Diamond_Jim

Watching the cricket last evening I could not help thinking about the similarities between the New Zealand cricket team and the North Melbourne football club. Both have small membership base and a financial struggle but they punch way above their weight and always give you a good run for your money. That got me to thinking about other cricket teams around the world and who were their counterparts in the AFL. England was easy.... it is of course Collingwood.. the team everyone else hates. Other similarities came to mind but I am interested to see what we all think. Took me awhile to come up with a cricket team that resembled the MFC and then like a bolt from the blue I knew the answer. It is of course the West Indies. A once great team living on past glories beset by financial woes as the rest of the competition leaves the Calypso cricketers in their wake. Interested in what other "matches" people come up with.... Sri Lanka and Brisbane Lions perhaps (world beaters for a few years based on some out of the box players)

I can understand the nostalgic desire for a gathering place/social club but I cannot see how in this day and age you could ever make such a thing pay. Gone are the days of a keg out the back of the stand. Mind you it's probably an easier problem to solve than that of getting a decent training facility near the MCG.

Hi KC do you know if they have redone the drainage at the oval. It was seriously bad in recent years. Thanks

Wonder if the 20 minute half time break was related to the Tea break in cricket of 20 minutes. For soccer it's generally 15, rugby 10 and for an NFL game it's 12 minutes so there seems to be no uniformity

25% of the list... sounds normal for the MFC

not to mention the famous pre-season training thread for 2012.

Has anyone noticed a growth in independent youtube commentary for the world's mega teams. If you have a channel with around 1M followers which is not hard to imagine for the mega soccer/NBA/NFL teams you can earn (as I understand the complicated algorithm) around US$400k a year. Of course the footage would be highly controlled but commentary and fair usage is free in most countries. Hard to see how one could make it work financially for an AFL team but for cricket (especially with an Indian spin) it could be a goer.

I see it requires paid membership to read the full articles but there are certainly some interesting topics. Not sure whether the fees on the membership page are monthly or annual $6-$25 PS.. they are monthly fees

We all know that the best site for following the mighty Dees is Demonland but I would be interested to hear about other sources including developing media. I'm a big traveller and one of my go to places for research is Youtube. The product by some vloggers rivals if not exceeds anything you see on the mainstream media. But what about sport. There's the Roar which is great but are there any other quirky sites for following particular sports. Cheers

mediocrity would probably be described by most as a dramatic improvement on our present status

Geelong review prelim loss............ https://www.afl.com.au/news/267612/tomahawk-cats-revisit-preliminary-final-heartache Not much info but review it they did.

one could extend that to "dimidium saeculum horribilis"

Assuming the odds in any one year are one in two of being positive or negative, the odds of 17 years positive are around one in 65,000 (I think)

there's four players at least that could go either way during 2020.. Best 22 or delisted/traded for low value Hunt, Hannan, J Smith, O MacDonald Cusp players also in that group are Spargo and J. Wagner

The mind blowing stat in that table is what in the hell happened with GWS in 2019. It is an outlier that blows the bell curve wide open. You would also expect teams to go positive and negative on a year by year basis. The ones that don't are the ones you need look at. Other than North and West Coast (both positive) and GWS (negative) the rest on a quick look appear unremarkable.

Makes you wonder where we would be without Casey radio. Sure the club can't cover everything but it needs to think about how it features itself in a crowded market. With this game. Perhaps Livestream a quarter with a short background video. Not rocket science. Done on YouTube all the time.

well he did write his own history which helped a lot but then again so have a few others, Napoleon included

didn't end well... failed to take the power brokers along with him

On a slightly related note wouldn't it be great if the AFLNT (or whatever is its name) could become the face of summer football. I can see southern based players who are NQR flocking up north to play with the local teams. Think Big Bash..... Frankly the NT govt would be much better funding such a comp with Federal government help rather than the peripatetic likes of ourselves and the Gold Coast.

Co-emperors usually didn't end well in Roman times. On a more serious note your excellent examples do not perhaps reflect the roles of an AFL captain. What if any power do they wield. I would suggest very little unlike your examples all of which directly influence outcomes. The comparative weakness of the captaincy system can perhaps be seen in the Essendon drugs scandal and to a lesser extent in the camp debacles suffered both by the Crows and the MFC.

For those who follow these things which individual MFC players went up in the rankings during 2019. Thanks

a lot in that I can see the Board when we are 0-2 with all the usual spin but if we are say 2-4 it's almost season over... it certainly would be at say 3-6. That was what was so disappointing about 2019... you could see the season was lost relatively early. 4 -2 and I'm on the bandwagon

MFCSS by Joseph Conrad... "I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness." Heart of Darkness

"Disgraced sports scientist Stephen Dank has been charged by Northern Territory Police with offences relating to his time working at an anti-ageing business in Darwin. Mr Dank, 56, is facing fraud offences and charges of recklessly endangering serious harm and causing serious harm, NT police said in a statement." https://www.9news.com.au/national/dank-charged-over-time-at-darwin-clinic/33d81b04-2c7f-4993-a256-fb5ad8dee72c

From today's Guardian.. A society dedicated to preserving the “much-abused” apostrophe is to be shut down as its chairman said “ignorance and laziness” had won. John Richards, who worked in journalism for much of his career, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 after he retired. Now 96, Richards is calling time on the society, which lists the three simple rules for correct use of the punctuation mark. “We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/01/laziness-has-won-apostrophe-society-admits-its-defeat