Jaded No More

Rub it in. I left my house for 40 minutes today to walk around the block with a mask. It was glorious.

Mystery injury of the last month- Burgo. Hasn’t taken one of these injury updates in ages. Has he already gone back to SA?

What's worse? home schooling, 5km radius, or AFL season rapidly going down the toilet? F$%^n Covid!

Correct. SCG is a pointless stadium. Apart from the money aspect, playing the Lions at Giant Stadium is a win for us. It is an easier trip than going to the NT and we play well there. Lions are not advantaged by this at all. I know missing out on the money is really hard, especially for our club which has worked so hard to be financially independent of the AFL. But, in terms of purely football, this is not a bad outcome (if it is the outcome?!). We really really need to beat the Lions, anyone who thinks the risk of playing at the Gabba is worth it, has lost their mind. Brisbane are directly competing with us for a top 2 spot. Imagine if we go to the Gabba and lose this game and as a result end up finishing 4th and needing to travel up there again in finals. No thank you! This is the most important game of the our H&A season outside of last week. Make it 2 from 2 and top 4 is all but sewn up! Lose and suddenly we are par with the Dogs and Lions are only 1 game behind us.

I honestly don't blame the players. I would not want to be away from an unknown time from my family either. Surely we need to get thru this next 2-3 weeks and then other states can start to ease their rules around Melbourne based teams. As it is, the risk is minimal while we are all in lockdown.

This game deserves to be at the MCG and have crowds. It would be better to push it to the following weekend (as we don't play Essendon until the following Saturday night, and hope we have some crowds by then. That is 18 days away. We may well be back to 50% capacity by then? This game is so important not just to our bottom line, but also to MND. Doing it anywhere else would not do it justice.

But if we have to go interstate and quarantine we miss the prelim final. And what if you go and we don’t make it? If the GF is going to be interstate again between two Victorian teams they should push it back 14 days to allow Victorians to attend ?

You mean the 6-8 weeks lockdown last July that lasted 5 months? I am not suggesting this will be a 2 months lockdown. I’m simply saying this will be a lot longer than the 7 days initially outlined and that restrictions (masks, reduced capacity at venues, gatherings etc) will be in place for most of winter.

He is a genuine A grader already. For a 19 year old with 20 games to solidly hold his position in the best defensive unit in the competition is just bloody impressive. I think he will end up playing wing when his tank is up to it. Has the speed, skills and physicality to do it beautifully.

Time for Clarry to get the peroxide out. He is a Salem home hairdressing Covid job away from a Charlie.

Do you even have Covid in Victoria if you haven’t been to 6 Indian grocers, 5 Thai restaurants, 2 AFL games, 3 pub crawls and travel exclusively on public transport to your high risk job? ?

Because if games go back to being played predominately interstate then of course it puts a massive strain on the club and our chances. Brisbane Sydney and Port will be loving this.

Goodbye normal winter in Melbourne. Goodbye our football season and flag chances. It was all too good to be true.

QLD premier will never let anyone come to Victoria and then come back while we are in lockdown. She is as bad as WA. I also think the AFL prefers to play with crowds where possible for financial reasons.

Makes sense. Is the government engaging community leaders or elders to try and help with vaccination information?

Agreed. Best to keep our large indigenous community in the NT safe. Out of interest how’s the vaccination program going up there?

If NT was waiting on Victoria case numbers, today would be the final nail in the coffin of this game. 5 overnight and 6 more positives already this morning.

You forgot “go to Chadstone and then to Barkley Square with a quick stop at Maccas and Dan Murphy’s”

There is no greater revenue generator for a footy club than a premiership. Whatever tiny advantage we can take right now, we should grab with both hands. Giving Brisbane an extra game at the Gabba, their home ground where they dominate, is just silly. Already this is a 50/50 game. Why give Brisbane an advantage, when they are coming in hot for our top 2 spot? We have some very hard matches coming up. This is one of them. There is absolutely no way I want to make it harder by playing it at the opposition's home ground, with a home crowd advantage. The last game we played interstate with a hostile crowd, was our one and only loss for the year. Lets not repeat this.

What we needed to do is go into a 3 day lockdown as soon as we had the 1st 'unlinked' case, or the case that came days after the SA traveller came back and tested positive. We keep being told that mystery cases are the biggest concern. Why then did we not lock down for 2-3 days when the first one appeared? Hotel quarantine is a flawed system. It failed in every single state except in NT, where quarantine does not take place inside large poorly ventilated buildings, but in small individual units with natural airflow. The federal government has refused to stop return travellers, but at the same time, has not done anything to fix the quarantine issues. They are as much to blame for this current mess as any state. And don't get me started on the pathetic vaccine rollout. Our capacity should be far greater. We have GPs willing and able to give the jabs, we have millions of Aussies under 50 who are keen to get vaccinated, and yet here we are slapping ourselves on the bum because we vaccinated 16k in a day.

We also have a very large population of immigrants, which at the beginning of the pandemic was not taken into account. There was a big failure in proper language appropriate communication, engagement of community leaders and so forth. You just need to look at the outbreak at the Islamic college and the towers. Additionally, a lot of immigrant families live in large households, so we saw one family member catching the virus and it spreading to 5+ household members. Melbourne also has only 3 major trauma centres in the state, compared to 10 in NSW for example. That means the foot traffic to Melbourne EDs is much greater, and we saw the spread of Covid that we battled during the second wave amongst health care workers particularly in hospital setting.

Spreading into aged care where only 1/3rd of staff have been vaccinated. How the fudge? What a disgusting debacle.

I don’t disagree but you also need to think about us members who have once again paid for certain memberships that allow us access to a certain number of home games in Victoria. We also need to take into account the membership revenue. Another disrupted season where we can’t attend games and some people may not renew in 2022 for fear of it happening again. If we can play GWS at the G with crowds and that game is moved, I’m not sure how I would feel about it. Although I understand we need the money so would support the club either way. But not everyone would be so understanding.

Please do not confuse my dismissal of the Victorian government’s ability to handle our pandemic, with my rage regarding our Federal government’s failure to roll out the vaccine properly. Half my family overseas has been fully vaccinated for 6 months. Our vaccination program is beyond a joke.