poita

Ego is the key word with Viney (and a few of his teammates). There is absolutely no need for Viney to take on tacklers or try and crash through packs the way he does. He might have got away with it in junior football as the hardest nut on the field, but it doesn't work at AFL level. I still think he can be a really good player, but he needs to play the percentages a lot better than he does at present.

I would have said no re tanking until 6:30 last night, now I'm not sure. We are truly awful, but there is no accounting for those selections.

That team is a [censored] disgrace and it is an embarrassment to everyone connected with the club that they have let it get to this point. Woeful drafting and list management, terrible injury management and pathetic selection have combined into one total [censored] storm. If you lose players you bring in the next in line for the position, you don't just throw everything up in the air and say let's not play a forward line this week. If it is good enough for Clarkson to say "you lose a soldier, you replace him with another one", then it is certainly good enough for me. Preuss and Keilty may not be great footballers, but they'll generally give a contest and they are certainly both better value than Spargo and Chandler ever will be at this level. Let's play Goody's Selection Bingo: players selected with injury / fitness issues - Melksham at the very least players selected with no VFL form - Spargo & Chandler ignore the players who performed well in the VFL last week - Keilty, Wagner & Preuss named in best players Goody's favourites in for no apparent reason - Neal-Bullen no key forwards - its not as though there aren't any options at Casey no ruck support (yes Sydney don't have a ruckman, but why not capitalise on a clear advantage?) And, if somehow we manage to beat Sydney, that's not due to great coaching or selection. It's an indication that they want to win even less than we do.

Carlton don't actually need to achieve anything at this point - if there is sufficient hype around them, they become an attractive proposition for someone like Coniglio who has his hand out for big money. Bring in some experienced recruits + the continued development of young players + favourable draw from bottom 4 finish = Carlton challenging for top 8 next year.

Good for Kade and I hope he plays well, but that is a ridiculous decision. Assuming the stats below are accurate, he has kicked 2 goals in the past 6 weeks and has never had more than 8 kicks in a game at VFL level. He comes into the senior side off a game with 5 effective possessions. The bar for getting an AFL game has never been lower. http://websites.sportstg.com/team_info.cgi?action=PSTATS&pID=206009870&client=1-118-10449-518179-26138799

God forbid the supporters (ie those who tip their hard earned money in each year and go along to watch the team play) actually have an opinion on what is happening to the club they love. You might be better suited to the opera where you can politely clap the performers at the end of each act.

Totally agree. Jetta was the same. Hannan before that. And what exactly has been the point of having Melksham hobble around the field over the past couple of weeks?

Whatever Jennings' skill set and knowledge may be, clearly something isn't working this year on and off the field and things need to change in a major way. Good luck to him if he can move higher in the industry. I'm no fan of Goodwin, but clearly he has some credits in the bank from 2018. He now has the opportunity to surround himself with the right people of his choosing for 2020. From there it is all on his shoulders.

Less than 32K to a game on a Saturday afternoon at the MCG against our oldest rival. A week after 38K against the competition's most popular and in form team. We could fall short of 20K this week if the weather forecast is poor. The appalling performances of the coaches and players this year has now gone far beyond simply writing off 2019. This season will take us years to recover from, both on and off the field. Gate receipts, memberships, sponsorships - the financial cost will be horrendous. The club simply has to give members some hope for next season if it wants people to rejoin. The same ordinary players making the same basic errors under the same highly flawed game plan week after week is serving no purpose. I could perhaps cop some end of year pain if there was some promising young talent coming through, or signs of a more sustainable game plan emerging, but there is nothing to get enthused about. The less said about the game the better, but the thing that summed up the match (and the season) better than anything else was the regular sight of Steele Sidebottom at centre bounces with the entire Southern Stand wing to himself whilst Nathan Jones pushed back to defence with zero impact. Even more comical was when we copped a warning for not starting with 6/6/6 because Dunkley wandered across to Sidebottom at one point whilst Jones was still covering grass on the point of the square. A clear sign that coaches and players either have no idea or don't care (or probably both).

If Lever was anywhere near as good as his reputation would suggest, he would (arguably) be worth what we paid for him. But the reality is that he is currently a mediocre player in a mediocre team, and there is a fair argument that we overpaid. Forget what Lever achieved in 2017. Adelaide was clearly the best team in the competition for 25 of the 26 weeks. They didn't concede many inside 50s and those that they did concede were subject to plenty of pressure. In Talia, Kelly and others, Adelaide had a very strong, reliable defense which allowed Lever play off his man and be third man up on a regular basis. Rating him on that basis is like testing a car on an autobahn and applying the performance specs to a dirt track. The Melbourne side of 2019 leaks inside 50s like a sieve and most of them are under zero pressure from the midfield. Our defenders are unreliable and inconsistent with their effort, which means that they are hard pressed to worry about their own man, let alone cover other players when Lever decides to go wandering off his opponent. Lever is primarily a liability in this side because he doesn't have the body strength to stand next an opponent. Hence he has to play from behind, so when the opposition deliver the ball well as Collingwood did to Mihocek on Saturday, he stands no chance. All the intercept marks in the world count for nothing if he is conceding multiple goals to his direct opponent. I'm not sure what he was doing in the 12 months he couldn't play football, because he clearly hasn't been spending time in the gym building upper body strength. Plus his kicking is putrid.

What insurance does Tim Smith provide? He's injured for about 16 weeks every year.

My son yesterday received an invitation to a pre match function before the Sydney game for first year members. Nice touch - apart from the fact that the function is in a bar, finishes at 7:50pm on a Friday night and he is 9 years old. I have been a member of this club for 30+ years and have never been invited to a club function. Why are long term, loyal members continually taken for granted by the club whilst first year members on 3 game memberships are given preferential treatment? This sort of stuff is why we will never be anything other than a middle of the road club.

Vandenberg, J.Smith, Kolodjashnij - we can afford to keep one of those injury plagued players on our list as a project player. The rest can go. If Vandenberg is not kicking the ball by Christmas, hopefully he does the right thing by the club and retires. We've certainly looked after him well enough over the journey. We clearly would given that we gave him a 3 year contract on the basis of 7 games in 2 years.

Because over the next couple of years we will lose Lewis, Jones, Jetta, Hibberd and Garlett, most of whom are regulars, from an already poor team and the replacements are not obvious. We should have quality young players with a couple of years on the list ready to take over when the time comes.

There were most likely less than 10,000 Melbourne supporters there on Saturday night out of a supposed membership base of 52,000. We were massively outnumbered. It was a disgraceful turnout, irrespective of how bad the team has been playing.

The Josh Jenkins who is 31 before next season starts? I'd be disappointed if we didn't ask serious questions re Patton at the asking price.

Is it only Melbourne supporters who are happy with supposedly honourable losses? I'm surprised the players didn't get a standing ovation at half time for showing the required level of intensity for a half. I'm pretty sure Fremantle didn't turn up against Geelong thinking they would just fumble and bumble their way to a 5 goal loss. Carlton fell behind against West Coast after half time, but at least showed regained momentum at times thereafter. Ditto St Kilda. Ditto the Bulldogs. All teams that we should be well ahead of in our development. Scoring Shots 28 v 15 Inside 50s 70 v 37 Marks Inside 50 19 v 9 The final margin flattered us and Richmond should have won that game by over 10 goals. Their goal kicking was the only thing that kept it close. 39 tackles in those conditions is pathetic - the number of times our players just halfheartedly waved their arms at a Richmond player as they strolled by was extraordinary. 14 players with zero or one tackles for the night. Gawn was excellent around the ground, Fritsch good up forward, Petty did some decent things, Dunkley kicked two good goals. Very hard to find positives beyond that. Oliver is so predictable with his short handpasses to teammates under pressure; Brayshaw can't find the ball; Jones & Viney are like the generals of old, fighting the war from the safety of their tents 10 miles from the front line; Lever can't kick and won't be accountable for his opponent; Preuss is a liability. Three more honourable losses to go and we can lay this season to rest.

So why did he come back at all? He clearly hasn't been fit at any stage this season. Shocking player management.

This one could be ugly - hard to see where Casey get their goals from.

Good to see we are carrying on with the ridiculous changes - why change a season long habit at this point? Two defenders come out so we bring in four forwards. I assume that means Fritsch will play back again, which is utterly stupid given his recent form. Yet we have Hore sitting in the VFL. No issue with Oscar playing - at least he can get on the field most weeks, which is more than can be said for May and Lever. Tim Smith must be the most fragile human this side of the bubble boy. What's wrong with him this week - broken fingernail, chapped lips? Surely he is done as an AFL footballer. Are the club going to pull out the same utter BS about Jetta's unrelated knee injuries again? It is indisputable that we played him injured earlier in the season which led him to missing 10 weeks or so of football. We brought him back too early and now he is out again. Utterly pathetic. Put him in cotton wool for the rest of the year and get him right for round 1 next year. Kennedy-Harris finally gets another chance after being brought back too early against Adelaide. Yet again, terrible player management. At this point he has to better value than Neal-Bullen, but why has it taken him two months to get the switch made? That said, why haven't we given ANB a different role at some point to get him more involved in the play.

It would be such a Melbourne act to sell the farm for a player at the peak of his powers and highest value (as we did with Lever). The only way from there is down. A better managed club would find a player who has dropped in value and back themselves in to revive them with a change of scenery (eg Essendon with Stringer). Of course, the top clubs just use free agency to stock up - an avenue which is not available to perennial underachievers.

Is a supplement still a supplement if it makes you perform worse? Perhaps whatever we are taking should be called a decrement.

I can't believe we are paying the bloke $800K a year to not take one of the opposition's best two forwards. Oscar McDonald gets relentlessly criticised around here, but he isn't playing on players the calibre of Doulton Langlands as Lever is.

You know what they say about ifs and buts ...

If it is in a trade for Lever and his giant pay packet, then it sounds good to me.