robbiefrom13

We panicked into snapping up Neeld, fearing we'd miss out; then Neeld raced off to Brisbane and snapped up Clark before he went west. Rushing in didn't deliver too well, did it? Maybe (hopefully) we are thinking our way through things a bit more nowadays...

Given ASADA's unchallenged power to issue show-cause notices, nobody in sport can do what Essendon and its players did and expect to get away with it. They knew that ASADA could demand answers about substances taken, and the only answer to a show-cause demand would be evidence of what was administered. Essendon knew that, and the players knew that. To not have records is as nose-thumbingly defiant of the rules as taking banned substances is. That's how the rules are. So - no sympathy for any of them. They all chose to disregard the rules, one way or the other or both ways. All are guilty, and guilty not just until they produce the evidence - they are guilty of not complying with good rules agreed to by all as the unchallenged way to keep sport clean. And even if they were now to belatedly produce some evidence about what substances were injected, we'd be wanting to hear an explanation of their long drawn out disrespect for and defiance of the rules. There is no escaping their fate. Attacked the whole concept of keeping sport clean, and wasted everyone's time and money trying to find a technicality through which to wriggle out of accountability. Arshholes the lot of them. Goodbye, Essendon.

tail end of the tanking stink, I reckon.

Vilification is bullying. Advocating or justifying bullying is not on. Laws have so far identified some common targets of bullying, but I expect there's more to come. Think current focus on pedophile behaviour, domestic violence, corporal punishment, sexism - with ageism next cab off the rank, and then who knows, roadhog driving, kids freezing in inadequate school uniforms, politicians lying-obfuscating, Hollywood violence operas, bank fees and other faceless computerised rip-offs, holier-than-thou-ism, etc etc - there's a long way to go to make our society ok for all, not just for those with greater power. Somewhere down the line hegemonic foreign policy will be seen for what it is, and opposed. I think we are living through a big trend, towards civilisation. A thirteen-year-old student suggested to me once that everyone dies and emerges on the other side with some sort of consciousness; and she'd been thinking, is it heaven or hell? That depends, she told me she'd realised, on whether or not you are happy with the state of the world over which you no longer can exert any influence. She thought God would have it all his own way once we were dead, so that our consciousness could impose nothing on anything any more, and all it would be able to enjoy would be Nature and so on. The diversity, the sunrises, seasons and growth and so on. If that lot is your thing, eternity watching it has to be heaven; but if you are say a petrol-head or hard-drinking picker of fights, unending passive powerlessness with no opportunities to do your thing would have to be hell. Maybe there's something in this for living people - leave aside all the controlling and dominating, and co-exist with generosity; it'd be a happy way to be. Sport must be a special case, I suppose - ritualised competition, within rules, determined by skill and quick response to chance. No need to be nasty - there's a real cameraderie among players in any code.... Maybe I'm as dopey as a thirteen-year-old girl, you want to say?... And I think Jesus must have been a nice bloke. He stuck up for the little guys. I imagine he'd be pretty puzzled by what religion is largely about today; probably get annoyed and upend their tables. There's a story in the Bible that Jesus killed a tree once, in a moment of frustration or a bad mood. You don't have to be perfect.

disagree. Roos watches the games too - with more knowledge of all sorts of things than we have. Not an off-the-shelf talent, Jack. If he ever does break out, look out - that's my view. And surely not our weakest link in anything other than tackling. So he's maybe more a weapon of offence than of defence. Fits our biggest need, I'd have thought. Offence the focus next year, Roosy?

True. I admit it. I'm owning up to my arbitrariness; and I think it's likely a lot of us are likewise applying fairly arbitrary and inconsistent standards. And changing our minds on flimsy grounds. Good thing it's not up to us. A mate of mine was manager of ABC TV one time, and he told me the experts used to ring him every day explaining to him all the problems with programming at the ABC. The experts were retired know-alls with nothing better to do. Or, the great Toscanini conducted Mozart and Beethoven in his first tour of the US. At interval some society dame bailed him up and began explaining at length why Beethoven was better than Mozart - "well, that's my opinion anyway," she said. "Madam," the no-longer patient Toscanini is supposed to have said, "your opinion doesn't matter." Pontificating on recruitment, I began to feel my opinions were a bit all over the place. And that I was not alone.

these posts change my view. Don't like the idea of bringing in such a guy. Funny thing is, I would still give Jurrah another chance. Jurrah's problem never strikes me as ego. I guess the big ego is what I think is the real culture-killer.

yes, that's true. still, if one of your blokes raises issues, you can show respect or rubbish him. Maybe Bucks had had enough and broke the rules in frustration. Hard to tell since we weren't there. But, all the same, even though PC can be a pain at times I know, a boss ought to behave the way a boss is expected to, in this day and age. Gotta respect the guys, if you expect to get the best out of them. if you have to address issues, surely you do it in private? Heretier is more up-to-date than Bucks, that's how I see it. Should he be getting bullied into acting a redneck too?

Sounds to me like Buckley was baiting him. As you say, "humorously" - so HL has the option of conceding and being good-natured about dropping his stance, and presumably having his nose good-naturedly rubbed in it (thus giving in to the rubbishing of the point he'd tried to raise), or saying "no" - which could equally be no to not only being ok with sexual harassment (no matter how trivial - it is Buckley who's made it a test case), but also to being so set up by the senior coach. And who would've found this "humorous"? Whoever their resident homophobic blokey blokes might be, I imagine - a locker-roomfull at Collingwood, likely enough? Not much respect going on in this story that Biffen is telling us. Yobbo monoculture, contributed to by the senior coach. I think this story says far more that's damaging about Buckley's effect on culture than it does about HL. Isolated and ganged up on, by the boss - this is not a workplace culture that belongs in the 21st Century. Bag me out, help yourself - at least I don't have to stand here taunted by the laughter. Good on you Heretier for having the guts to stare the p ssweak p ick down.

good old north melbourne, they won for you and me... with the very best yet to come, Essenscum!

Taking on a discarded Mitch Robinson would be more humiliating than getting just 4 wins in Roos' first season. How much do we have to take?

interesting to see Maslow turn up (Demon Stalwart, post 37). Maslow has at the very top of his hierarchy of needs "self-actualisation", above self-esteem (which is very much aligned with respect). Few achieve self-actualisation, but it is the pinnacle. You have arrived, when you are experiencing self-actualisation, the very fulfilment of what you are about. Self-actualisation is something the Neelds of the world will never understand or accommodate - but it is what made Jakovich, Jurrah, Flower, Daicos, Jesaulenko, Ablett Snr etc what they were: they "went themselves" as Hopkins put it, unique and with imagination and creativity beyond any anticipated norms. In place of respect, Melbourne players appear to have suffered years of abuse from we are not entirely sure whom, but certainly including Neeld and probably Schwab. (Supporters too - though hopefully the players don't read Demonland.) I acknowledge that there have been other issues as well, but Maslow's analysis of needs does offer some relevant points. Grinding compliance firstly makes relationships impersonal and token (undermining belongingness), and secondly, it denies individuality, which is the stuff of Maslow's ultimate and highest "need". While it is pointless to talk of self-actualisation if the lower levels of the pyramid are not in place, so that lawless individuals will only achieve a spurious individuality, nevertheless if the relationship/team things are in place, then it is the inspired instinct of individual spur-of-the-moment originality that tears a game apart. Playing on instinct, free "in the zone". That is the mountaintop experience, the very best, in all walks of life. Mechanical processes can achieve a lot, but in terms of what is possible for a human being, they do not go all the way. Belief in the team goals is not what Melbourne players are lacking - "buy-in" was a egocentric mantra from a man with no idea of how to get the best out of people, no idea of the hierarchy of needs that take people towards the mountaintop. Maslow would say, first self-esteem (along with belongingness), and then hopefully moving towards the ultimate: self-actualisation.

If Essendon end up accommodated by the AFL, our response should be a boycott of the AFL. Enough's enough. The game is no longer a game, no longer sporting, but instead a power play by corporate thugs with legal teams. Not what I used to enjoy, or believe in. "AFL, there's no elastic left in the public - you really have to restore supporters' faith in the integrity of the game. If you don't straighten this out, see you later we won't be back. How stupid do you think we are?"

pretty revolting seasons, though - Hawkins et al never had that. If Roos can turn the club around, perhaps he may also turn Watts around. probably why he took on the job - thinking perhaps he could get it to work. There are skills in there somewhere in Watts - we see them a bit, from time to time. Probably the reason he keeps on getting picked. Not working as well as you'd wish, no, but that's true of the team in general. And we are waiting on Paul Roos. If Roos has had enough, ok. but, faith in Roos is what we have, at this stage.

No it's not - the bans would be on the players; it's the club that dragged ASADA into court. We shouldn't confuse the issues. The players were almost certainly lied to and manipulated by their revered coach and surely by all the relevant staff at the club. Goodness knows what they have since been told by the club, but their silence suggests it has to have been something quite powerful, and presumably regularly reiterated. The players' position is in many ways the worst of anyone's, in that it is their livelihood and possibly future health at stake, and month follows month with them held silent on the sidelines, mere appendages, collateral to the legal stoush their employer now focuses on. So six months for the player victims has a bit of justice about it I think, so long as they are ultimately able to speak and they accept their fault and show remorse. But the club - that's a different matter. An appropriate sanction on the club for throwing the whole issue into a legal smokescreen eventually has to be worked out as a completely separate matter. Obviously the club has been start-to-finish cynical, devious and dishonest, and - once challenged on this - became destructive and obstructionist, turning the whole thing into a bottomless pit for money leached out of everyone at Essendon's mercy; the Essendon Football Club is now seen with its wrecking ball, rebellious against the very concept of being scrutinised or held accountable for their intention and sustained practice in chemical cheating. Six months for that, I agree, would be a joke. I'm not sure whether Essendon's greater offence would be against ASADA or the AFL - ASADA might ban the club for say a couple of years, despite the upheavals that must cause; but for the AFL, what Essendon has done surely entails the worst disrepute ever. Essendon is mounting a challenge against the legality of the AFL having tried to investigate with those best qualified to do it the rottenness that they Essendon have brought into the league; with Essendon presumably being able next, supposing they win, to attack the sanctions already imposed last year by the AFL; Essendon have effectively stared down the AFL with the Essendon "whatever it takes" mantra, and it is a declaration of war. That is a very different position to the position of their poor first victims, the players. Eventually when the two cases are separated, there must be very different sanctions determined for the two: for insufficient vigilance against a trusted employer on the one hand, and on the other, ongoing, unrepentant, deliberate cheating, and not just trying to cover up their sins but challenging the right of the AFL and ASADA to regulate for a clean sport, dragging down Aussie Rules football before an astonished and watching sport world. Those responsible for all of this should never again be allowed to have control of an AFL license; and how the entire club can be let off when they have endorsed and financed the club's behaviour I don't know. Coach, President, medical staff and any other staff who had any part in it, must all be gone. Maybe the captain too. I think the Essendon members who have not done their due diligence and blown the whistle, have a lot to answer for, too: their position of ignorance and then denial is in many ways similar to that of the players, except that it is continuing while the AFL is being brought into disrepute of enormously damaging proportions. What Essendon has done and defended is a systematic dismantling of one of the very foundations of competitive sport in the 21st Century. How can members of the club not be criticised when they have not demanded this be stopped? Once ASADA and the court cases finish, the AFL is going to have to salvage some credibility from the Essendon affair, and that will have to be expensive.

Obviously there are quite a lot of different attributes that make for effectiveness in Aussie rules football. A question in my mind is whether or not the 'contact side of things' is a non-negotiable essential - either particularly now, or in general (as though it were fundamental to the very nature of Aussie rules football). Could you have a valued player who simply didn't play that way? Defending was a non-negotiable essential for Neeld, and Jurrah drifted out of the team. No amount of hindsight has gotten me to accept Neeld's evaluation of what Jurrah brought to the team; I know others disagree with me on this. But what if our game is evolving to where we will again have specialists, as we did in the past? Ricky Jackson, Allan Jakovitch, Brian Dixon, Paul Callery, etc etc all had "deficiencies" that were not seen at the time as outweighing their value. In the rolling maul game, every player needs to be a tackling beast - but maybe the game is in a transitional phase and a new style will emerge, and take out a flag, and we'll all move on. Hawthorn, for example, rely more on accurate delivery than on sheer grunt. We have in general moved on from the flood. Pagan's paddock has passed into history. Bully coaching may be getting past its use-by date. And perhaps there will be appreciation of the special contribution of a Liam Jurrah again. Jack Watts has a skill set that does not include bash and crash. How absolute is that as a deficiency, I wonder?

Essendon is refusing to be umpired. Send off.

If Essendon drag it out until their guilty players have mostly all left, they effectively save the club from being hurt by any penalties ultimately imposed by ASADA. Taking the matter to court has in this way emasculated ASADA - and Essendon appear to be getting away with it. Who is going to uphold ASADA's jurisdiction over drugs in sport here? And if the AFL mutely stands by and allows Essendon to treat the regulating authority with such cynical contempt, who is going to bring the AFL to account? The players are not the villains in this - it is (and increasingly so, audaciously and incredibly so) the Essendon Football club. It is up to the AFL to take action against Essendon for bringing the game into great disrepute by using legal means to sideline scrutiny of their misdeeds, using legal means to render any ultimate sanctions irrelevant, and using legal means to dispute the right of ASADA to regulate the sport. The AFL should delicense Essendon. Nothing else will send the message that doping your players is a bad idea. Delicensing may be extreme, but it is the Essendon Football Club that upped the ante making less drastic measures meaningless.

At this stage he's not the one to get it happening, fair enough. But once it is happening, he will be valuable above most others - put it in his hands enough times and his clinical accuracy will seriously advance our cause. We don't use him properly, and it does look like his confidence is suffering. But MFC is currently in extreme disfunction, and if the rest of the team can't pick things up, well, what happens to the MFC won't be Jack's fault. He still leads and gets ignored. Why, when if he gets the ball it's on its way somewhere useful almost every time? How come he hasn't been instructed to go for home, rather than backwards? He doesn't need a free target the size of the side of a barn, like half the rest of the team... He hasn't put on any upper body bulk yet, but most people eventually do. He's very thin, looked at side on. What happens to his physical impact if he gets a better balanced torso? I believe it may happen. Some take longer, and if he turns out to be bigger in a year or two, we could regret losing faith when we were rattled by everything else. Very little is going well. I think we have to focus on upside, and he really has it in spades, in some areas. More than can be said for a big number on our list. I remember him playing well, in games where others were not. Last year when he got votes we won. Against St Kilda round one this year, we saw some wonderful signs. I have seen his pace a few times, and it does exist. Like the whole club, his confidence is badly down at the moment, but I believe he has shown character over the journey.

uncontested marks = the MFC free kick. We give them all day. Then we run like buggery chasing the free man who got the ball, and we end up tired. Supporters too. Who dreamed up this drivel? Why can't we apply any pressure at all? Jack Watts is never standing on a man when the opposition get the ball. Never goes to mind a man. If he was breaking team rules, he'd be dragged or yelled at. No team lets the opposition have the ball like we do. It really is pointless watching us when we allow the other team to do what they want, with their farty little circle work to wear us out. We learned yesterday that Hogan isn't the messiah, either. In our style of play, he would make no difference at all. If we stopped giving away control of the game by means of giving the other team free use of the ball, we would have a chance of getting closer to balanced levels of confidence. Then we might find out if our guys can actually play or not. Oh for a Liam Jurrah to cut through the bulllshit - someone who could do it on their own a few times a game, strike a bit of fear into the other side, by playing with some competitive instinct. That is what Neeld crushed out of our guys above everything else - competitive instinct. Watts and Trengove more than anyone, of those left on our list.

Speaking of which, "I have no spur to [censored] the sides of my intent, but vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other [side]..." Edit: hmm. I was replying to old dee, and in reference to a word he used with an "s" on the end, I have offered my memory of another bit of Macbeth. It seemed a reasonable comment on Essendon, and Hird especially. Only, without the "s", I am censored. Makes my post meaningless (more so than usual). I reckon the automatic censoring of this site is [censored].

14 goals from 16 shots sounds pretty good to me. On song.

the thing about Jurrah though, is that when he did get into the AFL the change of pace/standard etc didn't slow him down at all. He has proven ability at the level - unique skills, superb kick and a very fast rate of scoring. Not much point talking about who he was playing against on the weekend, as though that means we can disregard his 14.2. If he was picked up by any AFL club, and could stay fit and focused, I don't think there's much doubt as to whether or not he could impact the AFL a second time.

yes. we can hardly win, so this is the perfect week for throwing caution out and having a go at quick movement. Gotta take the risk sooner or later. Dare I say it, after the "wooden spoon" thread? - but perhaps we don't care so much about the margin - just to see something in our own play that we've been waiting/believing/hoping for...

never forget THAT! (- and, if we'd had that up ahead, I bet our mids would have had a different impact too. Wouldn't that in front of you have straightened up and accelerated your kicking into the forward line?) However we criticise other things, I'd say the lack of those three guys in the forward half outweighs any other issue for MFC in 2014.