La Dee-vina Comedia

And has the added advantage of being directly relevant to the Melbourne Football Club thereby bringing this thread back on track.

You weren't working in this place, were you? Greatest headline ever. Bar none.

Based on other comments on Demonland in the last week or so, I would have thought it's a straight swap with Jordan Lewis.

As well as compensating for the lack of father-son options, I seem to recall that all four NSW and Qld clubs are allowed academies to encourage locals with a view to boosting the stock of draftable NSW and Qld kids. This is not just about getting more locals into the side for the sake of it but also to hep overcome the "go home" factor which has been really problematic for the northern states.

Um, I don't mean to be picky, but on 11 December you've posted that the Women's training will be on 9 December. Something's amiss (pun intended).

The Northern State academies were also created to compensate GWS and Gold Coast for the perceived unfairness of older clubs having access to father-son prospects which the Giants and the Suns won't have for the foreseeable future.

Not quite. The owners of SEN (and some other media assets) is the ASX listed Pacific Star Network. A couple of weeks ago Pacific Star Network announced that it had formed some sort of agreement with Croc Media (a joint venture maybe?) and that Craig Hutcheson would be the new CEO. I'm not sure if that deal has closed or whether Hutcheson has taken up the CEO role yet. The end of the Schwarz and Marco show may or may not be unrelated to the changes. However, as annoying as some people find him on air, Hutcheson clearly has an eye for sports media and appears to have been very successful growing Croc Media over the last 10 years.

So are nephews

Can you expand on this? Why does Watts' departure lead, in your view, to an expectation that the midfield will be more attacking? I don't understand where you're coming from.

Serious question: Did being a MFC member give you any benefits when buying the car? (such as price discount, cut-price servicing, etc)

Why? What's that got to do with how he plays football? If you were saying that about a player who is homesick, I'd understand it, but now that he's home and that potentially depressive scenario has been removed, why is it now a concern?

Fair point. Do they operate any retail brands? I note, also, that as far as I can tell, AHG didn't market to end users and quite frankly, I couldn't see what value sponsorship had for them either.

I think non-contact might be more appropriate. Possibly even enforced by a Court order.

The real problem is caused by the club only training 3 days per week. It's the other 4 days where people fill in the gaps. If we could only get the club to train 7 days per week the problem would disappear.

I'd be talking to one of Amazon's new business partners in Australia, GetSwift. That's the company run by Joel MacDonald and which has Joel and James Strauss as significant shareholders. (In Joel's case "significant" means about 140 million dollars worth.)

Saty, thanks for the photos. I realise individual photos can look deceptive, but in that second photo Oliver looks like he's about a foot taller than the two Christians and almost as tall as Gawn. Serious question...has Oliver grown taller?

Thanks Saty, appreciated as always. Just a question about the boot camp. Are you saying that although the 2016 Boot Camp has produced good results, the club has chosen not to do it again? That just seems odd.

Keep them away from Richmond supporters. That should help.

To extend this comment further, the spin machine at the AFL fails to point out the elephant in the room...when Sydney (the team) isn't playing, Sydney (the city) isn't watching. Essentially what this data tells us is that there's always a strong support base in the southern States, but icing is added to the cake when Sydney (the team) plays. Nevertheless, I've always been a strong supporter of the AFL's national expansion and still hope that one day Sydney (the city) will become as interested in watching games when their teams aren't playing as the rest of us in the southern States are.

I agree 100%...but, I wonder if the newfound love of the umpires to penalise players for shepherding in marking situations makes it harder for players not to make a contest for the ball? (It's just one of the rules I would like Steven Hocking to look at. I've never understood how a player standing still can ever be penalised for shepherding. It just means he got to the right spot first, doesn't it?)

Flower played in some very poor teams for most of his career. I suspect that's the major reason he didn't win a Brownlow Medal. But let's look closer to home...how could he only have won a single Best and Fairest? I haven't watched the whole clip yet and even though I'm old enough to have seen him play and have always regarded him as the best MFC player I've seen, the clip reminded me of something I had forgotten - how complete he was as a footballer. He had vision, he could run fast, he could mark, he could play inside and outside, he was ambidextrous (and whatever the equivalent word is for ambi-foot-rous), he had amazing agility and courage. I know highlights packages tend to emphasise a player's value, but as someone who saw him play many times live, I'll say his "highlights" package could also be described as "just a typical package" of every moment of every game he played.

I really hope we maintained a good relationship with Joel MacDonald when he left the club. The company he founded, GetSwift, last week announced a deal with Amazon and the shares skyrocketed. His personal wealth is now about $150 million. I'd like to see GetSwift as a sponsor of the club!

Unless he trimmed his beard and removed half a kilo.

Great work, Saty. That picture of Billy Stretch at full stretch is outstanding, by the way.

Is that photo from today? Hard to imagine there was enough sun to cast a shadow.