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Will people PLEASE stop cherry picking players taken 5, 10 or 50 picks later and saying "we could have had this guy"!? It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how player development works. NOBODY realised Rockliff was going to be any good, let alone a total ball magnet. It's like buying a lotto ticket and then saying "oh, I should have picked THOSE numbers" when your ticket loses. It makes absolutely no sense.

Yep, when it fit, the top leaked. Now it's shrunk so much I can't even get it on! I meant order one from the UK ages ago and haven't got around to it, so it's a sunny-days-only vehicle at the moment! Mum was an only child, and I reckon she was probably considered the spoiled rich kid, driving that car, even though her parents weren't really that well off. The old Austin motor is still chugging along, too. Never rebuilt, never even had the head off it. The gearbox is starting to get a bit sloppy, though. She gets stuck in first gear, sometimes. Not fun in traffic!!

If we're talking old (and first) cars, especially English ones, let me chime in to say that I've still got my first car in the garage - a '73 HQ ute with a 308 - and I also still have my mum's first car, a '63 Austin Healey Sprite. It's got very little power, AWFUL brakes, and bumpsteer you wouldn't believe, but I love it.

Real facts? Sure. A percentage of young men go off the rails. A percentage of young men are black. Some intersection of those sets will see young black men go off the rails, as Garlett clearly has. You're making this a race issue, but it isn't one. You're inventing correlations where they don't exist. Dayle Garlett is a stupid and irresponsible young man. There are literally tens of thousands of other stupid and irresponsible young men in Australia, who just so happen to not be black. The first person you could think of that reminded you of him was a white female from a big city, which is instructive of the actual problem. Drug use is predominantly a problem of western culture. Indigenous Australians have their challenges, that much is certain. Let's not start blaming them for our problems too.

I'd just be happy if they turned off the music between quarters. I'm sick of having to yell at the person right next to me. Oh, and you can't play atmosphere out through a set of speakers. The crowd noise coming from the PA system before the first bounce of each quarter is cringeworthy.

Right. And there's also tens or perhaps hundreds of cases of caucasian players wanting to go home. In your original post (which I criticised for being racist), you collected all indigenous players (under the umbrella "these guys"), and then made a bunch of blanket statements and assumptions about their individual characters, attitudes and playing styles based on their membership of that group... which is the very definition of racism. Making assumptions about a person based on their race. For every example of an indigenous player that wanted to leave (Dom Barry) you can find another who wanted to stay (JKH). For every example of an indigenous player who was an attack-only downhill skier (Jurrah) you can find another who is a defensive beast (Nev Jetta). There is no basis in fact to make the assumptions about 'these guys' that you're making. And the term "racist" doesn't in this case mean that you hate them and want them eliminated through genocide or anything extreme like that, it simply means that you're making (incorrect) assumptions about them based on their race. I doubt the claim that indigenous players represent a significantly increased drafting risk would be backed by the statistics (though I don't have access to them to check - and I suspect you don't either).

If he doesn't take the mark, there's a 50/50 loose ball... and you're saying that is preferable to Howey having to take 3 seconds to get to his feet and prepare for a pass? That's absolutely ridiculous.

You do realise this is a spectacularly racist post, I hope.

It's your imagination. "A watched pot never boils", and you spend your time watching Melbourne FC. The other clubs are holding your attention so your brain doesn't process the time passing in the same way.

Yeah, fancy having empathy!? People are just weird. I want my football team to succeed at the expense of human well-being. In fact, I'd be glad if all the opposition players died of polio.

You might find this surprising, but when you delist someone, you have to replace them, and you can't just take players from opposing team's playing lists. We clearly don't have the best list right now, but chopping everyone and replacing them with VFL players and kids isn't going to help either. List management is a long game.

A single incident does not a trend make! (Especially when one of the most insipid teams in history is involved).

This whole 'nominating clubs' thing has gotten beyond a joke.

Not so. On games played over the career, from pick 15 to pick 40 the line of best fit is almost flat.

Malceski from grand finalists to 12th. Dale Thomas from top 4 to laughing stock. Buddy left an absolute powerhouse. I'm sorry, but the evidence to support the claim made in the OP is beyond flimsy. There's only one bottom club who's been really hammered by free agency - us. Other than that, it's pretty balanced across the league.

Perfectly put.

Gotta hand it to him, he speaks well on camera for a young bloke.

If I may play second devils advocate here... Y'all are drawing some major conclusions from some pretty limited data sets (yes, I'm a budding statistician, sue me). In any situation where the standard deviation is relatively large compared to the mean, and the sample size is small, you'll regularly see data points a LONG way from the mean. At the moment, the number of free agent moves (not including delistings which aren't really the same thing) is less than 20. That's a tiny sample size. With the exception of Melbourne, the trend of movement from "big teams" to "small teams" or vice versa is basically non-existent. We are the only club exhibiting an enormous variance from the mean. Usually what will happen in such a case is called "regression to the mean". As more data points are added, everything tends to move closer to the mean. Melbourne's free agency fortunes will likely follow the same path. (Incidentally, you can see this data trend commonly occur in another area of footy - player performance. You know when a kid comes out and plays an absolute blinder on debut, but then seems to get worse until he's an average player? David Warner is an excellent example. The reverse can also be true - Kade Simpson I believe it was played THREE whole games without getting a touch. That's a LONG way from the mean and a highly unlikely event, but it happened even though he's a skilled player, and eventually he regressed to the mean as you'd expect and he's a perfectly good footballer). In short, there's probably nothing wrong with free agency, we've just been unlucky so far (brought on largely by our own incompetence, I'd suspect).

These two rules were not brought in for the same purpose at all. The sub rule was implemented because the probability of a team winning the game after losing a man in the first quarter plummeted to almost zero. It has very successfully resolved that issue. The interchange cap was implemented because the combination of unlimited interchanges and massively increased player fitness allowed players to swarm the contest all over the ground. The rule was clearly introduced with a very high cap (significantly higher than almost all teams average per game) so that the teams and fans could get used to it, before the number would be reined in over time to actually start affecting the game. Whether it will function effectively or not at reducing congestion remains to be seen. The cap probably needs to be halved (or even less) before having the desired effect. So, the purpose of the two rules is different. The cause of them might be related - teams have realised that playing positional footy is tactically outdated, and having the bulk of the side cover the entire ground is a much more effective method of play. Frankly, other than the introduction of zones, I can't see this ever changing back. Introducing rules to maximise the effect of fatigue might reduce congestion by reducing the optimum number of players at the contest (because you need some further away to receive the ball, because otherwise the team is too fatigued by the end of the game), but we won't know until that variable has been tested. Yes, the sub rules sucks for the kid that only plays for 20 minutes, but it doesn't suck as much as knowing you're almost certainly going to lose when a midfielder gets knocked out at the opening bounce. Personally, I reckon the idea of 4 subs, no interchanges sounds brilliant. If a cap of 60 rotations was likely to reduce the number of players at the contest by, say, one or two, I reckon a "4 subs no interchange" rule would drop it by three or four. That would see the game open right up, and the fresh players would be able to play some exciting bursts out of defence and down a wing when the rest of the field is struggling to keep up.

Trade? No-one is going to give up a draft pick or player for a kid they could probably get with the last pick in the rookie draft.

I had a good vibe about him at the end of last year. His back issues were sorted, he got on the park and played a little bit of decent footy, I thought he could come on strong. D'oh!

Runs harder than any other player on our list.

Can't link to any specific examples but Nev is absolutely prepared to leave his player and help out a teammate if he thinks it's likely to benefit the team. He's not a "shut down my man and the rest of the team can worry about their own stuff" kind of a player, in my opinion.

Incidentally, his horse-collar tackle on Garlett earlier this year was the best thing I've ever seen.

List of Spencil's attributes which are AFL standard: Height Strength Aggression Tackling Attitude The last one is the crucial cog, I reckon, and because of it I'm backing him in to become a player despite not coming on this year in the way that I had hoped.