deejammin'

It will be nice to see some 'Blues free' finals football

Must resign Blease, Jurrah (pending court case), Green for one year and Rivers. I will reserve judgement on the rest until the end of the season. Upgrade: Nicholson, Magner

This is the worst demons team I have seen for quite a while...

In that situation yes, as 15th season is pretty much over anyway, which is why it should be 14th to 18th raffling the first 4 and the rest in order. 13, 12, 11, 10 etc. For the large majority of any season 13th spot will be in the hunt for finals deep into the season, which makes tanking quite unlikely, any team with a chance of finals won't dream of it, also there is usually such a gulf between 13th and 14th that by the time the team coming 13th realises they aren't making finals tanking won't get them anywhere anyway. I do think its important under this system to reintroduce the priority pick, any team in the bottom 3 teams for three years should get one, no club in its right mind is going to try to be in the bottom three for three years, and if they do, they deserve it.

Wow, what a brave and insightful interview from Mr McLean. It really takes courage to come out and pot your former club when its at its absolute weakest whilst at the same time attempting to justify your own pathetic performance with the "I was forced not to try" argument. If you want to be a whistleblower, do it when you have something to lose, it gives it credibility. Also its only tanking if you had any chance to win in the first place. Its amazing to me that anyone would have a problem with experimentation with our list the year after a pathetic 2008. For those of you who think this tanking argument is legitimate go back and tell me which games we should have won, I was at all of them and I saw nothing to indicate we were capable of winning any game we lost. Trying our absolute hardest against RIchmond earlier in the season we won by 8 points, a goal after the siren 2 goal turnaround is far from giving up, FFS if we were trying to lose we did a bloody bad job of it. Warnock at FF had worked until Jordie Mcmahon had the highlight of his career. What people here seem to forget is that Dean Bailey and Brock McLean have nothing to lose from coming out and claiming tanking. Bailey attempts to justify his pathetic coaching record, McLean attempts to justify his pathetic season and pathetic cash-grab turn-coat move. Go back and read the articles where he goes on about how he 'wanted to play because of his family connection'. What this whole saga should have proved once and for all is that there is no point in whinging about priority picks, as they are not guarenteed success. Cheating means getting an unfair advantage, throwing the members of a pathetic team to different positions because they have been losing all season is not cheating, or tanking, its desperate measures for desperate times. Yet again an over-bloated football media searches for a way to continue to have shocking stories.

So you have us losing to GC and GC beating GWS? I really hope we can get over the suns, I fear the meltdown that may ensue...

How nice to have a competition for all finals spots only a few weeks out from the finals, so heres the thing, what will be the final 8, in order and who's your pick to go all the way? Here's mine: Hawthorn Sydney Adelaide Collingwood West Coast Geelong Essendon North Melbourne Hawthorn to win the lot in a tight Final against Sydney.

The ridiculously overblown love-in for Richmond this year is getting beyond a joke. If we would should model our team on a club that loses to Gold Coast, can't win tight important games, has played in less finals than Fitzroy in the last 30 years and is a front running team with a strong midfield, one kp forward and not a lot else then there is something seriously wrong. Richmond and Hardwick are exactly where we were in 2010, close to the finals, been close but not good enough with top sides, and could easily capitulate horribly with a few unlucky injuries and lack of depth next year.

Alot of talk about floggings in this thread, May well happen but for the record I think people are getting a bit carried away about North. Their performances against Adelaide and St Kilda were impressive, but really, beating half of Carltons best team (who haven't been impressive since early season) and narrowly downing a Richmond team that the week before lost to Gold Coast and was hardly impressive against us isn't the greatest. They did lose to Port as well.... not saying we will even get close, but in terms of who will be going deep in finals I think North has been highly over-rated. If they make it I see them going out week one. Sorry to sound overly vindictive but I am very sick of bandwagon football media where a few wins in a row = quality team.

We are a terrible team, and that was a terrible team with most of its few good performers out injured, it was never going to be pretty, but it was still awful! We should never have had port going past us at this point, they were bottoming out during GC and GWS compromised drafts and were a terrible team the last couple of years while we should have been on the way up. This was a truly awful night for the MFC. At the half way point of the season we were told the second half would be a new season, that hasn't eventuated, it has been a repeat of the first half but without Mitch Clark! I am beginning to worry about Neeld, certainly he thought we would be better than we are by now, I don't think that he would have been as upset this week or last if he had expected it. But I think he could turn it around with some good trading and drafting as well as a strong pre-season and some luck with injuries. If we are at the halfway point of next season looking at 1 or 2 wins it may be that we have once again put all our eggs in the wrong basket.

We've had terrible luck this year, I know we have been terrible and bringing some guys in is hardly the panacea for our problems, but if we could have a team on the park with Clark, Jurrah, Green, Martin in the same forward line at least 10 times it would have been much more exciting to watch and difficult for oppositions to hold down. Here's hoping that next year Clark, Jurrah and Martin can play in the same forward line for 2/3 of the year! I know most of our problems are in the middle, but with a stronger line-up forward and back we can keep quality players in the midfield longer.

Part of that is due to bad luck, if Mitch Clark, Liam Jurrah, James Magner, Tom Couch, Rory Taggert and Tynan were playing there would certainly be a large changeover and a fairly large improvement (Mitch Clark is a large amount of improvement on his own!)

This thread would be a lot more poignant if the MFC was pushing hard for finals

I'm making the call, we will win 8 of the last 11 including beating Richmond to put them out of finals contention. Go dees!!!!!!!

Laser targets players: Apparently Chewy was also applied to several players boots, umpires were bribed and Coutney Dempsey had a full frontal labotomy 1 minute before the final siren. Could these guys be worse losers?

If you look at St Kilda's seasons in 2009 and 2010 most of their key games against fellow contenders saw them winning kicking 8-12 goals, and their finals scores from those years tell a similar story. Some teams play a brand of footy where the most important element is defensive pressure keeping their opponents score low so they don't have to kick high scores. Some play an offensive brand where they try a shoot out approach where they will score alot, but so will their opponents. The best teams have a blend and the ability to do both depending on the night. I would think long term that is what Neeld would be wanting, but he knows that alot of these players are good offensively off the leash, what he is building, and what Saturday night will reinforce, is that a strong defensive approach can grind out the tough wins in conditions where loose, off-the leash, Bailey style football saw us losing badly. When/If the two come together we will contend with the big boys. edit:grammar

Can you post what he said or give a link?

Bump, man a million years flew by..... It hurts so so good!

Maybe this week King will "just come out and say what everyone's been thinking about" a certain North Melbourne coach and football side? Maybe he should realise football is an up and down game, someone will almost always lose, 17 teams lose every year (from now on) so maybe don't make grand calls about the direction of football clubs you know sweet FA about.... Or maybe he'll just slam Ratten instead......

Three consecutive games is pretty consistant in my opinion, makes a few mistakes but is growing as a footballer and has the prepensity to tear the game apart. He's been brilliant since he's been back in the team against three very good sides under immense pressure. Credit where credit is due.

So incredibly happy with that effort tonight, can't stop smiling! I was dancing and singing the song like a madman, even through the carpark. Dragged my parents along (we go to all the home games but they were trying to get out of this one) by the end we were all going nuts! What an incredibly gutsy performance by the whole team. The best thing is there is still so much improvement in this team and with the confidence from this game you would hope that they will be this dogged, determined and at times bloody brilliant as they were tonight. Man, Jack Watts, Jack Grimes, Jack Trengove all had great games! After all the flack of the past nine weeks I hope every player, coach is as proud of the team as I am and that we can bottle the feeling and keep it going for the rest of the season!

In my opinion we are struggling on-field because we embarked on a strategy of rebuilding by completely removing almost all senior players from a list, replacing with 'project player' draft picks and expecting the team to become successful simply by pumping games into players with little or no on-field leadership. Culling so many experienced players all at once left a void in leadership at the club which we are struggling to recover from. They may not have been star players but the over-eagnerness to turnover all of our list at once certainly hurt our build more than help it. Consider West Coast and St Kilda, both clubs had members of the media, supporters and senior members of their clubs screaming for them to play the kids and cut some players when they were struggling over the past coupe of years. Yet the very players many were arguing were past it (Quentin Lynch, Kerr, Embley, Gram, Milne, Koschitsche) are now leading them back into form on-field and are no doubt setting the standard at training. Off-field we have just overhauled almost every facet of the FD and rushing to get rid of a CEO, Chairman and Members of the board would leave a similar void. Schwab, McClardy and Connolly may or may not be the best for the job, but I think knee-jerk reactions will do more damage than good. As redleg said stability is what we need right now and as for Schwab, when his contract is up at years end I am sure all members of the board will seriously consider alternatives.

I think Bennell may have a negating role on Garlett he did this under Bailey and it wasn't his worst effort.

Carlton, as with their injuries and current bad form a loss against us could put them out of serious contention, and set the media wolfpack on a different scent for a few days.... it would be nice to be able to pick up a paper without a negative article about our club for a little while, not that we don't deserve it but its getting a bit too painful.....

We'll learn a lot about a lot of players this week. There's been intense scrutiny and the playing group has been in the firing line, no-one expects us to win and neither do I but this is an undermanned Carlton and we desperately need to be competitive.