La Dee-vina Comedia

I find it hard to believe that Bendigo as a zone should be any better or worse than the Goulburn/Shepparton area that we had. I suspect Carlton's relative success with their zone may have had more to do with their ability to extract talent at that time. The point about Berwick and Mornington Peninsula being high growth areas makes sense and may have been advantageous to Hawthorn, but I still suspect their main success came from good talent identification programs and good coaching, both of which I suspect were deficient at Melbourne.

Can Demonland please confirm that Joeboy's account has not been hacked? I don't ever remember him being this positive after a loss.

The dilemma is that if he plays perhaps he will be keeping a great talent out. The player who plays instead of Lewis might become a champion. If he doesn't get to play because Lewis does, we would never know. My view is that Lewis's time is up. I think he's been a great addition, but as time has progressed we've received diminishing on-field returns. (That's not a criticism; we knew when we recruited him that his third year would likely be highly problematic because of his age.) And I would expect those returns to diminish much further were he to play on in 2020.

Hard to believe he's 30 years old already. And so's Austin Wonaemirri.

6. Oliver 5. Fritsch 4. Salem 3. Harmes 2. May 1. J Wagner

He's a defender; the others aren't. C Wagner on the other hand... I can understand why ANB is playing and why Hannan is not. And in all seriousness, C Wagner for Dunkley isn't much of a change. What interests me, though, is why J Wagner is in when it's two forwards that got the chop. We can but hope it means Salem on the wing or in the midfield.

Where was our zone? And is it correct to say it was "lousy" or was it more that we were incapable of making appropriate use of it?

Can't "like" this enough. Well said.

I used to have confidence in the capability of the AFL Commission to administer the competition. For example, I have agreed with the concept of the expansion strategy (ie, Giants and Suns) and the Commission's willingness to support social causes. But I'm not as confident as I used to be, especially when it comes to their understanding of the product itself.

An excellent, thought-provoking documentary. If people haven't seen it, I strongly recommend they do. While it's clearly football-related, it's the bigger picture about society, privilege and those that have a voice and how they use (or mis-use) it, that's most interesting. And it's probably worth pointing out that while there are some people mainly in the media - who come out of this badly, there are a few who deserve to be recognised for the positive roles they played. I'm not normally his greatest fan, but Mark Robinson was terrific as was Kelly Underwood. And possibly not properly noticed was Luke Darcy trying to stop Eddie McGuire from making a fool of himself.

Thanks Macca, for this and your subsequent posts on the topic, especially those that provide the data which backs up your earlier post. It is interesting that we're having this discussion the same week the drop off in cricket became a big story in the UK. The drop off in support for cricket there (not just at-ground spectators and TV viewers but also numbers of players) has been directly linked there to the transfer of the TV product from free-to-air to pay TV in 2005. Hopefully the AFL will appreciate that having only one-third of the games on free-to-air TV has a significant downside which might have more effect on the future of the competition than the "watchability" of the games. However, I have no confidence in either the Commissioners or the Executive to understand the sensitivity of what they are dealing with.

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.