La Dee-vina Comedia

Never went to Windy Hill. Clearly it was a place that has scarred people for life. Just to be clear, I'm not critical of others and their choice of teams they hate. I just don't have the same feelings.

I'm surprised by the hate strongly negative attitude towards Essendon in this thread. There may be all sorts of reasons for it, but I wonder whether it all boils down to latent hostility following on from the result of the 2000 GF? As I've said before, I don't dislike any team but subscribe to the view that I support Melbourne and any team playing Collingwood. I've always believed that other teams are our friends in battle with the true enemy (for want of another word) being the other winter codes.

Can Mitch Brown ruck? I am in no doubt that Weideman is an emergency in case we need to replace a ruckman at the last minute. I hope Bedford is the sub again, but unless he's needed to cover injuries, I expect Melksham to get three more games as sub during the year to allow him to achieve a 200-game career before he retires. It's essentially a similar strategy to what we did with Jones last year to get him to 300 games.

Gulp! How do we know it's not Max posting the April Fools Day joke pretending to be at a cafe 20 minutes ago...?

Hard to know. Without pictures, I can't tell if you're playing a team of midgets or not.

The AFL seems to have an intermittent policy of commenting on contentious decisions. That suggests to me that they review the umpiring in all matches (although I concede that is not necessarily the case - they could just look at the contentious ones). Clearly what you are referring to, though, is a more transparent process and I think that would be a good idea. I'm in favour of a holistic review being the "rules of the game and how they are umpired", not just the umpires per se. However, I don't buy the argument that it costs teams matches. Or, rather, it doesn't cost teams matches any more than the mistakes the losing teams make.

How does that help? By reducing overlap by 30 minutes? I understand that the two Friday night games were to assist the AFLW when the Grand Final had been scheduled for this Saturday afternoon. But my point has always been a general one, and not just about tomorrow night - I believe start times being inconsistent are bad for football. People expect consistency in scheduling rather than irregularity. I predict that the talkback shows on Saturday will have callers complaining about missing the start of our game because they had assumed it would start at 7.50pm.

In fact, three out of four options give lousy outcomes. All of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being in the right place at the wrong time and being in the wrong place at the right time all produce less than optimal results. Sometimes it does take some luck to be in the right place at the right time. Essentially, what I've just written above is the basic plot structure of your standard rom-com.

Whoa! I've just discovered our game tomorrow starts at 7.20pm not the usual Friday night start time of 7.50pm. I wonder how many people will turn up late or miss the first part of the game on TV? I'm going, but had plans in place to get there with 10 minutes to spare...for a 7.50pm start. Thankfully, I can change my plans so will be there on time.

Thanks. But you need to get out more. Unless you're being sarcastic...which is fine with me.

I agree with your point about Viney. However, as tough and as committed as Viney is, he can't do this role successfully against the bigger-bodied mids such as Bontompelli, Cripps and Fyfe. It's just physically impossible for him. He could, however, do it against Parish.

Given the sensitivity of the auto-censor, I'm quite surprised your nickname for Essendon got through unscathed. Mind you, if the Essendon equivalent of Demonland is equally as sensitive, it must drive them absolutely nuts every time they want to discuss arguably their best player ever in [censored] Reynolds.

I would suggest that the disposal efficiency stat is not particularly relevant unless you're comparing defender v defender, forward v forward, or midfielder v midfielder. And even then, it depends a lot on whether the role of the player is inside or outside mid, the distributing defender (a la Salem and Bowey last week), etc. I think you'll find defenders generally have a higher disposal efficiency than anyone else, possibly because from where they are disposing of the ball the ground is opening up thereby creating more space. Compare this with a midfielder kicking into the forward line where the circular ground is narrowing and therefore with less room for error and a greater concentration of players.

I assume this is correct, because it's otherwise hard to explain the reason for how much better he has become. He also needs to be credited with having put in the hard work necessary to be better. It doesn't matter how good the coaching is if the player doesn't do the work.

Is the Salem injury related to his pre-season one? Or is it a completely new and unrelated problem?

https://www.westernbulldogs.com.au/news/1090080/bulldogs-welcome-federal-government-funding-commitment Might be wrong, but I think that this was previously announced.

I think WERRIDEE has started something with this thread.

A life-size statue including beard may require too much bronze to be affordable. Might have to settle for a hologram in the Sports Museum instead.

A symptom of leather poisoning?

I think it comes from an earlier post in this thread which claimed that Howes was taken off the ground at 3/4 time in the Casey game. From that, it has been inferred that he was being rested to enable him to play in the seniors 6 days later. Nevertheless, a useful reminder using the words of Winston Churchill (quite prescient given there was no social media in his day): "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." (Note: I'm not suggesting that any posters here have been telling lies.)

He doesn't. At least, not yet. Look here. The record is 18 held by Albert Lauder from Collingwood about 100 years ago. If Bowey were to retire today, though, he would hold (equally) the record of most games played without recording a loss. Compare with Adam Tomlinson who player 21 games before he was on the winning side.

You must be younger than me. Anyone who grew up following football in the late 60s and 70s would have Collingwood as first cab off the rank.

Why do we need to know?

Imagine this thread about 13 months ago. Top of the list for some people might have been S Goodwin. In other words, this is way too early. Edit: Too early to be able to make the call; not too early from a respect point of view (although, there is that, too)

In the 1970s we rarely received much media coverage. I used to dread the rare instances when a story was published which profiled one of our players because that player invariably played a stinker* in our next game. I suspect other supporters who have been following the Demons throughout those lean years will agree. *'played a stinker' was probably the actual words a young me used in the 1970s.