La Dee-vina Comedia

Do you know where that figure can be found? I'm reasonably sure I heard Gil speaking the other day claiming that TV viewership is the highest its ever been. Not that I trust him.

With our luck, the AFL will grant us permission to engage a nurse.

I was hoping you could. I now have to decide whether you can't help me or won't help me. My point is, that you have an opinion that it's about the PF and the lack of any review. I just happen not to share that opinion. You think there's an obvious correlation; I think it's far more nuanced than that.

I can't see the link between the PF and us playing the way we are now. Perhaps I'm missing something, but is there something specific about the way we play that you can point to which can correct my view?

Sorry, but which program are you saying "makes him sweat"?

I'm still very ambivalent about Petracca. I see occasional glimpses but I don't think he impacts games enough. In other words, I don't see that he's a "gain" this year.

I think some supporters haven't moved on but I'd be very surprised if the players and the coaches haven't. For them, it's ancient history. Equally, every finals win before the PF would also be forgotten. They know they are only as good as the ladder says they are.

And this thread is even better with popcorn.

I understand your point, but isn't there also merit in the argument that if they're right to go, the more games they play with their teammates the more benefit they will have from the experience of playing together?

If the AFL wanted to be really courageous, they could get rid of interchange altogether and have four substitutes. The substitutes are needed in case of injuries and would likely all get played in the final quarter, whether there are injuries or not. On first blush it might seem "old-fashioned" but the more I think about it, the more I see merit. I think it would result in the following: it would keep the best players on the ground with ruckmen and onballers resting forward players would not be able to run over the whole ground at high intensity so it should reduce "flooding" tackling would still occur, but it would be more likely only one player doing the tackling (because of the previous point) goal scoring should increase because there will be fewer players in the defensive zone quality full forwards will have a better chance of kicking 100 goals in a season because most of the time they'll be not only playing on the same player, but there will be fewer defenders helping out their defensive colleague team lists would seem to have more apparent depth because instead of having 22 players all expected to be of equal fitness and ability, teams would really only need to have 18 with the four players on the bench being less important than they are now I have no doubt the coaches will squeal, but they're the source of every on-field problem so while they shouldn't be ignored, their opinions should not count for as much as the coaches themselves expect that they should.

That makes sense. I was assuming there were only two options - either we score or the ball is not retained, but I guess one could be talking about the first thing that happens after the ball ends up inside 50 ('retention') whereas the other refers to the eventual outcome ('score', or not).

I'm struggling a bit to understand what is being presented here. On the one hand, "Every time they go in, their ability to score from those entries is the worst that Champion Data have ever recorded". But elsewhere in the article, it says "Their retention for kicks inside 50 went from second in the competition, now it sits at 16th." That latter comments suggests there are two teams that must be worse than us at retention. How does that match up with the first comment that says our ability to score is the worst in the competition? Can someone explain to me what I'm missing?

My own view is that captaincy doesn't matter as much on-field as we might expect because all players today would be drilled to such an extent that there would be little for a captain to do. However, I think off-field the role of the Captain may be quite significant but more for the ceremonial (meeting sponsors, speaking to the media, etc) rather than the practical.

Sorry, Dazzle, I wasn't actually referring to you specifically, although I can understand why you might have thought so. It was meant to be a general observation about the schizophrenic approach to player value on Demonland.

My concern is his poor kicking when not under pressure. The under-pressure kicks are somewhat excusable if they fail to hit a target; the kicks when not under pressure are not.

If Port or Adelaide don't make finals this year I could see Hinkley and Pyke not being in their jobs by the end of this year. I would have thought Goodwin is safe for another 12 months (and, obviously, longer if performances improve).

I've noticed that Viney is using his right foot to kick more often than he used to. I don't know if this is contributing in a material way to his poor disposal efficiency numbers but I would encourage him to keep doing so. The more he does it, the better he will get, not just at using his right foot, but also at the amount he can contribute to the team. When he was solely a left-foot distributor, he kept getting caught trying to get onto his left.

Why would they bother? They're 1 game and 19% below the second last team. They don't need to "tank" to show how bad they are. (I should add, that I doubt anyone before the season began gave them any chance of actually winning 3 games, so overall, they've probably done better than expected.)

I always like the optimism that somehow players who apparently aren't good enough to be in team that is 16th on the ladder will somehow have trade value.

I wouldn't know Tony Cochrane from a bar of soap, but having listened to him being interviewed quite a few times now I'm absolutely certain he's part of the problem. I'm not sure of the governance arrangements of the Suns (is it owned by the AFL?) but if I were the AFL I would want to provide the Suns with help, but on condition that Cochrane was replaced. Otherwise, the AFL will find that additional picks or any other form of on-field assistance will just be wasted. That club's problems are not just on-field and what we know from experience of just about every other club in history is that you can't fix the on-field without getting the off-field right first.

You can add that Frost has become a much more reliable defender, although we know he will provide a "what the..." moment in every game. And Salem has become more consistent.

Where's Sigmund Freud when you need him. No votes from me this week as I only saw a few minutes of the game here and there. What I did see, though, was some outstanding tapwork from Gawn.

I've always thought that teams who play badly are more likely to have injuries because players are forced to twist and turn unexpectedly. For example, a kick that misses its target forces the player to stretch more to reach it than he would have if the ball had hit the target. If this hypothesis is correct, it's not just muscles that might be damaged by overstretching, but joints could be damaged by sudden unexpected twists, and collision injuries might increase due to players being forced into more body contact when a ball is more often in dispute.

Today I got around to filling in the survey and I've finally got it off my chest. It's been bugging me for years. I am sick and tired of only ever being offered a free scarf every year. Where's the innovation? How about socks or a cap? Seriously, it's good that they conduct the survey (assuming they read the answers). AFL football clubs are strange beasts. Full of members, most of whom the club administration never gets to meet. A survey is at least one way of finding out what moves the membership, for good or ill.

And factor in also that a significant number were also under-prepared at the beginning of the season due to late starts to pre-season. I wonder how many players had essentially a full pre-season and a year uninterrupted by injury? It wouldn't be too many.