robbiefrom13

Malthouse appears to me to have been commenting on coaching, not list management. He says the coach plays to the players' strengths. My question is whether Neeld does - in particular, in relation to Brad Green at the present time. Are you saying Green is currently a NQR? Or that Malthouse would consider him NQR? Nothing to do with our midfield group, unless Green is occupying a spot in it. Which he isn't.

ok. But I noticed Malthouse quoted in today's Age, concerning Wallace as a good prospect for Port Adelaide: "I know he has a hold on the game, he thinks about it very much in terms I probably would, playing to players' strengths..." I would love to hear that Malthouse assessed Neeld in similar terms - but do you think he would? From the way he refers to it, Malthouse appears to consider this "playing to players' strengths" pretty important. You can be sure he has watched Neeld's progress with great interest, and presumably with some serious reflection on why it's been so disappointing. Perhaps Malthouse has refined his notion of what really counts. I wonder what he would say about the opportunity for some other club to pick up a player with the strengths of Brad Green.

"poor form" - a certain lofty disrespect in this I think. The "land" is football - which ultimately is done by players, not management. If management decisions create out-of-jointedness among the players, then more fool the ignorant and arrogant management - they [censored] on their own parade if what they do undermines the performance of the players as a group. And treating them as mere cattle, discardable at the management's call, is not going to bring out the best in them or heightened levels of commitment any more than it would in any of us. Supporters should rightly protest at such stupidity. Human Relations 101 tells you that the psychological well-being of your staff is critical to ongoing organisational success; giving employees respect and a role in decision-making increases output and profitability enormously. Read up Ricardo Semmler, for an example. I am not saying that there aren't tough decisions to make at times, and clearly the balance between player egos and workload has been pretty wrong at MFC for a while. Really, I'm only trying to put up a balance to RR who I think is over-stating his position - so here is the polar opposite; all I mean to say is that the answer is actually somewhere a fair way this side of RR's position. Of course everyone needs to be stepping up to higher standards, no worries. But to tell an experienced and hard-working player that his efforts no longer count, is insensitive to how he and his mates will feel. They know the bar is being raised, but if one of them is making a worthwhile contribution, and progressing, it is not going to seem fair when he is told to pack it in, management doesn't care whether or not he can meet the targets of improvement. Casting off blokes that the rest of the team have grown up with and known far longer than they've known the current management, without giving those blokes the chance to earn their place week-to-week is just unfair - it smacks of management pursuing their own theories without particular interest in the players. For those doing the real work, such arrogance at management level is alienating and dispiriting. Absolutely destructive. (Actually, in the last quarter on Sunday, I saw Green just to the south of full forward, and one of our players had taken a mark just forward of the wing on the members' side; in front of Green was a big gap around centre-half-forward. Had Green led into the space, to 25 metres out dead in front, he couldn't have been stopped. He made no attempt to lead, presumably because team rules are that the play was to come down the boundary, and leading into the corridor wasn't on. I wondered about this. His instinct must have been to seize the opportunity, but he didn't. On fire, really, but suppressing what he is naturally good at. If this was a team rules thing inhibiting his play, I dislike it. A few minutes later, from a similar position on the members' side, Green passed the ball to Howe, in the spot he might have led to himself, and Howe gave Green what was for that game at least the absolute last word on this team rule (if it is the team rule)... If we cut Green, and he goes elsewhere, I predict he will play superbly and embarrass a lot of people - more than were embarrassed over Junior.) The master-servant Act is a long way out of date. It's common knowledge that Chapman got the Cats together to stop the rot, and that in 1987, six or eight weeks out and with it all going down the pan again, the senior players at MFC got together and determined what they were going to do, adding their input to that of the coach - and look what happened in both those cases. You can't disregard the importance of the players. Denying them respect, agency, ownership is just dumb. It is undermining, out-of-date, counter-productive, right-wing management-focused management. Please, don't make us have to go through such crap....

I saw it differently. When Brad Green kicked his fifth, he was mobbed by delighted team-mates. He'd lifted everyone Wonna-style after his third. Greeny is providing leadership in the team-bonding that we need so badly. Right at the end, Green to Howe was wonderful - without hesitation, he was aware of where his team-mate was and he had faith in his team-mate to take the hanger. Team-lifting faith, I reckon. Should be more of it - and when Watts gets back, I want to see the team counting on his skills and decision-making to a greater extent than they did for two years. This is wonderful stuff from Greeny, mature and constructive, and team-focused. What's more, his marking today was as good as it ever was, with his kicking improving too. Definitely a keeper for mine. Huge contrast with Moloney, who seemed to me to be lost. No sense of the team, no awareness of where his team-mates are or what they are capable of doing, and with no expectation that they can be counted on, he fiddles around looking for something that he trusts... Moloney isn't contributing anything to the kids, as far as I can see, unlike Greeny, whose example is so right. And Trengove looked the real goods to me - contested, marked, knew when he had to go - looks a real captain in the making. I enjoyed the game. We were smashed in the midfield; which in a 25-goal game is a lot of head starts the Suns got; yet we held them in our backline, and scored nicely ourselves especially given that we really are badly undermanned. If you take out the absolutely dominant Ablett and Bennell, Gold Coast would barely have scored at all, so that you could say we basically beat our man and their team everywhere else on the ground. Nothing brilliant, but solid, with some good things continuing to emerge. Joel McDonald really does some good stuff. Jones is a gun - very sure and decisive. Blease is exciting, and will eventually get his act under control - reminds me of Yze's early games, or Farmer's, with the rush of blood dumb things - they'll go with experience, for sure.

I do not think the AFL should punish a club for its players not putting in enough effort - the club should deal with that. I can see that players not putting in enough effort is a sort of tanking, but I see it as a kind of internal tanking, with all sorts of possible causes. Goodness knows it would be a mess if the AFL started trying to measure how much a given player put himself on the line, or positioned himself correctly, or sweated in a game... All the other questions relate to those judgment calls, where individual coaches (who vary as to their adventurousness and cautiousness) weigh up the multitude of factors that those outside the club don't fully know about, and try to balance risk against hope, in pursuit of success. Pain threshholds, progress in recovery from injuries, circumstances at home affecting players, contracts, building for the future, lifting the bar in the development of a up-and-coming player, I don't know what - all of these sorts of things will be mixed with the natural leaning of the coach's personality and result in decisions like those identified in the poll. Like everyone else at the club, the coach unquestionably has success as his objective, and clubs sack coaches who fail to balance all these things right, in the pursuit of success. What the poll lacked was a question about the coach explicitly instructing the players not to put in the effort to win. Even for one game, it would be wrong, and the AFL should come down on it - wrong because people have paid money to see a contest, there is gambling on it, and such an instruction would inevitably undermine the integrity of the whole competition. I said yes to the first question (players not playing to win), but did not think the AFL should punish the club for it, and therefore could not register my vote.

yes, and, like Garland forward against Essendon, it was a reasonable thing to try. If your experiment works, you're a genius; if it doesn't, the vultures scream either tanking or sack the fool. And the coaches who take no chances and have a "play safe" game-plan, they kill the joy of the game and bore the crap out of everyone. Until someone proves the instruction was to to lose the game, this is all just bullying and ignorance.

Find the boil and lance it, in time for everyone to get focused on the footy before we get into the pre-season. Then we might see what they can do... (because we surely haven't yet). Blue sky is waiting behind the mother of all clouds - surely it's time... Not positive enough? I am convinced there is a mountain of talent not yet harnessed, coaching and other staff and facilities that are Rolls Royce, the whole stuff first rate (with more players to come, too), and when the crap gets off our backs it'll fly. Huge sky full of sun and deep blue. We just need the little guy with the stick to move Rajah out of the way.

If tanking made us more watchable, it would be less reprehensible: the AFL sell television rights in what must just about be their core business now. How would anyone feel if they paid mega millions, only to find they were buying rights to screen the unwatchable? The tanking issue will go away for us, as it did for everyone else, when we start being competitive and worth watching. That we tanked and only attracted criticism of the operation of the game, while not improving the marketability of the product, must be quite galling to Demetriou who had to mouth such rubbish to keep the dogs off us. We really need to get some wins...

If their real target is something rotten that needs to come out, maybe their motives are not as bad as it appears. i think any footy-lover would have to be concerned about MFC's lack of success and its collective inability to find or apparently even look for the elephants.

I like this down to/including point 6 - then I think peripherals intrude into the central issue, which surely is "the wreck". Journalists no doubt are irritated by stuff, and McLean's lack of awareness got the petrol onto what was only smouldering, but his being on the show and being pumped for this story was either a conspiracy or it was journalists with the sniff of something that hasn't gone away. I incline to the latter scenario. Important to note that no-one is suggesting that we are still tanking, or that we were the only ones who ever did; the tanking story in itself is stale news, and already ruled on by the AFL. In my view the real story that is being fished for is not really about tanking per se - I'd suggest it's about the power structures and processes that led the club to be tanking, as outlined in your points 2-6, and how that stuff affected (and perhaps is still affecting) the players, and the club's performance. Why the MFC cannot improve with all the picks it's had is a real story to be unearthed. MFC's continuing wreck has to mean something isn't right. There has to be a "sufficient reason". Neeld being less than a lovely or tactful person won't do (he has excellent credentials and references, and in any case look at the personalities of successful coaches - Clarkson, for starters, and Norm Smith, etc etc), and it's not just "the cattle" (remember what Roos said about basically this group when we ripped Sydney up two years ago). Yet your very real and presumably very destructive points 2-6 have still not been dealt with, so we believe, and the on-going wreck surely tells us something destructive is continuing the wrecking. To get to the bottom of the wreck, surely these points need to be explored. Well, how is a journalist to get at it? Just doing their job, and without any specific malice towards MFC, journalists who could see loose ends and elephant droppings all over the club would be bound to go after what is surely a big story. McLean is just dumb enough to open the can, and it looked to me like that was the intention in the interview. The AFL weighing in is collateral damage, the erratic red herring. God only knows who they'll target, if anyone - but the big story is still there to unfold. Bring it on, I say.

Your reference to "polishing a turd" - what is "this one" that you are saying Neeld will flush? - the team? the third of the team that you don't like? This is insulting and offensive. It's also dumb - as you rightly point out, we have crucial and numerous injuries, which would pretty much sink us at the moment regardless of anything else. Getting injured doesn't turn anyone into a turd. I'm still going to games this year, and hoping to see some good stuff from us. When the players run out, I imagine they too are hopeful, as well as apprehensive, pretty much like us; I imagine they are doing their best, whatever their physical and mental limitations might be. I doubt I will watch Jones and agree with you that we have no midfield; "passable forward line" or not, I will be surprised if we don't win at least one more game; Watts is likely to return and I will be surprised if he doesn't play well - Tom Mac will play well too, I bet. The majority of our list will not be flushed away by Need at the end of the season, whatever you say. Of course the list can improve, but what we have at the moment is clearly not a simple problem. The change we really want to see is the team getting on a roll of fluent and confident football, and your solution does not guarantee that. Every year, players are turned over and clubs find they did not get what they expected. Focus on the rejoicing you will do when a dozen or more of our players are discarded, indulging the thought of being able to triumphantly wave your toilet brush at them as they go, and the only thing you ensure is that you'll look like the supporter from hell. It's only a game, you say (#232) - what sort of a game, when you talk about our team like this, and call this stuff "supporting"?

"It's pretty clear that he may be..." Seriously good thinking, that is! And Jurrah's imaginative and athletically freakish ability is written off in a single-minded focus on "work effort"? - heaven help us if that really is how those under Neeld think. Actually, my only preference is to see how the team dynamic would change if Moloney wasn't there. I agree with NSC here. As to the rest of the players, I agree that they have had a pretty steep learning curve under Neeld, apparently without much empathetic consideration from Neeld, and he surely has not been effective in helping them manage the disruption and loss of instinctive confidence that went with adapting to his requirements (and maybe in this, Neeld's manner was as necessary as it was unhelpful). But having the under-performing self-appointed policeman Moloney at them as well can't have been useful to anyone. It was that soft man Barassi who said in effect that the game is mostly played in the mind...

Why would MFC not presume innocence, and re-sign our most exciting player? Do we imagine, after that apparent shambles of prosecution testimony, that Liam's legal counsel have quietly told the club to expect a conviction? His injuries do not appear to be career-threatening, and he is in his prime. The nearest to an unstoppable match-winner that we have. With what story would the club explain discarding him now? Should we get rid of Grimes too - we can imagine he may get injured....? And maybe - who knows what? Look what's happened to Clark, and all that money thrown at him. Come on Demons, stop exposing us to all these RISKS! Shame on you, those who would canvas the idea of the club walking away from Liam Jurrah at this point.

I think the most natural understanding of "hardest team to play against" would be nobody playing against MFC would get a cheap kick. To that end, we'd be manning up, pressuring, shepherding and backing each other up - all the stuff that Bailey had not worried so much about. Good old-fashioned accountable footy, actually - exactly what we were looking for after Bailey. Therefore a logical comment for Neeld to make at the time, to the supporters and public. To coach the team to play this sort of tight and team-oriented football would be very doable - it does not depend particularly on skill. Given the low fitness base, which Neeld may not have fully realised at that time, you can understand him raising supporters' expectations with the statement, only to find in the event that it didn't play out. I'd accept it if we ran out of puff every week because we weren't fit enough to keep it up for four quarters. What is so disappointing is that our current style of play is not characterised by most obvious and basic structures and tactics that would make a team hard to play against. What can we see of Neeld's coaching since he made that initial statement? High levels of fitness training (fair enough I suppose - though there must be a point at which it becomes deadening rather than strengthening), and (especially in the beginning) public negative comment on his players, coupled with a clear distance between coach and players (remember "compliance"?). Also a focus on tactics (like playing the boundary, and the bloody useless zone) rather than taking the game on, a focus on "roles" and targets rather than flair or outcomes, plus dropping players whose reputations exceed their performance, making minimal moves during the game, and maybe now also, letting games go in the interests of his longterm experiments. Nothing there to inspire players' individual or collective confidence, which is clearly a huge problem, and almost certainly a major factor in the deterioration of skill and decision-making. I agree with the comments above that Neeld is not succeeding in having a positive effect on the players, and that he appears to be stubborn. While sticking to your guns is in general a good thing, and his ideas may well be excellent in general and excellent for MFC in particular, nevertheless success is pretty much a non-negotiable. If a percentage of the players became as disheartened as a big percentage of the supporters are, Neeld's inflexibility may be approaching the point of no return. Reconstructive surgery and physiotherapy are wonderful things - but when the patient starts to bleed badly, what you have got to go for urgently is First Aid. The patient here matters - the patient is the MFC, and it is more important than the coach no matter what his vision might be. I don't see the value in haggling over who to get rid of - clearly we need them both, and we need them working together. Adjustments to the list at the end of the year will not fix anything now, and what we need most now is a couple of wins to stem the bleeding. The most basic way to achieve that is players putting pressure on the opposition and supporting their team-mates - and a coach applauding those things. We need Neeld to see his immediate job as dealing with this corrosive sequence of defeats that is surely now undermining the club. His plans for the team can't be headed for success when they are being embedded ever more deeply in defeat.

Footynut has been consistent on this theme all year, pretty well ever since the first loss. He may have been the first to refer to our players as "cattle". Was Neeld privately advising him that the players were crap, and that a major cull would be necessary, from as early as that - or has Footynut just anticipated the inevitable, right from the outset of Neeld's gameday results? Now we have numbers put on the cull, and the impression given that Footynut's comments about the scale of the cull is inside information. How much is Footynut interpreting what he's heard? Or extrapolating? Or assuming? What to think - how far to take Footynut's prophecies as gospel? If there aren't at least 10 players gone at season's end, Footynut's credibility on this forum is going to be very much diminished...

you are going to start getting nervous soon, I think..

you talkin t' me??

yawn

Integrity is worth loads. Think of economic rationalism and the cancerous effect it had when everything was based on what the bean-counters said and human factors or rights-and-wrongs were dismissed. The public standing of MFC lost a lot, as far as integrity goes, with tanking, throwing away our respected captain because he'd done a hammy, even the style of our play, with its lack of accountability... Then Scully's duplicity further tarnished the image of our club... We need to distance ourselves from every sort of chicanery and "pragmatism". It would be a very sound investment instead to prioritise at any cost a culture of integrity. We do not do an Adelaide at the tribunal. We do not try to set up Visy deals or go corporate lawyers and accountants to find an edge. We actually make a success without having cheats of any description on our list. We are not drawn into the Sheedy-style [censored]. Maybe it's a good thing to be told we have turned into an old-fashioned club. We begin to look after our own. Close ranks, and build strength. Norm Smith practised this. And in that vein we take Viney - of course we do - he's OURS. As to the calculation of his size and speed and the length of his kick - grow up! (Barassi was of indeterminate size and not especially quick, the son of a former player. But didn't the qualities that he did have outweigh the measurables! - and in a number of ways similar to what we hear JV's assets are. I can't wait to see Jack Viney running out for us.)

yes - my target in the footballers' brains was bonding, my fear an "every man for himself" outlook, where mateship is not cultivated. I know that could work either way too - I was just starting from perceived weaknesses already visible. And I am a believer in the value of having some sun break through clouds. For me, the two best things this year have been seeing the passion in Neeld with his players on the siren against Essendon, and the players' exuberant celebration in moments like Watts-to-Trenners and Dunn's chase-down in the game against GWS. There's been a lot of the year when to me they haven't looked enough like team-mates. My biggest concern out of everything. But you are right - from this distance, who can tell which way anything could go.

all true enough - I'd just like our preferred position to be, "we've weathered the worst of it, taken a battering, now we prepare to climb back up. We are not without resources and ideas, if you want to be part of it and work hard to get the best out of yourself". Time, I'm suggesting, to consider the benefits of closing ranks. It would be a statement. (Of course we will have some new players - but not going overboard may have collateral benefits with the players we keep...) Plenty of players of less than stunning natural talent have been champions, by hard work and real desire. If guys want out, fair enough. But those who want to stay, and are prepared to push at it harder, keep them! What I am talking about is the perceived default position on our current list. And 8 or more sounds like a lot; how much confidence will the playing group begin the off-season with if this happens? "Our average losing score screams not enough talent", you say. I'm questioning whether this is the only possible cause of our average losing score. If it isn't, we could be hasty in reacting.

hmm. you're just having fun, right? Maybe figures is a dumb way to try and make a point.

pride. the joy of excelling, and bettering themselves, at what they really love

what, and start again, again? Pretty destabilizing! I should hope nothing of the kind happens, and I very much doubt it will. My thoughts are based on concern about the damage that was done when the club under Bailey began cutting senior players, culminating in the cutting of their highly regarded captain James MacDonald; and then followed that a year later with cutting almost all the 2011 leaders, and this year allowed it be generally believed that Neeld intends to clear out a whole lot more players at the end of the year. I hope the club shares the view that overall this has damaged the club more than it has benefited us. Elements of the present poor performance of the team are confidence, player development, perhaps club culture, the team not carrying out a well-oiled game plan, and so on. In some ways it is the lack of esprit de corps that has been the biggest disappointment in a disappointing year - being able to joke and laugh while your team is being or just has been thrashed, not spreading for the player taking possession, not shepherding, etc etc. These are things we need to see improving, quite apart from the talent of the individuals on our list. Importing talent obviously will not automatically fix them. On the other hand, if we ignore these things, and make the club a revolving door for players, instead just focusing on importing talent, strength, speed, etc - and thereby, by implication, blaming the existing players for our poor season - what effect will that have? It certainly won't help develop confidence, or the individual development, of those players spared the axe. Can we afford to further weaken confidence (and job security) among the playing group? Maybe we should focus on player development. Misson is still a long way from having completed his work, and benefits are certain to follow as he gets the players closer to what he is aiming for. Neeld will be working out more about how to develop his players as he goes along. Teaching is an endless exploration of what works best with the students in front of you, as well as, over time, an inevitable growing understanding of one another, between teacher and students; similarly at the footy club, unless something is going drastically wrong, the benefits of Neeld's coaching of the players should only increase. Scotty and Juicebox (#56 and 57 above) both shift focus away from which players to turf out, and instead raise questions about the club's development staff. Curry & Beer (#39) offers the view that "some of Collingwood's better players would be battling in the VFL had Melbourne drafted them". A lot of posters see player development as an issue at least as worrying as recruitment. At the end of the year, then, I suggest we ought to be giving the message that in general we have faith in the players. We have faith in Misson and Neeld and the whole club to be getting more and more out of our players. This would be a positive for the players, before we even look at the pre-season. It might help to draw a line under the negativity most notably fueled by the sacking of JMac. It would place the focus squarely on the real issue of how to get the maximum out of those people who actually are the Melbourne Footy Club. With the coach's faith in them demonstrated, player confidence in both the coach and themselves could be expected to be much higher than it was last summer. Clear the bad air, and have a good run at it in 2013... With growing esprit de corps we might get 80% efficiency out of players with 75% talent - which is a much better outcome than 60% efficiency out of a group of 90% talented players (there for the money and who have only known one another for a short while). Do the maths: 80x75 = 60%, while 60x90 = 54%. A "team" team beats a cartel of all-stars, comfortably, regularly; what's more, the fans love them, and it can grow into culture...

confidence, perhaps? and as the game goes on they realise they actually aren't that bad, or the opposition isn't that good (except when it is Hawthorn or some team that isn't making mistakes - then we never do get going) or we pull out some good individual efforts and they walk taller for a while till they tire... elsewhere I've speculated on anger being the ingredient likeliest to change things for us. Stuff all those mental attitude/expectation factors, if they just got seriously [censored] off at being everyone's punching bag, and went mental... If only we could get Smithy to talk to them for a few weeks... But today, go Clark-like; hurl themselves at it and who cares if someone gets in the way, you're just not stopping for that. How much abuse can you take? - you either end up a serial victim, or you bellow and kick the can over...