Little Richard

Watched Place Beyond the Pines with Gosling, Mendez and Brad Cooper (Ray Liotta has a small part too) last night. Was pretty impressive and a bit different in the way it shifted the story focus from character to character. There were a couple of annoying things about it (I won't mention them incase they spoil the story for someone) but I'd recommend it.

Celebrating the ODI series win feels cheap... I'll wait until this summer to crack a celebratory froffy.

I like the VB logo, it's a very Australian symbol. Good on Ahmed though, it's fair enough. Amla does a similar thing with Castle lager, RSA's major sponsor.

Could be on the money there. White might not have been going places so perhaps Cricket Australia got into Shipperd's ear. This development wouldn't surprise me from Shipperd - during this preseason my cricket club had a workshop with him at the G. A very impressive individual... extremely professional, all about getting better and setting higher standards for yourself. Hopefully Wade benefits from this, I never thought of him as captaincy material though.

Just a joke, he did get 11 in a test once though.

Everyone seems to be forgetting Borders left arm hand grenades! Deadly at his best.

I have a lot of hope for the cricket side in about 4 years time. What really surprised me watching the Ryobi Cup and Shield matches last season was the ages of the players. There were a lot of young guys (18-22) playing and most played quite well, especially in the one dayers.

Spot on, mature age players like Terlich and Matt Jones. The exception for me is project ruckman.

In case you didn't watch the game, Toumpas was spare because North kept setting up with an extra man back. That's where they get their run and drive from the back fifty. I'd say the reason Toump was used as spare man is because if the other guys could get the ball into his hands, we'd actually have a good chance at hitting up a target coming out of defense instead of kicking long to a pack.

Not sure about this. He was far from our worst against North and his confidence seems to be on the rise again. He is actually one of the players I feel most comfortable with when he has the ball - his skills are so good.

Good points. It's so bloody frustrating how little unity and mateship there seems to be. All around the ground there's just little to no support for each other, pulling each other up off the ground etc. The only one I can remember is Dawes shoving Thompson off Viney. If that situation (Toumpas) happened in a Sydney or Hawthorn game, they'd be all in there. You don't even have to be a good footy player to back up your mates, it's just pathetic.

Tipping Jimmy to have a big one today. Good show of confidence from Craig and co not to drop him.

Young Dee... that's a bit over the top. Sure he could kick and he could run but Bennell couldn't do much else. He was way off the mark in terms of toughness and just had no confidence. Your last sentence is true though, if he had been drafted by anyone else he would have won a brownlow by now.

There is no way you can say that is a fact. What is fact is that a couple of people in the industry have said they would have taken Toumpas first. You can't speak for every other recruiter in the AFL. The other fact is that we have Toump and not Wines so we have to wait and see how Toumpas develops as a player in his own right and not how he compares to Wines.

Very true, and then there was that Jose Mourinho fella...

Adding to that, we seem to have a hell of a lot of work to do in working together as a unit - I personally don't see a lot of acts of camaraderie on the field between the midfielders. Just pulling each other up at a stoppage, putting off a tagger physically or general talk to each other in play seem to be lacking. They don't have to be elite midfielders to do this either. When our midfield can work together it will be a lot easier for young guys to come in and play well, knowing they have the support of the rest of guys through the actions above.

Here I was thinking BH and rpfc were prett much the same person

Cos we're always planning for the future man, and the future never comes... Nah but in all seriousness they drafted the guy who they believe will be the better player when it counts, not the guy who will slot right in and play well but will probably plateau fairly quickly in terms of ability. We won't know for a few years yet if we made the right choice so people need to calm down and let Toump play.

No doubt Craig will have a good chat to Jimmy this week about the game and I'd trust Craig's influence on him to be very positive and encouraging. Choco would probably work wonders with him if he ended up at the club for next season. The emotion that he showed after he had been subbed was good to an extent because it showed he cared but he can't show that emotion all the time or he'll be targeted on field (and of course on Demonland), so he has to work on that and get it right. Absolutely no doubt about the ability, just has to believe in himself and build up his confidence.

It seemed only yesterday that Khawaja was a young, up and coming gun. Now he's 26 and hopeless. Where's George Bailey at the moment?

Hopefully Siddle and Harris can start to dig us out of that hole tonight. Then we need some sort of miracle to chase down the 400 (at least) that we'll probably be chasing.

Don't start this again

Rhino again, this is a great start.

Little Joe gone! Harris bowling well which is good to see, I was worried he'd be well underdone.

He did have seven tackles against Geelong, not such a bad effort. I'll put your comment down to trolling.