La Dee-vina Comedia

So, if you're Uncle Fester, that makes him Great Uncle Hassa. Is that right? On point, it's amazing how our club's inability to move with the times from the mid-60s through to the mid-80s caused so much damage.

Generally, I think Caroline Wilson's articles are pretty good. They are clearly opinion pieces rather than factual reporting, but that's OK because it's clear from the outset that that is her stock-in-trade. This article, though, is poor. It's full of individual points which she has tried to meld into a cohere whole. It's as if she was joining the dots of an elephant (a white one) and managed to draw a vacant space instead.

He should have stayed in Victoria. Sure, he may have been fined but apparently wouldn't have to pay. Instead, if news.com.au can be believed, he now has a conviction against his name.

Don't you just hate it when facts ruin a great theory?

Heard Kevin Sheedy being interviewed by 3AW on Saturday about his appointment to the Essendon board. If I'd been an Essendon supporter I would have been sorely disappointed. Sheedy could not justify his appointment beyond saying it gave the board someone with coaching experience. He couldn't articulate why that was going to be helpful. Probably because it isn't going to help. Sheedy has been good for Essendon over many years, but making him a director now is another step backwards showing that the club has not yet understood that reliving past glories is not the way forward. There's a moral there for us, too. For exactly the same reasons, we need to be sure that whoever we appoint to the Board, or to any role at the club, will take us forward and not return us to some idea of a glorious past. If Brad Green can add something to take us forward, then I'm all for his addition to the board.

I've always believed (without evidence, just a hunch) that a senior coach needs to have the experience of being involved in winning a Premiership. It could be as a player, coach (senior or assistant) or as a football manager. Winning Premierships doesn't just happen; it needs a lot to go right and if your senior coach has never been at a club when it's happened before, I can't see how he knows what is required. However, the converse isn't always true. Having expereinced a Premiership doesn't automatically mean success. After all Mark Neeld and many others have experienced Premiership success prior to becoming a seior coach and for whatever reason have been unable to convert that experience into a successful senior coaching career.

An important point. You should only move someone on if you think there's a better option available.

Doesn't always work that way. My best guess is that assistant coaches take over the top job when their boss gets the chop fewer than half the time. More often, they get moved on, too, as part of a failed group.

The club's announcement states that Yze has completed the level 4 coaching course. Is that the highest level?

Add Preuss to the list. (Not sure if he was 'asked to slim down'; but he obviously has done so.)

You ain't seen nothing yet.

I'm not sure Collingwood is such a powerhouse any more. It used to have the most members and now it doesn't. It has won a single Premiership in the last 30 years (OK, two if you want to count 1990...in which case you could argue it's only won two in 62 years). And I sense it is no longer the club most "hated" by opposition suporters, which was a badge of honour it wore with pride. I'm not having a go at Pert. I have no idea whether he's a good CEO or not. But I don't think he Made Collingwood Great Again.

Interesting to compare my view (above) with suggestions elsewhere (see Bombers Implode thread) that Zac Merrett wants out of Essendon because he lost the vice-captaincy.

Nice work

I know one Bomber member (I know, I'm ashamed to admit it) who is disgusted enough that she has emailed to cancel her membership today. She also told me that Merrett wants out, although I don't know how reliable her source is. Maybe it's just media speculation.

I'm generally not a fan of five year contracts. However, in this instance I could see that the longer contract term is compensation for losing the captaincy. It would have been ego-deflating for someone so (relatively) young to have the captaincy taken away. Many players in his situation may have considered leaving to go somewhere where they felt more wanted. The five year offer might have been offered as a sweetener way back when the removal of the captaincy was "negotiated".

Interesting. I have always thought it would be other way around.

Maybe the club can give you the vaccine. Seriously. If a vaccine is available, the club might be able to organise for health care professionals to administer the vaccine as you enter the ground. I'd take that over a new scarf any day.

On Twitter...

Agreed. You've made some good points here. Especially the one about being in the AFL bubble. I hope he has a successful post-AFL career and life, whether it requires any growing up or not.

He's 29. Does anyone "grow up" any further once they've reached this age?

Spare a thought for Jack Watts. If he hadn't broken his leg last year he may have well played in his first final last night. I suspect he's not the type of person to brood about missing out, but it would have been nice to see him rewarded for having to put up with all the criticism he received over the journey purely because he was selected number one in his year and in so doing went to a club which was incompetent at managing and developing him properly.

Perhaps WA police don't want to be seen to be "soft" on a figure in the public eye. It's much easier for them to handball the matter to the Court to decide and let the Magistrate wear any negative PR consequences. It's not dissimilar to the MRO transferring a matter to the AFL Tribunal to avoid having to make a potentially controversial decision.

You've got your characters confused. We've got Mitch Brown, not Charlie Brown. Unless you meant we trade Mitch Brown and Charlie Spargo.

Rather than start a new thread, I'm interested in whether people like the idea of a bye between the final home and away round and the first week of finals. My view is that it kills momentum. I have found that since this particular bye was introduced a few years ago that I have fundamentally lost interest in the whole competition every year due to the bye when we're not in the finals. I know it was introduced to overcome the problems associated with some teams resting players in the final round. I think there needs to be a more creative solution to that problem, such as suspending the senior coach of teams that do that for four rounds. I'm pretty sure that would work. Having said that, I think the AFL had no choice this year to have the bye. Because of the way the season panned out, they couldn't go into the finals without giving Essendon and Melbourne a break at this time of year. When setting the schedule they couldn't ignore the possibility that either or both these teams could be finalists. In summary, I'm all in favour of getting rid of the pre-finals bye. Any thoughts?