La Dee-vina Comedia

Clearly my challenge for today is to work out what word starting with a vowel is worthy of being auto-censored.

Have we paid the $500,000 (non) tanking fine? Or is that separately accounted for? It's possible the $1.45m is actually only $950,000 in real terms if we still had to pay the fine out of those proceeds.

Interesting comparing the size of Mitch Clark with Jack Watts. Adjacent photos both approximately doing the same thing (running to the left and about to kick). Jack looks so much skinnier. Still needs to add some bulk.

Must be why we're allegedly recruiting bigger bodied midfielders

Dank's resistance to speaking with ASADA may have nothing to do with the AFL and everything to do with the NRL (or vice versa, of course). Or nothing to do with either of these codes but something else he may have been involved in.

I'm not pushing for (or against) Zak Jones, but I suspect his older brother's durability will have helped his cause. Conversely, Troy Menzel feel down the draft order because of his and his brother's propensity for knee injuries.

We can assume it's a large number or else the club would only have agreed to front or back of jumper position, not both.

I think it's pretty clear now that Tom Scully was just the set of steak knives needed to enable GWS to get what they really wanted - Phil Scully.

Not everyone is a born leader. Some of the best companies and governments have had a natural leader in charge and a dour, detail person as deputy. They make great teams with one complementing the skills of the other. But the deputy should never take over as leader. What happened at Melbourne was that Don was forced to take over the reins when he was better placed to remain as deputy. I respect him for his efforts and am grateful for the time and effort that all board members volunteer. It's not like any of them join up to make things worse for the club that we all love.

With Jetta delisted does that mean we now have zero games of experience with indigenous players on our current list? When was the last time that happened at Melbourne? The club should not recruit indigenous players for the sake of it, but I suspect we'd be a better balanced team if we had some of the obvious talent available from players with that background.

The more I think about it, the gladder I am I haven't thought this one through.

Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR?

Can someone clarify for me: We can re-draft him (or any of our delisted players) in either the national draft or rookie draft, can't we? I'm not saying we should, but just want to understand the "three live picks" in the draft rule.

I think you'll find that in the world of AFL "imminent" is a single word which describes the length of a piece of string.

Mind you, for sheer idiocy surely "p15sing in someone's pocket" has to be the most nonsensical phrase ever invented. Why would anybody think that it's a good thing?

Ron, are you sure you didn't mean to post this in the cliche's thread?

Do delisted free agents have a choice as to where they play? In other words, was Riley made an offer by Melbourne and chose to accept it over the possibility of being rookied (or re-drafted) by Adelaide?

And, "He's in the mix" Also, "Player x could be anything". It's generally used to bump someone up but generally leaves me doubting that the player has any particular skill which stands out. If he did, it would have been stated.

Mind you, at some stage I'd like them to be making skill-based decisions when they're tired so as to simulate game day experience .

Who are you suggesting makes up the 5 in their last or second last season? I can see Jamar, Cross and Byrnes. And I would put Dunn and Mckenzie as maybes based on form rather than age although both could yet find something to extend their Melbourne careers. Is that the same as yours? Or do you have Vince, or someone else, in your 5?

I'd be interested in a statistical analysis but I suspect poorly skilled football teams have higher injury rates because (1) the better skilled players have to work harder to compensate for the duds thereby adding extra stress to their bodies and (2) poor execution means players are being forced to twist, turn, stop, start, etc more than they should compared with when a ball gets delivered "lace out". If that assessment is correct, our the best cure for our injury rate might be just to play better.

Agreed. And too often two or more of our players go to tackle the one opposition player with the ball which inevitably frees up an opposition player who, not surprisingly, becomes the receiver.

He strikes me as somewhat clumsy though. So even backing out he'd probably collide head high with someone and get rubbed out for a couple of weeks.

Hire your car from Hertz, get your caravan and head off to the NT. Logic suggests our next sponsors will be a tyre company, the RACV and a petrol company, such as Shell or BP.