robbiefrom13

"Coach" came into most European languages in the 16th Century, from the name of a Hungarian town where they had developed a new kind of carriage that all of Europe saw as the next great thing. The verb coach derives from the noun. So that a coach is an improved way of travelling, a faciltating of the intention; and to coach someone is to carry them forward in their endeavour. That's the origin of the word, and the concept. The coach is not, etymologically at least, anything like the captain, the judge, or the one determining the agenda. Coaching students sitting exams came before athletic coaching; the idea was always an extension of the idea of conveying them more effectively to where they were going. Not done with an axe, or by belittling people, or from any position of power. Applying this to football, the coach coaches the team. The team are the main event. According to the language, anyway. This is what the rednecks on this site don't get, and sadly it appears Neeld spent a long time damaging the players' ownership of their endeavours before (if he ever did) grasping the essential relationship that a coach must have to the initiative, confidence, purpose and commitment of the players to what they are there for. Work with them - that's the core concept, supporting them and bringing them things they can add to their stock. So sad, to see the mess we are in, and the abuse of our players, and the amount of focus here and (apparently) at Board level on Neeld first. Language evolves, of course, and the historical understanding of "coach" may be changing. People may point at earlier successful coaches to argue that the word changed its meaning long ago. But I suggest that no successful coach would disregard belief and individuality and psychology the way Neeld has; successful coaches have to rate their players and their talents - that's what they come to work with.

Malthouse on radio last week (I think it was) was asked about injuries, and his answer is I think applicable to all that we say about list refurbishment. He said "I never talk about the injuries. I don't think it helps at all. I want every one of the 22 who run out for us to believe that they are in our best 22 - they are the players who are going to win it for us." Words to that effect, anyway. That's a winner talking. It's about belief. it's about today, with no excuses. Supporters can go with that sort of thinking. Yet here we are, arguing over who to blame, and nobody talking positive about what our 22 are capable of. The thing that frustrated me most at the game yesterday was seeing Jack Watts taking up a position 25 metres from the goal line when our full-back kicked in - presumably to be there for the quick kick coming back in. I've seen Watts used like this before. If it's Neeld's idea, see you later Neeld; if it's Watts' idea, what's wrong with Neeld that he hasn't told him to cut it out? Watts is a marking target, but there he is positioned out of the play, insurance against a turnover. And, in close, I love Watts' second and third efforts - he has always been cool and accurate in a scrimmage when he's involved. So, what's with the negativity? That's my take on the last two years. I'm ready for belief.

still trying to sell it?

Totally agree. I wasn't going to go, but I went, and saw us beaten by a far better team. Had a nice time nevertheless, because of course Hawthorn are better at this stage and of course they were going to beat us, so it wasn't any surprise; what I enjoyed was the way we manned up and put in. I liked some really good flowing passages until skill errors broke it up. I saw bits of Jack Watts and Jones and Frawley and Terlich and Garland and Dawes and so on that were really good to watch. Had a nice chat with some thoughtful and friendly Hawk supporters at half time. It was like a day at the footy, circa 1978. I can live with that. Ready for changes, to get someone who can harness all this and get it going somewhere - big loss of course, but we knew that would happen today; but better signs from the players at least, for me, so that I see hope again.

In my opinion, you pro-Neeld guys just don't face facts. But - we will see.

so "Neeld is not the problem" - more to the point is whether he's the solution. According to some, he may be so long as we can wait several years; no-one else can solve the problem any quicker, runs the argument, so suck it up and fill in your time rubbishing the players etc. Some of us barrack for the team, which means the players, and we don't think they are that lousy. Didn't think Jurrah was either. Liked his attack on the ball, and his instinct for finding team-mates and the goals. Imagine that Moloney had more to offer than we got from him. Really liked Green's presence, as an older and still skilful member of the team. Remember commentators saying we would be the next big thing, and loved the attacking game when it clicked. Etc. Some of us don't think waiting several years is an acceptable time-frame for evaluating our rookie coach - especially when by everyone's opinion we are going steadily, astonishingly, backwards. We don't want to comply with the argument that insists we are now powerless to advocate any alternatives, and stupid if we try to anyway. Maybe Neeld is not the solution we want. It is, obviously, only speculation for any of us to say what would happen if Neeld was replaced by someone else - but a new coach would be hard pressed to make us any worse than we are currently. If the five year time-frame is not an acceptable solution, then Neeld by his revised promises is simply not our man. Just as he cast his eye over our leadership group, and a big percentage of our players, and said "they are not what I want"... Raises the next question, though - who? Which is another thread. But as to this thread, whether you call him the problem or just not the solution, I think Neeld's time-frame is a game-changer. Not what a lot of us supporters, or sponsors or broadcasters, are up for at all. what we all need is players and a team we can get behind. We need some x-factor, some hope; something more than just slow grinding resignation of the "it is what it is" variety. That's no solution.

I hear you all, but I see the games too. Great talk, [censored] walk, I say - a plain as day naked Emperor. For me, what's happening on the field undermines any explanations and arguments you put up. So that telling me how impressed you were by listening to Neeld speak just isn't going to outweigh my impression of how the team is playing under his coaching. You claim that good foundations are being laid - but this will of course only be verified (if it is verified) in the future; likewise, my claim that we can't afford to wait will only be verified (if it is) in the future. Where I think I have you is, what it is all about - going to the footy to watch our team. That is a present and unambiguous horror show. Missing the most basic fundamentals of manning up and tackling, spreading and shepherding - nothing to do with experience or skill. Without these things, there is no winning. I don't know how to enjoy the game when I spend three out of every four quarters groaning in frustration at the vacant centre and the 10 metre policy in minding your man. We lose every game in uncontested possession, so we focus everything on contested possession. I tell myself, this rubbish cannot be a sound foundation for the future, no matter who says what. Tell me how I'm wrong. I'll tell you something I haven't read here yet: there is a type of belittling teacher who uses sarcasm and autocratic means to secure intense loyalty from his students; students commonly learn to embrace his every little signal, knowing that there are rewards for those who please. Compliance is his yardstick and he stands firm on "walk, don't run". It's true that a regime of discipline does bring some reward, and this teacher's students may have a degree of success (if they don't rebel). But it's also true that others taught differently will go further, both at the time, and even more so in subsequent education. So I ask myself, when is all this buy-in going to produce results other than players (and supporters) declaring loyalty to Neeld? And when will the agenda stop being about this man and become about the team?

why did I reply to this? I did it for no reason at all.

it couldn't be anything to do with the coach, could it?

It costs me nothing to get into the game - so the club loses no money when I choose not to go. I won't be there. Far too much certain misery, as I see it. Man up and tackle, shepherd and break out - that's the most basic formula for Aussie Rules as I see it. But that's not currently what Melbourne does. Why not? The players? The coach? I give up trying to sort that one out - but either way, there is a failure of players-and-coach to produce the most basic things of football, and watching it is extremely, and unnecessarily, frustrating. I like football; and this rubbish ain't football. I'll be back when they (coach and players) show by their actions and their words that they are aiming directly and centrally for these most basic fundamentals of success. Until then, I cannot find the page they are on, let alone join them on it. And I can't see why you'd think I'm hurting the club - to me, it's them (coach-and-players) hurting the club, and hurting me. If the AFL get involved, I'm betting it will be to say "how about playing football...?"

WE"RE SAVED!!!

Not sure that's fair. The context in which he lived was both complicated and violent. Ultimately he wavered, it seems to me, and was swept away. Greatest tragedy in living memory at Melbourne - including Jimmy. Jimmy's was a truly great life. Liam's ought to have been.

plotocracy, love it! best thing you ever posted Bing! (Plotocracy a freudian slip from an MFC-watcher?)

The playing of Watts in that game was a mistake, but I have not seen any discussion of whose mistake it was. At the time, I was pretty disturbed to see the flimsily-built Watts attacked by the Collingwood players and none of his team-mates flying the flag. His first shot went just wide, and no-one showed really any interest. For the first few games he played, no-one would kick it to him. I got used to seeing him running to the boundary trying to get the ball before it went out of bounds. It seemed to me that the team were not proud to have him out there with them, were not looking out for him - there was a sort of standing back which made no sense to me at all. I have wondered about it. It must have undermined him, his leads became really half-hearted, and so on. I wonder whether playing him that day was a Schwab idea? It seems to me exactly the sort of pseudo-symbolic (or whatever it is) nonsense that made up so much of Schwab's thinking. If this were so, it would explain the players' reaction to Watts, as being so similar to what we understand to have been their reaction to Schwab. The cancer at the club has surely extended into the career of Jack Watts, and while many of the problems today may not have been of Neeld's making, yet Neeld was in a position to have given everyone a clean start - and he clearly failed to do so. Whatever happens, my respect for the perseverence and resilience of Watts is colossal; my dismay at the waste of talent is equally colossal - and I do not see how we can blame Watts for it. He has no idea what he has to do, I am sure of it. And don't jump up in frustration telling me about "getting some mongrel" or whatever - this guy who we recruited is not a Mitch Robinson battering ram, he is a supremely gifted and intelligent ball user, who has not found his place in the team. The team has no Watts-shaped place - same as it had no Jurrah-shaped place, same as it had no Green-shaped place, etc. Nice one, Neeldy.

Scully was not struggling under the same disincentives as these players are, arguably, today. A lesser contract may be acceptable when the desire to relocate is greater.

for me, it is first Jurrah, now Watts - if they can't recognise, and develop, and embed the rare talent they acquire, quite right - stuff em. But it hasn't happened yet - and maybe there are cards a competent management could play, in a situation like this? There is no escaping the fact that the players are our ONLY assets. were you being serious, I wonder? I am.

can we trade autocol?

A bit of Dylan Thomas: "I played for Aberavon in 1898," said a stranger to Enoch Davies. "Liar," said Enoch Davies. "I can show you photos," said the stranger. "Forged," said Enoch Davies. "And I'll show you my cap at home." "Stolen." I got friends to prove it," said the stranger in a fury. "Bribed," said Enoch Davies. Recognisable style?

the core business of a football club has to be playing football. Every organisation needs to have its administration, but in the long run a successful organisation will have its administration serving the organisation's core business - not growing independently, as an end in itself, and with its profile and importance increasingly detached from the core business. Bureaucrats are leeches crippling the function of whatever they colonise for their own careers - our society is riddled through with it. But good administrators prioritise the needs of the core business. Post 186, as always, it was the players who would transact the club's core business. I condemn the Board for its post-186 failure to find ways to make things right for the players. I condemn the Board for allowing Neeld to get away with blaming the players after last weekend's game (yes, they played badly - but their playing well is what the coach is employed for; what else does he think he is being paid for - to "implement his plans"?!). I condemn the Board for allowing Neeld to come in post-186 and apply iron discipline and the axe to underperforming players - blaming the players from the outset. Bureaucratic responses! The players are our only resource in our core business. I condemn the Board for its failure to keep MacDonald, Green, Rivers, Moloney (who I didn't like), Martin, and even Wonamirri (?) and Jurrah, who all had needs we failed to meet (to our cost), and for not ensuring our players were properly developed to their potential. I condemn the Board for allowing Schwab to prevail against the coach and the players, while our on-field performances went from bad to worse. What I condemn today is the failure of the Board to recognise that everything will go down the pan if we can't put the players' performance up front and centre and get them firing, and bend every bit of administrative personnel and role to the sole end of facilitating the players' improved performance. The players are all we have. No-one else at the club plays football. So, I am pleased with the apparent remit Jackson has been given, but until it is producing effects on the field it has yet to show it is any more than just more self-serving bureaucratic furniture-arranging in an administration that lost the plot years ago. If Jackson's remit is not in terms of shifting whatever is needed explicitly for the purpose of getting players performing better, it is just more window-dressing, more self-absorption, more of the Board fiddling while the club burns.

I think we have - for several years - done most of our running just after the unmarked opponent gets the ball. We run after them. Oh for some positive moves! Robbie Flower laments the stop-start-go-backwards lack of flow. How must the stars of junior football who wind up at Melbourne long for the corridor, and remember tearing it up! Instead, they have been taught the counter-intuitive drivel of guarding nothing until the opposition are on their way to goal - and then we run... Every cheap possession we give the unhurried opposition causes us to have another desperate chase. That's the bulk of our running. Exhausting and dispiriting, but implementing the Plan.

It's like nothing Neeld says can have any impact on the players, because they have frozen on some message he delivered too effectively at some point in the past. Psychologically frozen, no matter how much they want not to be. This won't begin to get better until everyone who had a hand in the paralysing of the players is gone. I don't think we have yet seen anything like what our players are capable of. Get them out from under the rubbish, and I suspect they will show some real hunger for the game, like a blind man given back his sight.

I like this - drop Neeld to Casey and give Welsh a run in the seniors! It's just form, Mark. Cost neutral. Well, if only...

this view is what someone seeing in "dark light" could be expected to come up with...

We can't stay like this - supporters and sponsors will depart, which would be terminal for the club. Delaying any changes has to have in mind the increasing likelihood of those departures. If we spend to get change and there is no change, supporters and sponsors will still depart, and presumably we will go broke. Two questions occur to me: firstly, not whether change will push us into heavy debt - it is certain to - but whether we can actually service that level of debt until we trade our way back into the clear. Bad decisions have clearly undone all that Jimmy did. Is it time to call it quits - or do we invest in faith? What could persuade supporters and sponsors to stay on board - what would it take? Secondly, whether or not we can get a clear run at making change without having the old boys' claws all over the levers. Somehow the old boys' club is central to the mess - it has to be (it keeps coming up) - and it has somehow stifled the players. So my second question: can Jackson get the old boys back into the glass cases quickly enough, so that real change can be made in time? And, in line with that, how possible is it to arrange that Connolly will not be back? I am convinced that freeing the present generation of the club from the clubby grip of the past is the key to real change. The blazers were Schwab's slow drip, anaesthetising the players, and that whole drivel needs to be swept aside. We need a Satis House fire, to clear the air, and get the past off our shoulders. Then see whether in fresh air anything can be different. Can real culture change be offered?

oh yes - another trip to the excuses bucket, that's where