robbiefrom13

my mother's 92, going well, very positive outlook, laughs a lot and learning all the time. Plenty of time-on in the real game, OD...

you will drown in those speech bubbles, OD

Nathan Jones is a good B grade, for mine, and any climb up the ladder is going to require several midfielders with brilliance than goes past the very good workmanlike Jones. Plus serious talent around the ground, able to cut through in a way Jones still keeps trying, unsuccessfully, to do. You have to have players who dissolve the shackles. Heresy, I know...

"How will I feel..?" On the day, just after the final round, we will either have just beaten North or they will have walked on us again. That will have a bigger effect on me than the ladder. After watching Hawthorn-Sydney the other night, I put on a DVD of the 1990 Elimination Final between Melbourne and Hawthorn. Three things: firstly, I was gripped again by the excitement I used to get watching the footy, even though it was 24 years ago and I knew the outcome; secondly, it was quite something to see that amount of talent we had, all over the ground; and thirdly, the level of skill and hunger and desperation back then was a great deal higher than I remembered it. It made me recognise how numb I have become in the past few years. I don't particularly care where we finish because the disappointment has been seeping in fairly steadily all year, again, and what I know about our improvement doesn't get me to where I need to be as a supporter. We need some punch-in-the-air triumph, not just incremental one or two steps in the climb out of the cellar. But - if we beat North - the season ends with something that would bring real and vindicating satisfaction. It'll be a litmus test of a last game for the season, for this disappointed and flat-feeling supporter. Something to carry through the summer - a bit of real hope. Who cares where anyone else finishes, in this wreck of a season.

As you say, you "believe" this; but no doubt Roos can base his view on more than just believing at a distance? And maybe Ling himself can work out by some means other than a trial run in the TAC whether or not he wants the job? Your second and third statements are surely speculative assertions. We haven't got enough to base any opinion on here - but those who will make the decision presumably will have; plus anyway we trust them this time, don't we? Why not just wait with interest? It sounds like we are just talking out of nervousness.

and so, your comment to the umpires? "Well played, sir"?

Too early to be drawing the line under anyone - Roos hasn't even had one full season yet. Do you really think there's no more to come? Think Jetta, Pederson, the losing margins, the after-match pressers - do you really think we have already seen all there's going to be?

It's really about character, and some of you don't seem to be up to handling the heat in Adelaide.

and even if he doesn't do that, he will make Watts look anything but a plodder.

Over the past few years we have not been particularly uneven (think Kangaroos this year for "uneven"), but rather, just no good. Poor recruiting, development, coaching, training facilities, toxic club politics, an awful run of major health disasters - it has all added up to us not being much good. So, our lack of huge wins is not evidence of any lack of character, or killer instinct, or whatever - we just aren't likely to get on top because we aren't yet good enough. At the moment, it takes a team having a bad day for us to get on top. Like the Dockers just had against St Kilda - the Dockers' players went on holidays a day too soon, and it wasn't that much about St Kilda, whose experienced players simply carried out their roles and cashed in on the windfall. Now we are getting closer to competence, and some non-destructive experience is going to be accumulating, we will probably win more of the achievable games next year. We already have some great signs, and individuals doing great things, and stronger defensive skills all over the ground (allowing for errors that are still part of our pattern, at this stage of skills development); but it's not enough all over the ground yet. But it is building. As positive experience builds, we will be able to do what St Kilda's experienced players did on Saturday. As we get better, we will have more to draw on - better skills and more confidence in those skills and in our team-mates, and a bigger number of players all over the field with more confidence and experience in doing it well and confidence in and knowledge of their team-mates - and we will be better able to exploit it when our opposition is not switched on; and eventually be better able to rattle the other team into falling apart. As the team as a whole gets better, we will have more big runaway wins. Good teams have them. Other than that, such big wins are anomalies arising out of what the other team did wrong, or they are evidence of unevenness the result of some unaddressed weakness in the team (think us in 2010, or the Kangaroos this year). It's exhausting listening to people endlessly bagging out our players for character defects, while ignoring the obvious reasons for poor outcomes. Ockham's razor! We don't crush teams, because we aren't good enough at the moment. But we are getting better.

well, it was a certainty that there'd be some part... but, Satch, correct me if I'm wrong

That's just silly - he tried out, and played a bit in a minor league.

Jurrah played like he was from a different planet.

I'm saying that they risk "disenfranchising" many in the non-Essendon supporter base if they don't take from Essendon the right to compete.

Essendon's demise should not be because they were struggling to field a team. Kick the bastards out for what they did to the game, and what's worse, the way they thought they could take it all into court in an attempt to get away with it. AFL football cannot have a club that thinks like that. Talk about "bringing the game into disrepute"!!

world championship wrestling is one kind of fake; Essendon's approach to the ASADA investigation shows a non-sport motivation there, and undermines assumptions on which the naive supporter follows the game; and, if loyalty to community and players is eroded on a large scale by FA (in the players' pursuit of money and disregard for community and loyalty) then what the game has always been built on takes another hit. Taking a battering... Football is changing visibly, showing how it has been changing in the backrooms for a while, and I ask myself do I like it? Am I invested in the way we all used to be? I can't think that I - or maybe many of us - am/are. Somehow it feels like we have become just the punters, the "mark" that a corporatised organisation feeds stuff to, while keeping their eye entirely on the dollar. Disappointing. The thing for me is, the wrestling is fake and we know it. Watch it only for a laugh, if at all. But now we've heard of cricket, soccer, etc being corrupted at high levels with match-fixing; and in whole countries, plus spread throughout cycling, swimming, weightlifting, sprinting, etc - and now Essendon - a constant chemical warfare to stay ahead or legally weasel out of being stopped from winning by means of cheating with drugs. What sport is "clean"? - how pointless has it become to watch in admiration? The ancient Greeks saw nobility and respect for the gods who made us as the over-riding thoughts about success at sport, and I reckon a lot of us have had thinking that was not too different. We just loved seeing prowess and the whole thing coming together and being inspired on the day. I used to love the characteristic humility of Australia's tennis champions. The "whatever it takes" posters, who attack our players and talk of culls, may be able to adapt to the changing (or changed) nature of sport, but others of us are really struggling, and not sure we want to get there.

Machsy said this( - I can't do "quote" from two different pages of the thread): Yeah, well if that's how you see it then... But it's not the way it is in reality. My point is, how you see it is your right, how he sees it is his right - but your thinking it does not make it "reality": it's just your opinion. And so, you cannot declare him a simpleton just because his opinion was different to yours.... in fact, if we want to sling around the simpleton tag on a site like this, maybe the biggest simpleton is the one who thinks his is the only opinion worth listening to. None of us here are in a position to claim an exclusive alignment with reality, are we? [Exit onto the Southern wing]

Machsy, "the gateway to reality"... Stand back, gents!

yes, it is a mystery that is there to be seen, pretty much every week. Along with the slow ball to a Watts contest. WTF, Melbourne?? Why doesn't Roos put his foot down about this? Yet he doesn't, so somehow, we are missing some fact...

It looked like that to me too. Apart from what we thought about being so uncompetitive, I was worried about how unenthusiastic and disengaged I felt about the game. No atmosphere, no noise, at all - I couldn't believe there were over 36,000 people in the MCG. Walking away, we had our thoughts to sort - Geelong supporters cannot have been feeling too good either. They'd've had to have been realising that they really are on the way down, and I reckon that would've felt just as bad as our feeling that we are not yet on the way up. "It was a bad game of football, Harry..." Ugly, unexciting, error-riddled, pointlessly exhausting football. Nobody got entertained. That is a worry, maybe even bigger than the scoreboard.

Nothing to the risk he'd be taking! Got to admire a bloke starting out, pretty respected and likely to get a gig somewhere, who chooses to take on Melbourne. More faith than most of us have, I'd say - yet we pontificate our mingy little opinions about it... Oh that we should be so lucky as to get a Ling!

ok, but in the last quarter Nathan Jones with plenty of time assessed his options and chose to kick across the ground to a Jack Watts one-on-one, which Watts is not likely to win, and the ball duly went out-of-bounds; it highlighted Watts' inability to do what his captain was in that instance asking of him; later Jones again had a kick and time to choose what to do, and while Jack Watts charged into space at centre-half-forward, Jones stood thinking about things and the lead died. By the time Jones kicked, we lost the ball. I know these are just two incidents, but to me they are consistent with the pattern of a lot of what the team keeps on doing. And they illustrate a lot about Watts, too. Melbourne do not act quickly enough to seize opportunities, do not encourage spreading by honouring leads, are far, far, far too slow to move the ball. The quick kick forward has to be the option; it may cause a score; what they do now doesn't and won't. All very frustrating (and dreadful to watch) - but here's the thing about Jack Watts as I see it: Jack Watts would look an entirely different proposition in a team that moved the ball quickly. He is a great ball user, he is quick - but he's not Neeld's man, at his natural best in body-on-body work. How come we can't use him? The worst player-use thing I've seen at Melbourne since they thought Flower might make a half back instead of a wingman was the idea that Jurrah needed to become a defender; today, our failure to use Watts at what he's capable of, and persistence in rubbing his nose in what he's not naturally good at, is - for me - as frustrating as it is seeing him not throwing himself at it more. If we trade Watts, to a team who put his abilities to use and does not go on trying to turn him into a one-size-fits-all what-he's-not, it will hurt seeing him become what we know he could be. But, if we did trade him, and he did become what we know he could be, that will be why. Dumb, Melbourne. Dumb. Poke back through the annals and look again at how we used Jakovitch. He was a match-winner, at times criticised for looking uninterested. But surely he knew what he could do. We used him on his terms, and it worked. Unimaginative is dumb. Loved Viney yesterday. (I don't know why I post - bound to be ignored or dumped on. But nobody else is saying it, and I think it's there in front of you.)

Development may still result in big improvement. It wouldn't be unprecedented, especially with Roos. One problem for us is that we don't have a critical mass of players who have a lot of experience of being in the zone with the team on fire. Difficult to graft more in when there isn't that basis. Another problem is that we are a team that until this year simply couldn't rack up possessions; as a result of which, we are not experienced in making the play, and we don't have the confidence that is built on experience of being on top; when we get the ball, we are too slow, too protective of what we've achieved; not necessarily because we are useless, but because we don't instantly lock into the killer instinct, seeing the goals in front of us, and spreading and so on.. We don't have it programmed in as a default. Federer knew he could probably pull out another ace, last night. Almost got enough. But poor old MFC, it can't remember playing aces, and it doesn't try for them. We need to graft out some wins, and slowly build some form and confidence. When our players one day have the right stuff in their minds, their legs will go faster, and the teleological effect will draw the kicks to carry to team-mates or through the goals; we'll get the free kicks, too. Roos is skilled for getting this to happen. But not until then will we really be able to see who actually hasn't got it. It's about belief as much as it is about anything else. Just an opinion, of course.

and then, on the same grounds, why do you Satyriconhome, waste your time reading Demonland? "Not hatred", I suppose - am I putting words in your mouth? (rhetorical question - point of which is, you have no business saying WYL hates anyone....)

"Satyriconhome Sums Up". Don't be so superior! - just one more poster, with just one more opinion... no taller than anyone else... (and yes, we do appreciate your training notes)