La Dee-vina Comedia

I wonder if it's an insurable risk? Particularly when it's "on the road".

On Rohan Connolly's excellent Footyology site, Ronny Lerner has redrafted the 1986 Draft. Three of the players we drafted ended up in the top 10. But there's a catch...one of them was Darren Jarman who actually never played for us. The other two were the Febey's who we drafted at 3 (Stephen) and 16 (Matthew). Was it a good move to draft a player who was always unlikely to play for us? On the other hand, we drafted him at pick 55, so it might have been worth the risk if we had a strategy in place to try to convince him to come. Still, getting 2 of the top 10 (even though it's a subjective assessment) is still pretty good drafting. Three would have been so much better.

For a while after his retirement, Joel MacDonald was flying high with a delivery company called GetSwift. The company was listed on the ASX and considered to be a market darling with Joel's net worth for a short time around $200 million. Yesterday it all came tumbling down with GetSwift found guilty of various ASIC breaches. Penalties are yet to be imposed, but it appears Joel may be banned from managing corporations. Sad to see.

Good work Demonstone. Thanks for the challenge. I admire your restraint in not including James McDonald in your team.

I expect that's quite common. However, I suspect those same people have watched the replay from halfway through the third quarter many, many times.

St Kilda and WCE are using the "individual privacy" line to avoid answering the question. But given the obligation, that's not going to hold up forever. If a player remains unvaxxed by whatever their specific state's deadline is, the clubs won't be able to avoid the question because any players missing from training will need to be explained.

I don't think any team is ever more than 4 years away from winning a Premiership should everything go right for them. It is because everything rarely goes right, that clubs are forced to revisit their strategies, their recruitment and their coaching talent every few years. Having said that, if you are a betting person (and I'm not) by all means back the option of neither Essendon and Carlton winning a Premiership in the next 5 years. They are just as likely or unlikely as any other teams, except Melbourne (not said out of loyalty but because we're the current best team in the competition).

I notice from Demonwiki that Brent Croswell played 48 games for us. Was his son, Tom Kavanagh, recruited under the father-son scheme in place at the time? If so, what rules were in place about eligibility for selection? After all, if Kavanagh was eligible to play for Melbourne he must also have been eligible for Carlton and North Melbourne as well.

Bingo...

I know that it's the off-season and the Herald Sun is scrounging around for AFL stories. I also appreciate that it's November, so the Herald Sun is desperately trying to find stories with a link to the up-coming draft. But re-ordering a draft held less than 2 years ago is fatuous. At least, that's what I would have written in any other year to justify why no Melbourne players made the top 10 or moved upwards in their personal ranking. (Let's be honest, it's a meaningless exercise given the brief opportunity these players have had to show their talents.)

I've often wondered whether clubs who have had considerable success through the father-son recruitment process, such as Geelong and Essendon, were just lucky or whether they actively helped develop the sons from a young age knowing full well that the club may be the ultimate beneficiary? A long, long time ago I remember Melbourne making a big song and dance about putting on contract one of Ken McKaige's sons when he was still very young. (Was it Andrew, who subsequently became a TV soap actor?) But apart from that story - and I'm not even sure it was anything more than a PR stunt - I can't recall the club actively monitoring or developing sons of fathers until Chris Johnson.

Three languages in one 5 word sentence. Impressive.

If Howe had stayed at the club and been coached by Roos and Goodwin, he, too, might have been just as selfless and disciplined as the rest of the current team. We'll never know. He made the choice that he did and lives with the consequences. In the dark days, he was one of the few players who made watching football a joy. I hope he's happy with the decision that he made.

While it is a precedent, there is also a significant difference. AFLW is not the main job of AFLW players. In Varnhagen's case, I believe she's still working as a registered nurse. For the men, AFL is a full-time, professional career with a lot of potential earnings at stake. In other words, while I hope all the AFL men are vaccinated, if one or more don't want to be, get ready for an expensive legal challenge.

Part of the script was written about 425 years ago. Just look at the parallels in Richard III. It starts with the line, "Now is the winter of our discontent...". The murder of the two nephews in the Tower is an obvious reference to the destruction of Grimes' and Trengove's careers by making them captain too soon. And the immortal line, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" is clearly Roos asking his recruiters to draft a stallion called Petracca.

I may have missed it, but has anyone said what it was that Burgess said to Goodwin during that discussion on the boundary line during the Grand Final?

On the other hand, the club hasn't prepared me to deal with success. I don't mean that flippantly. I enjoyed the game and I'm still thinking about it, but I'm not sure whether I'm making the most of what might be the makings of a dynasty or perhaps just a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Do Stephen Armstrong and Matthew Bishop qualify as "ship jumpers" or were they made to walk the plank? (By the way, when I first read your post I thought you were making some reference to Frawley having premiership success with a club with a sh*t jumper.)

This is Demonland? I thought it was Facebook under its new name which reflects more truthfully what everyone believes it to be.

I appreciate everyone's emotions are different and it might be very tough for some if we'd lost. However, I've become so conditioned to mediocrity as the best to hope for in the preceding 50+ years, that I think I would have been OK if we'd lost. Supporting Melbourne for all this time has conditioned me to accept disappointment. Perhaps the whole club had operated that way for so long, that the achievement by this group of players is perhaps even more special - that is, they overcame emotional hurdles that might not have been in place in the more successful clubs.

The end of lockdown brings with it the chance to catch up with friends and colleagues I haven't seen for what seems like forever. Some are footy tragics, although not Melbourne supporters. When we next catch up, probably next week for the first time in months, I'll get a chance to re-live the whole season but especially the Grand Final.

Let's not confuse science with myths, irrespective of how popular the latter are. Science deals in facts. I'm not sure what "so-called science" is intended to mean, but I would happily put my faith in science if it is used properly.

More fine work from AFL Media. Look at the date at the bottom left of the photo.

The AFLX trophy is beyond compare

Absolutely this. It was obvious how he completely changed his style when he moved from Saturday night to Friday night. On Saturdays, he was clearly being asked to impose his blokey style to suit that particular format. On Fridays, he is much more "straight" albeit without losing his essential style. I don't think he's a particularly good caller, but he's also not particularly bad and he's certainly not biased towards or against any team. The style of commentary is very much dictated by the expectations and requirements of the program's producers and always will be. And I give him credit for two things. He's very good at promoting (and sometimes critiquing) the umpires, rather than allowing them to be ignored. And he put in a surprisingly good acting performance as a fictional NT footy coach in the movie "Last Cab to Darwin".