Diamond_Jim

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...

the local problems won't do us any good as I expect the council's longer term major expenditure plans are on hold. You would expect that there will be a major turnover of the councillors at the next election together with changes at its executive level. It's also not good for the MFC brand but I think most people will be able to disassociate our connection from the alleged shortcomings of the councillors. Unless we are dragged in by some media revelation or the like I suspect few people would know or care about our Casey presence. At a more practical level I am more interested in whether they have fixed the drainage on the oval. For half of the oval you literally sank through the surface as you walked across it. A local told me that the rumor was that the contractor never connected the underground arena drainage to the outside pipes. Apocryphal perhaps. Overall it is an excellent sporting complex (or could be) with pools , athletic tracks etc etc... but it is a loooooong way from the CBD.

They effectively killed the AFLX format last year with the ridiculous format and promo style. A pity because as you say a cause like this could have been an excellent opportunity to promote and legitimize the format in the minds of the public.

Suppose the measure for powerhouses then and now are different. Attendance wise we were ahead by miles simply because we had the MCG. Supporters of opponent teams pencilled in their MCG match simply because it was their one day of "comfort" in watching the football. Moneywise the teams were still relative amateurs I assume with the weekly pay be a few pounds at most. Training was twice a week after work etc. You didn't need big money to run a footy club perhaps. And of course at the time we were a subset of the MCC who probably controlled our purse-strings. And then we get to the big question.. geography... up until some point a teams following was largely determined by which suburb you lived in. Controlling got the northern suburbs. Carlton won the immigrants etc. Did Melbourne benefit or did we just get the male children of the silvertails who registered their kids for school and clubs at birth. Stereotype perhaps but there is a shred of truth. So I suppose we were a powerhouse in an era when perhaps it didn't matter as much.

Can't recall 1998 but definitely 1990 was anyone's.

The Northey era was probably the more enjoyable. I will never forget the open door policy to the change rooms that allowed you to go along and listen to Swoop rouse the players. The first two 87 finals and the unforgettable prelim at Waverley can never be forgotten. Daniher's era suffered from the up down form of the team. Just our luck to come up against the most successful one year team in Essendon in 2000. Many here blame Daniher for the subsequent collapse that we are really yet to emerge from as a club. Harsh.. maybe... but he did provide some great years unlike after he left.

crossing to Jimmy in the rooms... Are you there Jimmy.... are you there Yeah Harry but they locked me in the toilet ............

Good point....North are a conundrum and a big warning lesson for MFC. They have had reasonable success for a long time but have been unable to turn that success into a real boost in supporters. Probably only Hawthorn have been successful in coming from a low base to a power club and they have had incredible on field success. MFC on the other hand have gone from one of the two or three power clubs of the 50's and early 60's to the bottom four (North Bulldogs Saints and us). Not sure we can turn the ship around but a few successful seasons would certainly help paper over the cracks for a lot of us ageing supporters.