Lucifers Hero

Guess at Coaches split: 5/5 Petracca 3/3 Jackson 4/1 Bowey and Miller 2/2 Oliver The rankings look correct but the differing views of Bowey and Miller are a bit of a surprise.

Well! That's the last time I do a 'What they are saying...' thread. 😉

I doubt anyone will be watching the meaningless SA Derby which is on Foxtel not FTA.

He was standing up🙂

It wasn't unreasonable to doubt his value to the team, after all he was asked to look for opportunities elsewhere at end of 2019 2020. To his enormous credit he turned his game around and now there is no doubt about his value to the team. Received a contract extension and is now, one of the first picked.

He is smiling. He will re-sign.😉

The pessimism isn't my editing. From 'Bomberblitz': I think the Dees will be a bit flat coming back from the GC on a six day break. If we bring today’s effort, we should give a good account for ourselves, but the Demons will do enough and win by 3-4 goals We haven’t been 0-3 since 1967 we are going to get completely obliterated no matter who we put on the park. heppell on fritsch is the stuff of nightmares For gods sake, can someone please just start a COVID outbreak at the hanger so 38 players are in health and safety protocols and the AFL call the game off? Going to be brutal. Oliver and Petracca are going to get 50 touches each and Brown will kick 10. merrett out only takes the margin from 60 to 80 points Who cares whos in…we have a bottom six that should be in the vfl but are playing so…Dees will smash us. With our unbelievable decision that we are so good we don’t need to use taggers, Petracca must be really looking forward to this week’s game. His main concern would be leather poisoning. ANNOUNCE HS PROTOCOLS FOR MELBOURNES BEST 22. The most hopeful comments: I think the Dees will be a bit flat coming back from the GC on a six day break. If we bring today’s effort, we should give a good account for ourselves, but the Demons will do enough and win by 3-4 goals. We’ll see. We beat them in a great Friday night game at the MCG in 2019. Lost narrowly in a dead rubber game for both clubs (at Metricon) in 2020 and then pressed them deep into the last quarter in our game last year before eventually going down by 11 points. Some questionable decisions also went their way in the second half. We know they’re a terrific team but I don’t think we are going to be overawed. From 'Bigfooty': Just want to see us be competitive and have someone run with Petracca. Cant believe Truck's comments about not tagging Neale. Horror draw to start the season but doesn't seem we were ready for the season anyway. There's a real stench about the team, which to me, has come out of nowhere given how positive last season was. Old habits are back, unfortunately. This will be a big loss and will effectively kill off the season It’s the stench of having sky high expectations, the second most difficult fixture in the league, and a team full of babies expected to pull off a miracle. I think we’ll go okay this week. I kind of hope shiel is out for another week so we get to see a pure midfield game from caldwell. If lever doesn’t play again this week the game will be a lot closer than many predict. I'm not all doom and gloom like it seems so many others are here, we're still a very inexperienced team who only beat one top 8 team last year, playing Geelong, Brisbane and Melbourne to start the year is no free ride even though the effort in Round 1 was poor. Like it's been mentioned already we won several key areas on the weekend so if we bring a similar output and convert a bit better there's no reason we can't compete and finish within 5 goals. To their credit I didn't see any disrespect. Probably just grudging respect. A bit of humour here and there was refereshing.

There has been a few well deserved articles today about his game. He won Fox's Golden Fist award this week. That is a mickey mouse fun thing but still good recognition. Collectively, they add up to having his name in the RS conversation. I can't think of any eligible player who played better this week so he has to be the nominee. Keep going at this rate and it will be tough to overlook him, despite the glamour boys being hailed as young stars.

Free tickets available today: AFLW Members, 2:00pm (local) | General Public 4:00pm (local). I also would have preferred Casey as it is our fortress. Casey is an MCG sized ground. Anyone know how The Gabba size compares to the MCG?

Luckily he just signed on for a few more years until 2024!

Some players took heavy knocks (Brayshaw, Petracca, Gawn, Bowey and Rivers) so it is understandable they would slow down, make mistakes or 'looked gassed'. I can't agree the decision to defend was to conserve energy for next week as it would be more fatiguing to do all the defensive things than to attack. Tackling, chasing, stoppages and all the 1% require a fair amount of physicality. We could have simply slowed the game down, played tempo footy and done less energetic attacking if the goal was to conserve engergy. And we used only 72 or our allowed 75 interchanges. Why leave them on the table if some players were 'gassed'? If anything, it looked like we were adopting the Burgess principle of 'building physical resilience'. After all we had played only one game in 6 months and that was 10 days earlier so probably needed the workout. We will never know the reason Goodwin responded as he did but I'm still of the view that he was fair dinkum and the more likely reason is that the last quarter 'defend' was to test and refine an end of game tactic. He could have simply said that our 5 pts in the last was inefficiency in front of goal. Btw, Ess will also be on a 6 day break and it was quite warm here on Saturday afternoon albeit without the high humidity, they did a mountain of running and had injuries to Cox and Merrett. We knew all that going into our game. I'm not sure our coaches and fitness folk were too fussed about facing an emotionally and physically battered and bruised team next week.

I agree. I was a bit surprised by his frankness. He would usually just play a straight bat to it. Regarding the tactic, I reckon he valued testing end of game defence ideas and developing good habits when defending a lead. We were caught out a few times last year, namely the Adelaide match. Nothing beats practicing a tactic in real match conditions.

Too early to call 'Time' on Ratten's coaching career? Buckley available. Has said he doesn't want to leave Victoria while his sons are at school. But would he want it?

An interesting insight into our game tactics from Goodwin's press conf. He was asked about our trouble scoring in the last qrtr when we kicked 5 pts. His response (paraphrasing): "We didn't need to score to win the game. We had built up a lead that we needed to defend".

Based on Goodwin's press conf there are unlikely to be any unforced changes. He said Lever and Hibberd will be assessed. Their were no hints of other changes; may depend on recovery. Goodwin said he was very happy with our defence vs GCS , understandable as we kept them close to our goal of 60'ish points. Ess are missing a few fwds and with Cox out they won't have many talls. So we could give Lever another weeks rest.

Has he ever had 20+ touches? He isn't in the midfield. On your criteria he would never get back into the side!

As I said, I think it is all to do with lack of opp pressure for the likes of Coll, Hawks, Ess and to a lesser extent Carlton.

Can't agree with the first line. It isn't because Salem is left footed. When the team changes ends the whole team changes 'side' but the formation stays the same.

A Swans fan marked Buddy's 1,000th goal and excitedly left the stadium but lots of vision of him appeared in social media and the Swans implored the fan to give it to Buddy in return for personally handing the ball to Buddy at training. After the social media vision he may not have had much choice but kudos to the guy for giving it back.

While we had a lesser defence they had King and Rankine out so they weren't able to take advantage of our weakness. They also played on a 6 day break and a flight back from Perth. Under the circumstances they did exceptionally well.

Cox and Merrett finished on crutches yesterday. Merrett's injury reported as 'minor, at this stage'. For us, Rivers' heavily bandaged leg at the start of the game didn't bode well. He looked very proppy late in the game. Hope Gus' shoulder is ok. He looked a bit shell-shocked (pain, not concussion) when he came on to replace Rivers and even forgot his helmet.

Winning scores so far: Carlton 16.6 vs Bulldogs Swans 17.5 vs Geelong Collingwood 15.10 vs Crows Lions 15.7 vs Essendon Hawks 19.6 vs Port Demons 12.10 vs GCS It looks like phenomenally accurate kicking by the victors (not so much the dees). To me the goal efficiency above looks like poor defence, especially fwd and midfield pressure to allow such scores. It is not just the number of goals, when very few points are kicked imv it says there is little pressure inside d50 on the ball carrier coming in or when the ball hits the ground near goal. Some of the winning teams: Pies, Hawks and Carlton have easy draws by virtue of the 2021 ladder position which will help them this year. I'll wait 'til they play some of the better defensive teams to see where they sit. Is there such a thing as a 'pressure' ladder?

So far not much competition for this week's nominee. But the powers who vote these things probably figure he has a premiership medallion and there are more 'glamorous' players this year. They like it when a top 5 pick wins rather than a pick in the 20's albeit would make a better story. Would Bowey care? Nup!!

I would like to see a positional change for Bowey. Langdon hasn't played to his normal level lately which is probably because Salem isn't there. They are a wonderful link-up combo. Bowey played an excellent and attacking game so I would like him to play on Langdon's ie the attacking, side of the ground rather than the defensive side. Bowey has the vision, ability to stop and prop and the kicking skills we need on the attacking side. On the attacking side he would be in a better position to take May's kick ins as Salem normally does. We are missing Salem and while Rivers was the person to replace him no-one has really stepped into his role. The closest we can do imv is to put Bowey on Salem's side of the ground. That would enable Langdon to get back to his best.

Who did he tag?