La Dee-vina Comedia

If Hibberd is withdrawn because of gastro, I wonder whether Smith or Bowey will be promoted? I can see arguments for both.

It's a great read. I was laughing out loud at Clarry's description of Petracca communicating with his family in Italy.

We're all winners, but some are more winningest than others.

Me too. I assume the prize cupboard is still bare.

Ahh...all is right with the world. We're still training (and playing) in September, crowds have turned up for our training session, and if I look closely at the fifth of these photos, I think I see Satyr wearing a jaunty, white beret to match his beard.

This would be so much easier if I wasn't colour-blind. Well done, Demonstone. Again.

(Apologies if this is embedded in a thread elsewhere. Mods feel free to merge if necessary). Rohan Connolly has published his view of the merits of the pre-finals bye. While I agree with his conclusion, I think using a statistical analysis on such a small sample size is flawed. In essence, he doesn't like the bye because it appears to take from the top four the advantage of the week off for winning a qualifying final. He also refers to its momentum killing effects. I couldn't agree more with this last point.

Presumably Spargo now gets an invitation to the Brownlow Medal count. Probably not something he would otherwise have expected to be doing on the Monday night before the GF.

The failure might be mine, QD. The lack of a sarcasm font is one of Demonland's great weaknesses. (The others are the incomprehensibly nanny-ish auto-censor and Demonland's lack of auto-correct to pick up obvious spelling mistakes...meaning we have to rely on the plenitude of pedants found on this site.)

Customs, maybe? Not that it matters. I'm not sure Joe would know what a customer is, or customs, or what the role of an official might be or where Dakar is.

I think Christian Salem should sue for defamation. How can he be the second least valuable player on that board?

Just imagine the "Embarrassing Records" thread for St Kilda. Starting with "we average one Premiership every 125 years".

When writing, try to avoid ambiguity. This is from Peter Ryan in The Age today about Ross Lyon: So, is Brendon Goddard saying Ross Lyon would stop the Bombers from succeeding? Or fix the cultural issues which are stopping the Bombers from succeeding. Obviously, it's intended to be the second, but that's not what the reader interprets the phrase to mean on first reading. (Second hint: I'm not an English teacher, but I would suggest that the sentence is also too long and should be cut into two.)

T Mac himself spoke about how the club's psychologist had worked with him and that they had discovered that he felt he was too mentally constrained if he was "stuck" deep in the forward line. He said at the time that he may spend some time on the wing to allow him to remove those mental shackles.

Who's the player for the red team on Luke Jackson's left (that is, on the RHS of the photo)?

Maybe. But I thought there was a thread specifically about The Age article which Layzie has found for us. The Age article was published in May 2016 whereas the thread you've found was from a couple of months later. Not that it matters, but it's hard to believe that The Age story could have been totally ignored by Demonland at the time.

Thanks Layzie. That's definitely the article I was thinking of. I'm pretty sure Demonland also had a thread about it once the story appeared.

He loved football. My favourite story about Gordon Lewis is that in the 1960s he used to provide the now defunct Herald newspaper with the results each week of a country league competition. The Herald published the results every week. The only problem was that there was no such league and he made up the results every week. (Which also goes to show that fake news is not a new phenomenon.)

He was a great full forward, but he'd be 94 if he were alive today and wouldn't qualify.

Judge Gordon Lewis passed away earlier this week. He was not a Melbourne player or supporter but in the 1980s was critical to our ongoing existence. In the mid-1980s, before he became a County Court judge, he was Commissioner for Corporate Affairs (a job that no longer exists). In that role he wrote to the then head of the VFL, Jack Hamilton, to advise that seven clubs, including Melbourne, were trading while technically insolvent and if the VFL did not provide him with a plan for the future, he would have to wind them up. The plan the VFL came up with was expansion into WA and SA (although, in the end, it became Queensland, rather than SA) with the money for the new licenses and other expanded revenue streams, such as national TV rights, saving the seven clubs. Judge Lewis subsequently said in interviews that he had no power to do what he did and he was sticking his neck out by giving the VFL the opportunity to rectify its problems. If he had done what he was legally required to do, he would have wound us up and we would have disappeared before the end of the 1980s. So, when we (rightfully) praise Jim Stynes, Joe Gutnick and others who have helped Melbourne survive, it's worth remembering that Judge Lewis was also integral in the survival of the Melbourne Football Club. The Age published a story about this about 10 years ago which I think was covered in Demonland. Someone with search skills better than me might find that thread.

"How can I get a Seinfeld reference into this thread about Moore Park?"

I don't know if I subscribe to this view. But if we accept the premise, we're running out of time and matches for him to play in. For that reason, should he play as soon as possible to "find form" ASAP? Against that view is (1) who would come out for him? and (2) is it too much of a risk to play him if we're not confident he will contribute sufficiently? They're not easy questions to answer.

Is this a publicly voted team? The AFL story says, "A whopping 97 per cent of fans had Collingwood first-year sensation Nick Daicos in their side, with Brayshaw and Geelong key back Sam De Koning named in 95 per cent of teams." It doesn't actually say that the team was selected by "fans", but the inference is there.

I'm curious. How does the NRL manage their fixture and playing arrangements? Does every team play every other team twice? NB: I know they have one difference that could potentially affect the ultimate ladder position and that is the three State of Origin games which interferes with team selections for those who play in those games.

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to wonder about Essendon engaging a former coach with Essendon experience on a one year contract to hold the fort while they get their house together. That could be Sheedy, Mark Harvey or Dean Solomon. As long as the person they choose knows it's only for one year, they take the appointment with no unrealistic expectations. It allows the review to be done, the changes to be implemented and possibly a new board to be installed. It's not necessarily a wasted year and they don't burn another new coach in the process.