Diamond_Jim

Of course we do well... they are always held in an even year !! 2000 also springs to mind

definitely worthy of a discussion. Inter club movement in the AFL is limited relative to many other world sports. Not sure why but I suspect the relatively small salary cap has something to do with it.

Frankly you would expect a few rumblings in the off field area after 2019. Their budgeted figures were massacred and it is not too much to think that their sponsor KPI's were far from maximised (ratings and finals just to mention two). The blame quite rightly fell on the coaching staff and in the main they are now gone save for number 1. Running a club with the downs and relatively occasional ups of the MFC must be hell.... (but of course the puff piece said we are now back from hell.) No one saw the possibility of 17th in 2019 nor did they see that the season would be effectively finished after so few rounds. Next time you are at a medium level MFC match count the number of super boxes that are open. We've a long way to go.

Does anyone know how the finances work for these games. Does the MFC pay the Hawks anything, a lump sum or a fee per head? Thanks

During the bye we must revisit all these fluff pieces. Could make a great montage

Agree but at 22 he'd be mad to sign a deal of that length. His next contract will be 3/4 years and the one after that will be the money contract not to say that his next deal will be cheap.

I doubt it. The contract will have a base but you can be reasonably certain that it is full of all sorts of adders and that if in year 6 he's still AA he'll be one of their top paid players. He's only 25.. so it's not like the Buddy contract that took the player out to 34 years plus. If it had been a ten year contract I think there would be more merit in your argument. From Grundy's viewpoint he has secured his "injury future" with a seven year guaranteed base of at at least $600k plus the upside. I suspect that the base for the first two or three years might even be higher than the remaining four. Will we offer Gawn a similar deal. I doubt it. He's 3 years older than Grundy. Our decision will be four or the five years that Gawn will probably ask for. I'd be happy to give Gawn 3 years guaranteed high money with two year lower plus incentives.

some great comments in that thread. Noticed this one.... but who was Barry? Master Demon Members 5,811 4,595 posts Gender:Male Report post #331 Posted November 22, 2012 You forgot Barry. I know you said "etc" but Hogan and Barry remain as "twins".

Agree but I think that is what makes Grundy so valuable and much the same with Gawn. Decent if not very good ruckmen but also very good around the ground. It effectively gives a team another player. Your point though abut the importance of ruckmen is well made. Going forward I see the perfect ruck combination being two or even three talls who are primarily backmen or forwards rotating through the ruck position. It's another example of the modern game making some positions irrelevant eg. centre, half forward flank, wing

I suspect the contract has many KPI's and indices together with a large guaranteed base. https://www.afl.com.au/news/366351/pie-for-life-in-demand-big-man-signs-monster-long-term-deal "The ruckman, who was set to become a free agent at the end of this year, will now be tied to the Magpies until the end of the 2027 season. Negotiations saw the offer jump from an initial three-year term to five years before the Magpies bumped it to seven years, which Grundy had always been chasing."

Is this what we class as an interrupted pre-season ?

booze is rather hard to find in Bangladesh and is super expensive. I think of it as my dry month. Much easier to find and affordable in India. you would think with all that sobriety the road toll would be nil... but ........ I take the local motor bike service around Dhaka as the cars get stuck in the traffic. Hard to say which is worse.... Saigon or Dhaka

it has second and third class as well. Up front on the middle level is the first class seating area. Best river views in the world for a few dollars. Mind you finding out the boat schedule and buying tickets is an artform. Self conducted tours of the engine room are a must and the giant paddles are shielded by a bit of chickenwire. No alcohol I'm afraid.

This is the famous Rocket steamer that has plied the lower reaches of the rivers of Bangladesh since around 1880. First class cabin is around ten dollars for a couple of days. Bangladesh makes India look orderly but it's a great place

Off to Dhaka next week where the air is about the same as here most of the year. Dhaka sits on a magnificently wide river and men row you across the river for 50 cents if you want the whole boat or ten cents if you share. By comparison the Ganges is crystal clear.

There were also zones within the city of Melbourne itself. They originally came into force in 1916 and remained until at least the sixties. The country was however a free for all until the mid sixties. "The VFL’s response was to zone rural Victoria and the Riverina of New South Wales in a similar manner to metropolitan Melbourne. Because of the sparseness of Australia’s rural population, the country zones related not to the player’s address, but rather to the league in which he played. This difference made zone boundaries effectively impossible to adjust, and was a critical component of the failure of country zoning. The VFL was aware that discrepancies existed in the strength of each zone, and it was originally planned that the zones would be rotated every year so that each club would obtain a chance of receiving the best young country players. However,Carlton and Hawthorn lodged complaints with the VFL, as they had productive zones and were naturally unwilling to give them up for less productive ones,[1] so the zones remained the same from the inception of country zoning until it was abolished in 1986. There was also no provision for demographic changes which occurred in the various country zones, which exacerbated the problems mentioned above." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_(Australian_rules_football)

disappointing but no panic stations... just the usual MFCSS resignation

So given the number of bush fire charities... some National, some State based.... is there any word on how the proceeds will be divided.

would we now be third or fourth division?

On that basis you would say that North is a largely successful team and yet they may well soon be fighting for their very existence if and when we move to odd team numbers with a Tasmanian based team.

depends which season you see as the aberration.. 2018 (the last six odd weeks) or 2019 (a bad version of 2017). If it's the former you would expect to see us splitting our win loss ratio with the top 8 and beating the bottom four convincingly. With a modicum of luck that is top 4. If 2017/2019 is a better measure then top 8 is stretch. The list will not get much better. Our "golden youngsters" of Oliver Petracca and Brayshaw should be hitting top form and Gawn is still going well. The older brigade of May, Hibberd, Jetta will to varying degrees decline as Jones has. Not much coming through unless you count last year's draft and we sold off our 2020 first round pick. After a lacklustre finals series the jury is out on Tomlinson but with Langdon they might provide a better balance to our goal leaking gameplan. Would feel a lot more confident if we had a fit Hogan in the side but no such luck. We should not miss Lewis but we will. Sadly I think we scrape into the top 8 and meander along in the river of irrelevancy that seems to be the inevitable fate of the MFC. Would be nice to be wrong. Like you I wouldn't mind a premiership or two.

and that's why some balanced negativity on this forum is great to read. Not as though we get much press coverage anyway.

sorry... you may well be right. The Casey Demons VFLW side train there but I am not sure about the MFC AFLW team. The info on the net had pictures of them training at Gosch's Paddock but that may have been a one off.

but we don't use them other than the occasional visit. Even the listed MFC players who make up half the Casey team train at Gosch's paddock.

A common line through this thread seems to be that the list which Northey had was not as good as that enjoyed by Daniher. With this I tend to agree. On the Goodwin note I think short of a figurehead full forward (Neitz) the present list largely rivals that which Daniher had. He has it all ahead of him in the next six to twelve months. The measure of a good coach is of course to get more out of the combined unit than each individual could contribute if acting alone. Northey certainly did that...