La Dee-vina Comedia

Jaded, I hope your friend recovers.

On the contrary. The important point is that the player asked for permission rather than just tried to bring it in without permission. Nothing wrong with that. If only someone had thought to ask for permission for their children to visit a theme park with their grandparents.

If people knew they would be named and shamed, would it make a difference to their behaviour? I suspect it would, and therefore I have no problem with idiots being named. But it needs to be all idiots and not just those with the least power and influence. As to the family members who breached the AFL's Covid rules, they should be sent home. Today.

Not sure if this is referring to a football strategy or the Queensland government's Covid plan.

You could argue that because we're 3/4 and not 5/2 we need to "exepreiment away" because what's happened so far hasn't worked as we would have liked. But I understand your point.

There's a lot to like about Luke Jackson. His hairstyle is not one of those things.

This country really needs to etsablish a new indictable offence called "criminal stupidity".

Apart from ANZAC Eve, have we ever previously played a Thursday night game broadcast on free-to-air TV?

Luci, I wouldn't give too much credence to anything Goodwin says publicly (or any coach, for that matter).

In the last post in the now locked Changes thread, Kev Martin says Sparrow is a great kick. Who's right?

Has Sparrow been training with the defenders? if not, who takes the seventh defender's spot to replace Jetta? Harmes?

Which airport? Could we not fly in and out of Maroochydore's airport?

I wonder if that's muscle strength, fitness, confidence, game style awareness or a mix of all the above. Anyway, hopefully all of them will improve with time.

You may be correct. I didn't check any stats to confirm my impression. Maybe he did change last year and I didn't notice until now.

Working from home is really dulling my senses. Truly, my first thought when I saw this picture was that Covid had really aged Max Gawn. Then read the piece and realised it wasn't him.

I'm not sure there's a common understanding of what "x factor" means. In a football sense, to me, it means someone who is not possible to define. They're not a forward or a back and they're not reliable. They show potential with occasional flashes of brilliance but have never yet realised any semblence of a consistent form line. If they were a comedian, they would be described as "zany" - a word used to describe someone who isn't actually funny, but you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. (The word to use if they're not funny and you want to be critical is "buffoon", regularly used among people I know to describe Bill Brownless.) For what it's worth, I don't think Smith has x factor (as I've defined it). He meets some of the criteria, but I'm yet to see any flashes of brilliance.

Nice pun

Today's Age suggests strongly that rorting the salary cap was widespread around this time. https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/many-clubs-rorted-salary-cap-league-knew-veteran-hawk-official-20200727-p55fy0.html In other words, nothing to see here, folks. Don Scott just seems to be grandstanding for no reason.

The Melbourne score that day is similar to scores this year. I assume that means we were playing 16 minute quarters while Fitzroy played the full 31 minutes and 10 seconds of Q4 and the equivalent in the other three quarters.

On my reading of Richo's report there might be nine changes! It's like everyone who played for us deserved to be picked in the seniors next week. (I presume the players get real feedback, not the confected garbage we're given. To be fair, I'm not sure what else Richo could actually say publicly about individual performances, though.)

It's a sad state of affairs when this becomes a necessity. The game suffers and becomes a less pleasurable viewing experience. For this reason alone, it is incumbent on the AFL to do something pro-active. Maybe we won't need to worry about zones, 6-6-6 and interchange limits if the ball moves quickly away from stoppages in the first place.

I see it the other way around. Don't discount the possiblity that this story has been released now to distract the media away from Hawthorn's current problems. Kennett would know a thing or two about not wasting a good crisis. And if there's to be a Clarkson v Kennett brawl (and I suspect there probably won't be), it would be a beauty.

Excellent pick up. I mistakenly thought the problem was our inability to clean grab the ball in the wet compared with the Brisbane players.(Just to be clear, some of our players, such as Hannan, Harmes and Fritsch, definitely had a problem gripping the slippery ball at other times during the game). Now that you've pointed this out to me, I wonder what else I miss when watching games.

And I don't think he has the same flexibility in his spine, either, hence choosing not to bend at the waist. That could be why he's ducking his head too often, too.

Just to add a comment about Oliver. I was delighted to see him chasing Cameron, even if he didn't catch him. The biggest weakness up to know in Oliver's game has not been his disposal but his willingness to run hard both ways. This year he's improved his kick to handball ratio and improved his two way running. Two big ticks from me.