Undeeterred

Excellent, excellent post with analysis of a quality we rarely see around here.

Ludicrous.

Gee Geelong just know how to get it done, which will save them from total meltdown this year.

You are a dead set peanut.

Thank Christ you're not in charge.

gee that is fantastic vision. Bernie must absolutely hate him - very lucky he didn't connect with that elbow though.

Yes, but 'every time' is, well, just once.

Me too.

It's just one guy with a relatively minor injury in the scheme of things - it isn't the end of the world and it certainly isn't anywhere near how bad our injury list has been in previous years!

Was that the one we were up by about 45 points and beat them by 3 or something?

Sorry, my poor taste.

Brilliant. Thanks for that. Do you do workstation assessments for a living?

Ba doom, ching

That's just an unconscious bias in that you notice them more. We have injuries to VFL players all the time

That was my shorthand response to your exposition about how hard the players' lives are. You've said the players work 8am-5pm most days, with a day off. Let's take the week you set out on page 2 above as an example. You cannot possibly tell me that 'club recovery' on Sunday is more than a couple of hours at most. I often work a couple of hours on a weekend too and a hell of a lot of people work the whole thing. Meetings/training/weights - yes, heavy physical activity but no worse than a lot of blokes routinely put in at sites all over the place during the week. Their 'hours worked' number would be nowhere near your suggested 6 day a week, 9 hour a day job. Putting all of that aside in any case, your input into the original topic was to say that the players couldn't be expected to spend a couple of hours on a weekend watching a live game because their lives are so chock a block with their work already (substituting, obviously, 'work' for a 'career as an athlete'). Here's an idea - how about the club cancels just one of those afternoons of weights or meetings or hanging out at primary schools or, look, whatever they feel like really, and send everyone to a game of footy to watch how a decent team does it?

And I have a bad back and my eyes are stuffed because I sit in front of a computer all day. My career has given me 'injuries' too - what's your point?

Just throwing up a discussion, nothing more than that. Is that for last year as well, or just this year?

Oh boo hoo. Seriously.

Agree. I guess what I'm saying is that, regardless of that, we've had the same access to what was left as have St Kilda, Brisbane, the Bulldogs, etc etc and they're all doing the rebuild thing a hell of a lot better than us...

Fair enough

The problem is, we are generally both insipid and ordinary.

This is incorrect. We've had plenty of picks and better access to picks than a number of teams outside the expansion list who have went down later than us, and are moving up earlier. This is just excuse-making.

Bit ranty, but for once you are absolutely spot on. I can't argue with a single word of it.

Flooding.

The same thinking that made us take Scully and Trengove over Martin. Not saying you are wrong in the rest of your comments, and I think Brayshaw and Petracca will be really great players. Sometimes, though, it is worth at least talking about how we are going to look against the competition in, say, three or four years when our core youngsters will mature. We were already three years behind getting a pile of goal kicking midfielders. Now we've got them, but they are young, and the top 4-6 clubs have already been thinking about the next steps and we're still stuck behind the 8 ball. Just my view.