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Dunn came seventh in our BnF this year you bunch of peanuts. Take off your blinkers. He can play.

Pencil is my pick for breakout player of 2014.

I'm scared he might be curtailed by Roos next year. Roos has stated that he doesn't defend well enough, and has cut him from a list before! Hopefully they gel a bit better this time.

restraint of trade? you unshackle the finances of the AFL (the salary cap is a clear restraint of trade also), and you'll be watching collingwood vs west coast grand finals every year for the next millennia.

You think we'll get 40,000+ members without doing any marketing or social media work? Seriously dude, get a clue.

Go to every Melbourne game at the G. Generally another game at the G each weekend too, assuming a good fixture is on. Download every Dees away game from aussierul.es and watch as much as I can bear! Watch one or two other games on Tivo, with the laptop open. In all, I consume far too much footy (and still know stuff all about it!).

Exactly. Too many people on here think that being the best player makes you the captain. It's a crock. Being the most inspirational person is what makes you the captain. Whoever makes everyone else play better is the right choice. Should Buddy be the captain at the Hawks? Or Swannie at the Pies?

I think you're confusing yourself as to who the 'public' really is. Sure, the AFL doesn't often act in the manner of the 0.5% of fans who are consumed by the game enough to regularly post on forums like this or bigfooty, but those fans don't represent the wider public. Everything the AFL does is to serve the 'common denominator' footy fan who will attend a few games and watch a whole bunch of footy on TV. The interchange cap is designed to make the game more enjoyable for casual fans. The fixture is designed to appeal to casual fans. There are orders of magnitude more of this kind of footy fan - who don't care about the politics or machinations, and just want to watch footy - than there are people campaigning for perfect parity across the competition.

The love for him is exaggerated in this thread for precisely the opposite reason. I don't think me, or any of his supporters in this thread, think he's in even the best 200 players in the comp, but the way you and half of this board carry on, he wouldn't get a kick for Lalor's under 15's.

The two-plus-one nature of the deal says to me that Peter Jackson is the greatest negotiator of all time. Remember how the last four-year deal we signed turned out? Not so Flash. Jackson has not only landed the biggest fish we could have hoped for, he's done it on his terms too. What a CEO!

What, like the coaches who awarded him 3.75 points per game out of 7, the seventh best in our team (Garland was best with 4.29)? You continue to claim that your incredible ability to watch football outweighs not only all of the statistics, but also the football-watching ability of a whole group of paid professionals. It's time to admit to yourself that your confirmation bias has left you completely incapable of making a fair assessment of Dunn's play this year. You're just wrong, totally wrong.

I don't know how you overlook all the evidence that clearly indicates how wrong you are.

Sixth in the BnF is a good result for Dunny, and - may I say - well deserved. I think, at some point in future, he'll be recognised as a valuable contributor when surrounded by a good team.

I wonder if we'll have to put one on the left AND the right?

I wouldn't worry. It's used in that manner frequently enough that it's surely not long before the dictionary catches up. Have you seen the definition of 'literally' that google serves up? The second usage is - literally - the antonym of literally. Words evolve.

I've agreed with Machiavelli twice in the last five minutes! Somebody pinch me!

I agree entirely with the sentiment here, and I'm not sure that Roos would necessarily want Craig to move on. He may, but then, he may not. I'm good at what I do and I don't need someone to tell me how to do it, but I still keep a team around me that I can bounce ideas off, delegate responsibility to, trust with important tasks, etc. Unless he lands a senior gig next year, Craig is going to cost us $400K (or whatever the figure is, I believe it's in that ballpark). I don't see any reason why we shouldn't get a return on that investment, no matter how senior the senior coach is.

And Beamer isn't?

If Magner gets delisted (and if they're not going to play him, why keep a spot on the list for him), I genuinely hope another club drafts him and he tears it up. I don't see how he's any less effective than Beamer as an inside, see-the-ball-get-the-ball-pound-the-thing-vaguely-forwards kind of player. Beamer is good enough at that to be one of the better players in a midfield nearly good enough for the eight, so I can't see why Magner isn't good enough at it for the worst midfield in the league.

So you're willing to abuse other posters for supporting Dunn, but not willing to make a concrete statement as to whether Melbourne's next coach, most likely Paul Roos, will put him in the team for round 1 next year? Brave poster, you are.

I'll give you that one... I laughed. I had another thought, however. Your argument, whenever someone says they rate Dunn on the field, is that "clearly you don't know anything about football". So, turning to the stats sheet again (as I am prone to doing), we'll see that Dunn has played 117 matches since 2006, at an average of 14.6 matches per round. That would suggest that through five coaches (is it five? I'm a statistician, not a historian), however many list managers and leadership group members, Dunn has been rated enough to hold a spot in the team *most of the time*. Without doing the research, I think the games he's missed are generally due to selection rather than injury concerns, but I'm happy to be corrected with facts (something you're not keen on, I've noticed). So, by the logic of your standard response... ... am I to assume that you claim to know more about football than Daniher, Bailey, Viney, Neeld, and Neil Craig? Is that your assertion? Further, if Paul Roos does come on board next year and Dunn gets a game in round one, will you also claim that Paul Roos knows less about football than you? We need an answer to this question in particular, because I will bump this thread when the team is named for round one next year. So here's your big chance. Do you, or do you not, know more about football than Paul Roos (or whoever Melbourne's next head coach is)? Secondary, and related, question. Are you willing to stop using this arrogant, unhelpful, derogatory and fallacious argument in future, or will that stretch the limits of your boundless football intellect?

You might be leading the Demonland argumentum ad hominem award this year, so allow me to respond in kind. [censored].

What they say during the season is just theatre. Scully proved that. Their public comments are akin to politicians 'answering' questions. They speak a lot but say nothing. I think the surest sign we've landed Roos is Eade re-signing.

Ha! Because utterly pointless discussions between anonymous fans on the internet that have no effect on the operation of the club are so important when discussing less ordinary players. I'm sure all 3571 of your posts on this site have been valuable additions to humanity's body of knowledge and exceptional use of your valuable time.

I can see how this thread might give you that impression of me, but I assure you it's not quite accurate. Yes, I do love numbers, but I also recognize their limitations. What I love more than numbers is evidence, and evidence is sorely lacking where football is concerned. The one easily accessible evidence we have available is the scoreboard. It's a pretty good indicator as to which is the better team. For most other analyses, the evidence becomes more difficult to identify and quantify. The problem with football is that it's highly emotive, which makes observers even more likely to succumb to the cognitive shortcomings by which we're all afflicted even when we're calm. Players like Dunn, Zac Dawson, Ryan Schoenmakers, etc, are all victims of their supporters' availability heuristic. It's easy to remember their mistakes, because they cost goals. Thus we become more critical of them, and come to expect them to fail. Each time they do, we pat ourselves on the back for "knowing it was going to happen" and become a level more critical again. This is a failure in the wiring of our brains to objectively observe a situation. We simply aren't capable of it. No-one - except perhaps an autistic - is immune to these biases. All I'm trying to do here is remind people to consult the available evidence occasionally. It can be seen from the backlash how firmly people hold their beliefs. I remain confident from the evidence we have available that Dunn would be a successful footballer in a different (successful) team. I personally think he would play the Josh Gibson role very well, though that's just an opinion. Unless he is traded - and I doubt he will be - I guess we'll never know for sure, because we won't have concrete evidence either way (and the idea of Melbourne being a good team seems a LOOOONG way off!).