentially May going there’s no way he lets Trac go for picks. Also FWIW Oliver, McVee, May could net us similar picks to the joke of a deal described here, (definitely if we do the traditional package picks for higher picks later on), to those touted for Trac. There’s just no way we take picks for Trac if we get some kind of combination of pick 12 from GWS, late first/second rounder from Freo (let McVee walk to the draft if Freo don’t come to the table, see if WC pass him up!), third rounder for May. Thats more than enough picks for us, don’t need more for Trac. Humphrey or bust GC.

Any news on what Heaters injury is/may be? I hope she’s ok, she’s my fave.

Lions are the only team in Brisbane and one of only two teams in QLD. We will always be in competition with 9 other teams pushing up deals and making us pay a premium. Especially that mob that gives players farms, cars and cotton on deals outside the cap. Us being a destination club is so much harder than Brisbane.

The problem isn’t players asking to leave. The problem is the clubs getting locked into one trading partner. If Judd had any care for MFC he would allow us to deal with WC and Freo to extract the best deal possible for us. If this is truly about “going home” then there’s two teams there. All this talk about fans “growing up” and being more “professional” with player movement but then the players pick one club and hold their own club to ransom to get there no matter how bad the deal. If a player asks for a trade the club should be able to send them wherever they get the best deal. That would be the league “growing up and being professional”, this is a farce.

I mean, we did beat them in Brisbane this year with our worse list. Footy’s a funny game.

Absolutely, they are now, but Collingwood mortgaged their future on them. Pick 14 and 34 for Schultz 3m over 5 years for McStay (who’s barely been on the park), Richards, Noble, pick 36 and a massive chunk of salary cap for Houston. Thats 5 young players including some guns and potential guns for a 31, 28 and 29 year old next year. It got them close but let’s see what it does to their future. McAdam, Hunter and Billing’s were a huge bust but they only cost us one second round pick and some junk picks, a waste for sure, but not to the same extent. EDIT: Also none of Billings, Hunter or McAdam were on anywhere near the salary of any of Schultz, McStay or Houston, not even close.

Also the amount they paid for McStay, Schulz and Houston almost makes our Hunter, Billings, McAdams deals look good.

How did Buck’s interview go? How’s this incredible process that makes us look shoddy playing out? Lots of candidates?

I think with our list profile something has to give with: May, McDonald, Turner, Lever, Adams, Howes and Kalani White (not saying he’ll play seniors but we’d be wanting to develop him down back in the VFL, Fullartons role at the end of the year) + with Mihocek coming in meaning the likelihood of playing one of Petty or JVR back. On form maybe this year it was May that has to go, his last Collingwood game was outstanding but his Hawthorn game was abysmal and he’s been up and down all year. We have a plethora of tall backs and while at his best he can play on bigger blokes than all save maybe Petty and McDonald, his best may be behind him. I hope he stays and proves his worth but we have a lot of key backs and with the emergence of Turner as a first choice intercept defender the first choice backline may be three of Turner, Petty, McDonald, Lever even with May on the list. If we can get some kind of pick or player for him maybe that’s better?

The devil(s) were in the details.

Ok so the story is that Buckley comes out and says he wants the Dees job when it’s first announced and continues to do so through the whole process, does the interview and the presentation and does a heap of study for it and tries hard and doesn’t rule himself out at any point. Then decides, right at the end of the process, when the Dees ultimately pick someone else that he’s more interested in hearing about a job that doesn’t yet exist, for a team that hasn’t met the stadium requirements it needs to exist in a process that hasn’t started and will probably include several other high profile candidates (Longmire, Hinkley, Simpson and Hird for example) rather than the job he spent months of time, energy and put his public statements on. Yeah, seems likely, not face saving PR at all 🙄

Except that that story just isn’t true. We very well may have to wait til after GF day for King if the cats go through, which is precisely why we could’ve waited for Bucks if we wanted him. We didn’t want him, King was more impressive. Notice how all the Bucks ummm and ahhing started when he realised he was going to have to do a proper process with an interview and presentation? Couldn’t be that he was hedging his bets and managing his PR in case he lost, especially as he’s never actually done a proper head coach process before, it has to be that we’re incompetent, because media said so! All those external experts and our new highly qualified CEO and board director and our unanimous board are all fools, they should’ve just waited when they had to wait anyway! What [censored]! These highly informed media people, who got every report about who was leading our process wrong, were clearly so much more right! [censored], do you even support this club?

Can I just put in a little tip. Bucks won’t get Tassie, it will be Longmire. All this Tassie spin will be revealed to be Bucks PR after losing a process (he’d actually never done one before, King has). I might be wrong but let’s check back in a few years, I’d be taking the Bucks spin with a HUGE grain of salt. Long live the King!

Great appointment. The most experienced coach in it (Bucks hasn’t coached a game in four years, only did one apprenticeship under Malthouse and was handed the keys in a train crash, King has done it the right way and has also sat in the hot seat at the suns). A lot of media mates are already getting the PR going for Bucks their mate to make sure it looks like he didn’t lose. But I have it on good authority we’d have taken King over Bucks, possibly even Kelly. King completely blew the panel away with his presentation and his pedigree is beyond compare. Bucks has literally worked with one senior coach, King the majority of the best coaches of the last two decades and is knee deep in a finals campaign. He’s the right choice, can’t wait to see what he does with the list. I predict some surprises.

No Lindsay again? Is he ok?

In the AFL media landscape reporting is extremely binary, players are almost always “gone”. I’m not going to re-litigate the Oliver one with you again, he’s still here, there’s been 8 times in the past 2 years a large amount of the media landscape has reported several players are leaving our club and they are yet to get a single one right. Not one. Even the obvious ones like Jordon, Bedford and Harmes were reported relatively late. Grundy is the one exception and I think we know he was leaking that himself. I don’t think they have a good source inside our club on the trade front, and the evidence supports that. I also think there has been a clear bias against our club since a couple of people left in 2021 in certain parts of the AFL media but that’s not what I was arguing here.

Glad he’s staying. So: Petty, Oliver, Kozzie, Viney, Petracca, Oliver again, Kozzie again, failed to know ANB was leaving til the day it happened, now Fritsch and despite our board having a “six week” long discussion on Simon Goodwin’s future and eventual sacking no leak til the day it happened. I don’t think the media know anything about the internal workings of our club, operating at 0% accuracy currently.

Longmire sure Bruce or Enright or any number of other assistants with impressive showings in a thorough process sure Hinkley no thanks Simmo no thanks, was past it years ago Hird hell no, should never work in the industry again, maybe we could get Dank, Lance Armstrong and the 90s Russian and Chinese swim teams in to help with Hirdy’s sports science program too! Bucks I hate with the fire of a thousand suns. Would be the only time that I just don’t think I could do it, might have to take a break from footy. Also he’s very similar to Goodwin except that Goodwin is a good person and Bucks is not. You want cultural problems, have a look at what went on at the pies under Bucks and especially when Bucks was Malthouse’s assistant, yikes and yuk.