Dwight Schrute

I hope it puts 2022 into perspective for us. winning back to back flags is soo hard, the cats from a conditioning stand point look miles away from the teams they've played. i suspect a lot of them are carrying niggles and just don't have the run in their legs yet, they'll get there, but it's really challenging to build the fitness base when the season has started, it's a bit like starting a road trip with 3/4 of a tank. I suspect they'll rotate and manage their players a lot to try to catch up with the pack, which is probably a mistake we made in hindsight, not managing the challenges of that well enough.

Even when fully fit, it's not clear to me that he's an obvious best 22 player. i suspect the club likes his potential upside and ability to play multiple positions, but i'm with you, not sure i'd have given him 2 more.

Sad reality is Brisbane are mentally soft, they can't handle a hungry team coming at them, and they're just not that well coached. they're going to be 0-2 after this weekend, they'll beat up on enough lesser teams to play finals but they won't fire a shot again this off season

Brisbane are going to come out absolutely breathing fire, this is going to be a much tighter game. I still think we get the job done, our backs will make it very tough for their forwards to take enough marks to kick a winning score, and all 3 have very litttle impact once the ball hits the ground. so they'll rely on the smalls getting at least half of their score. on the other side i don't think their defense will be able to match up on us well enough and guys will continuously bob up and kick goals. Dees by 21

I don't think we need to death ride Fremantle. they've just let too many players walk out the door, upset their chemistry and i've heard a lot of people over there aren't stoked that LJ is one of their highest paid players given how inconsistent he will be for the next 2-3 years at least. This is Peter Bell trying to stroke his Ego but it's IMO upset a club that was otherwise building nicely

Oliver, Petracca and Kozzie will be our starting and best combination by years end. Mr Pickett is ready to absolutely explode as a player

Wait til he sees what that bloke in the number 5 is going to do to them Saturday night.

we're going to belt them... Dees by 59

I hope the club is having a serious look/think about Ben McKay as a long term Steven May replacement, not that it has anything to do with the Doggies game

The Dogs should be far more worried about how they match up against our inside mids than we should be about their tall forwards. No Dunkley leaves a heavy load on Libba and i think we'll see a similar situation to previous carlton sides where the obvious pressure on one bloke hurts the team massively.

@Roost it far can you please keep repeating that we're going to win the next 5 flags and kozzie will sign on for 6 years?

I actually rate Norths backline. i know they're going off stats but i think it's the one area they're not so bad

Big fan of some new blood within the team, both lads provide some zip, Lauries skills and decision making are spargo esc, it's definitely clear the club are really keen to make sure the kicking inside 50 isn't an issue this season.

Haha i've got no actual information on this one beyond clubs and particularly Melbourne are really excited about Kozzies improvement and how much damage he can do spending more time in the middle. he's genuinely challenging the front liners for time in there already.

1. Brisbane (will absolutely smash lower teams and have a crazy %) 2. Melbourne 3. Geelong 4. Sydney 5. Dogs 6. Port Adelaide 7. Collingwood 8. Carlton Premiers: Melbourne Runner up: Dogs Brownlow: Christian Petracca Rising star: Cameron McKenzie Spoon: Hawks

I really feel for these young blokes, imagine being 18, 19, 20 barely able to cook your own toast in the morning, and then being asked to move to the other side of the country and having multiple major organisations offering you enormous sums of money and having to weight that up. it's admittedly a good problem to have, but geez it'd be a bit to work through For the record i reckon Kozzie will stay, my read is he and his manager are expecting Kozzie to improve quite a bit this year and as such his value may also jump, i suspect the delay is about 80% about getting the best possibly contract and 20% making sure Melbourne the city and club are the right fits for him, though i reckon just about any manager in Australia would be trying to get him to stay given we seem likely to be around the mark and possibly winning some more silverware in the next few

Pretty keen to get along to a few more games this year, the last few i haven't managed to attend as many in person as i'd like, possibly post covid anxieties.

I reckon Freo drop away and just miss the 8

I don't think the amount of talls in the opposition team really will have much of a bearing on how we play, we'll try to win it out of the middle and put them under a lot of pressure, make them kick it long and high and let our team defense do it's thing. I'd suspect Gawn will go behind the ball pretty early in the game but beyond that it'll be more about beating them on the inside where i think they're a little thin without dunkley

I don't understand the hype on the Tigers. i see no evidence at all to suggest they're a legitimate premiership threat.

On some level if feels like a game plan like we had in 2022 is more suited to a team that doesn't have the same level of talent as other teams, but is looking to close the gap. I'd say we are right up there in terms of talent so we can afford to have a more assertive gameplan based on the teams values

I must admit i didn't realize until the last couple of weeks how good a footballer Lachie Hunter actually is, getting him for a future 3rd round pick is incredible. He's a serious chance to be the best off season recruit of the year, he will not only add a huge amount to our team, but i think he'll take a lot of pressure off Langdon. teams did really hurt us by tagging Langdon at times. Lachie will make that much much harder

Seems to be quite a lot of Hype around the dogs and a lot of commentators thinking they might bounce back to their 2021 form and push for top 4. I think we will beat them up around the midfield, the two rucks will be very mean to poor Tim English and those two forwards won't get much in the way of silver service because of our pressure. On paper they're a very good team though and should be good enough to play finals, i just think we're in that next level above them with Geelong and maybe Brisbane

To me, the Tassie model always made more sense with a relocation, though I'm not surprised no team was putting their hand up for it. Hopefully, they have a really open-minded look at the format of the competition to make it work, I'm coming around to the idea of more games, but shorter, and playing potentially during the week as well, part of the issue is all of the games being bunched together always leaves the bye as an annoying challenge to deal with

Another flag. anything less is a failure and those are the lofty expectations we should all embrace. this list is primed.