La Dee-vina Comedia

i can't see why employing an assistant coach should be different from any other employment process. So you'd think the prospective employer would check references of any potential employee. In short, I'd expect the CFC to have contacted the MFC; and because of their personal history it may well have been Malthouse to Neeld.

If he's only just "begun to mature" he's not yet a leader.

UH, I'm impressed. You appear to have understood what ADC wrote which is completely unintelligible to me. Mind you, when I do understand what ADC has written I find it's drivel virtually impossible to agree with whatever is being suggested.

I'd like to agree, but there is one additional matter. When Demetriou was commenting in 2009 he (presumably) was not aware of the meeting which it is now being alleged was held with the intention of planning to lose. While everything else he said are legitimate arguments his comments might have been different if he was aware of the alleged meeting (if it indeed happened the way it has been reported). So, he still has wriggle room if he needs it. My guess is that the AFL would like to find a solution without ever having to admit that 'tanking' occurred - whether they now believe it did or it did not. They should be using an external strategy firm to advise them (because an outside view is less likely to bury its head in the sand and shouldn't be afraid to provide both palatable and unpalatable suggestions for consideration). But I suspect they won't do that. And they should re-frame the question away from whether tanking occurred in the past and should instead talk about reforming the draft process to get rid of any incentive which might still exist not to perform. And I would like to see (but doubt it will happen) some stricter obligations on clubs to report their intentions during a season (ie, advising if they intend to trial players in alternative roles, put players in for season ending surgery, resting players because of a rotations policy rather than pretending that they are suffering from general soreness, etc).

Could be worse. Might have to take old Scully as well.

A bit like having smiling footballers

I saw a story about the 'Judds' mispelt in another thread as 'Judas'. Or maybe not.

I was lucky enough to see Robert Flower who is clearly the best Melbourne player I have seen. But I wouldn't clone him because I'd like the chance to see Ron Barassi at his prime. I saw RDB play in the 64 GF - but I was too young to remember. And I wouldn't mind seeing Jack Mueller and Bluey Truscott. They must have been considered legendary for a reason.

Now you're talking. We should go on the attack and write to AFL this week formally requesting a priority pick in this year's draft because we've been so bad for so long.

There are lots of threads about tanking and all taking a serious look at a very serious issue. But I think we should also have a thread which allows a humorous take on the issues. if I'm wrong, feel free to delete this post. The idea of this thread is not to debate the serious issues but just look at it with a wry smile. In other words, don't use this thread to argue whether the tanking existed or it didn't. Or whether Caroline Wilson has a grudge or she doesn't. There are plenty of other places to post those views. So, to get things started, I've got a proposal which the MFC could put to the AFL as an appropriate punishment. Let's accept a similar punishment as handed out to Melbourne Storm for their salary cap breaches and have all our premiership points for 2009 and 2010 taken away. And why not go one step further and offer up all our premiership points for 2011 and 2012 as well. Then we can ask the AFL for a priority pick in this year's draft on the basis that we haven't won a game for four years and need the help that the priority pick was first designed for.

If Green didn't want to retire but had to be 'forced' into it, he's hardly the first player in the history of the game that this has happened to. In all sports champions of the game and some who were just plodders refuse to recognise that their time is up. When Shane Warne retired he said he'd rather have people saying "Why did he retire?" rather than play on too long and have people saying "Why didn't he retire?" Brad Green retired at the right time for him. Whether he wanted to or not is a different question.

Especially if we lose.

Mind you, Jim Stynes, Tadgh Kenneally and, more recently, Mike Pyke show that successful code swapping is possible. Of course, we may be drawing the wrong conclusion. Media conference might be to say Folau has extended his contract.

We'll play Geelong at the MCG when we play them twice in a season. That will happen when either Melbourne is as good as Geelong or Geelong is as bad as Melbourne but not while we play at completely different standards. The draw is sort of seeded. Poorer teams player each other twice and better teams play each other twice. When you think of all the potential permutations and requirements, I think the AFL have done a pretty good job overall. I don't have to like every individual round (especially a home game at Etihad) but all in all, I think the AFL deserves credit.

We've got quite a good history of turning rookies into decent players (Junior, Davey, Jamar, Robbo come to mind). In fact someone with more time and a better memory might be able to put a whole team together. It would be interesting to see how it would match up against a team made up of players who didn't start as rookies.

Thanks. Always grateful to those who go and who then share their views. And it's worrying that for the last few years there are more highlights and greater enjoyment reading training reports than actual match summaries.

Presumably TV cameras. Not because of the merit of the training itself but because new pictures allows a re-hash of the 'tanking' story. I'm tipping at least one of the news services will say 'Demons in crisis' and another will try some how try to blend 'tanking' with 'Watergate' to make the barely intelligible 'tanker-gate'. reason for edit: turning it into English

I hope Jeromy Webberly gets picked up by someone. Only because when Leigh Matthews says his name it makes him (Matthews) sound like Porky Pig. And I suspect St Kilda will argue, if they haven't already, that Gram had his contract terminated for ongoing problems rather than the single event which was referred to yesterday. That's the same line they used with Andrew Lovett. Which is my way of saying I suspect Gram may come with more baggage than is publicly known.

The allegation is that we tried to lose in 2009. Laughable, because we couldn't win even if we wanted to in 2009. And to go one step further, what is alleged that we did was, in fact, to try to win...just not in 2009. And I will argue that that is a legitimate tactic. To fix this problem, AFL rules should be amended so that clubs are obliged to explain their decisions. For example, that they are resting players rather than claiming they have "general soreness". That they intend to try players in alternative positions for the rest of the year. And that players are being sent off for surgery because the club has no chance of playing finals, etc. And the best rule change should be that a team which is picked on Thursday night must line up in the positions named on the ground with no players moved around for the first, say, three minutes. I appreciate it would be difficult to enforce but the sport is now inextricably linked, whether we like it or not, to betting.

We'd be truly incompetent if we can't stretch this out so that any penalty - should it be necessary to impose one - takes effect after this coming draft.

Attitude, fitness, better understanding of the game plan, experience, newly drafted talent...

That's what I want to see. The words "tanking" and "sanctioned" used in the same post. Both words have multiple meanings. I'll assume you meant "sanctioned" as in "punished" rather than the alternative meaning "approved of". But I'm sure the journos at the Herald Sun when faced with both "tanking" and "sanctioned" will have no idea where to go with the story.

But it can be used with different meanings. "Tanking" meaning to experiment with players and put others in for surgery is quite different to "tanking" meaning to deliberately lose so someone's bet is rewarded. I'm not suggesting the latter has occurred in our game but it has happened in other sports most famously with the Chicago White Sox when Arnold Rotstein bet on the outcome...and rewarded players for "tanking".

Thanks rfpc. I guess even if the club wants to retain all of those seven, negotiations could still fail on terms - such as length of contract offered. So it's still possible that there could be between zero and 7 more delistings. (Apologies for stating the obvious.)

He's either got a manager smart enough to tell him not to sound bitter in an effort to win a new contract with someone (even Melbourne as a rookie) or he's skipped through the five stages of grief to acceptance very quickly. Although I imagine it was obvious to him before last Friday that his contract was unlikely to be renewed, so I guess he's had time to come to terms with his future. But I did like the suggestion in the article that the club is helping him. I'd like to think, if it's true, that this behaviour will be talked about amongst players and make the club a more attractive proposition for the future. And that will help in future free agency and trade negotiations. I know I'd be more willing to join a club which respected its players, even if their productive time was over.