Deecisive

Melbourne over the last 7 years has had a pretty amazing player list, that we have supplemented with some good draft picks, or trades. That list is dwindling, the drafting and trading of players has probably not been as effective in the last couple of years and we are loosing key players to retirement, injury, or movement to other clubs. our window of opportunity is sadly diminishing. i truly hope the club can pull together and turn this around.

personally i am not overly confident in goodwin producing another flag, he seems reluctant to make changes even when they are staring directly in the face. so we play players who are not playing well, we play players out of their natural positions, dont use the players we have well, dont adapt our game style when we are obviously getting over run by the opposition. we dont man up, our tackling is [censored] at times, we dont chase, we constantly kick long to contests where our forwards more often than not lose out rather than win. a lot of players especially in the back half can be very slow to move on the ball and when they do they kick in along the boundary where its often picked off by the opposition. some of these are player mistakes and some must be game plan otherwise they would not constantly be doing it. ie. you would have a runner out to the players everytime the dont follow instructions, so that next time they do as they are instructed.

so if they call it off is it a draw?

skills are woeful, we had so many opportunities go begging because of poor disposal. we need a new skills coach (and some better players). i still dont see us manning up, this is where they are killing us and we continue to give them heaps of easy cheap possessions. absolutely destroyed at our lack of effort in chasing, tackling and most things around the ground. i had hoped that after the 2nd quarter we were making bit of a comeback but that was not to be.

slightly better that quarter but still brain dead football letting collingwood players run by themselves with no pressure. they just run the ball down the field pulling players to them and getting the overlap. Dumb, dumb football. the umpiring has been pretty poor quite a few collingwood players have clearly dropped the ball when tackled and nothing. I thought the rule was if a player is sliding in and takes out another player below their legs they are at fault. a lot of poor ball disposal, poor choices, and what happened to that strong tackling we supposed to have shown a few weeks ago. I love fritter but he just runs around and does not seem to be accountable for anyone. all of our players need to put more pressure on the player with the ball. that will result in turnovers, fumbles etc. but at the moment its too easy,

what an abysmal display of something it certainly did not look like football. were we acting like witches hats for them to run around. our stupid zoning is not working. the 60 extra touches they had should have told even the stupidest coach that that is not working. We would be do far better if these were contested possessions, at least we may get a couple of touches.

i cannot understand the stupidity of putting petty in the ruck, sorry he is a liability in the ruck always has been. With minutes to go and we are behind and we dont man up we let them play kick to kick, really how dumb is that. And billings sorry i just dont see him having a future with his kicking especially for goal where it counts. our final chances are well and truly over, l would just like to at least see us beat Collingwood in our last game of the season. hopefully we can get something good in the draft, like a new coach

can we sub off goody and get someone else to finish coaching the game. Why is oliver still on, he is having a horrible game, our forwards need a lift that is exactly what Melksham COULD give us. what is the damn problem with making a call

sub oliver off to give him a rest. they guy needs time to recover. At the moment he is a liability the way he is playing. our forwards need to do better, as does our delivery into the forward line. a lot of good play up fields is totally destroyed by our delivery into the forward line. and the umpiring has been pretty bad our players held, pushed in the back, they drop the ball everything going unnoticed by the umpires. really the AFL needs to do something about that.

i am a little disappointed that we say most if not all of our younger players need more time to develop. Sometime players step up to meet the challenge and playing with supposedly higher quality players may make it easier for them than playing at a lower grade where things are not so organised or structured. though having said that not sure our seniors side is all that organised or structured as yet. and if the cannot step up and show what they have then maybe we should not be investing years of time running them around in our vlf side if they are not going to cut it. other sides are playing younger players, i dont see why we should not especially when we have players who really are not cutting it at the moment. Not playing these guys can result in them getting frustrated and wanting to leave as we have seen happen to a few players on the edge in the last couple of years. We supposedly saw enough of fullerton to pick him now we are saying he is not right, they really why are we picking players that are not right. billings unfortunately is another that i wonder what we saw in him

i doubt we will win another game this year. such a pitiful performance, we allow the opposition to run around all by themselves and at times we dont even chase them.

we are lucky to be as close as we are their kicking has been almost as bad as our team is playing. lack of chasing and tackling is poor. same old same old. not manning up, too many opposition players running free. where is that team that won a grand final, is there any semblance of that team left. very disappointed in the way we have crumbled since winning the flag. our window of opportunity is closing again.

amazingly we still have a chance to win this

given there were poor umpiring decisions, that is not something we can change. what we can change is manning up, and we certainly did not do that. In the last quarter we just did not try to move the ball quick enough at times in the dying minutes of the game we were kicking it from side to side as if we were in the lead and we wanted to waste time. and once GWS got the ball they had kick after kick to each other without a melbourne player being within range to spoil. no manning up, do they need explicit permission or instructions to do something so basic as that when you know the opposition wants to wind down the clock, definitely something wrong with their football thinking. Some players had bad games again missing kicking it straight to the opposition too often. season is probably done now. i would like to see us try a few other players as some of the players we are playing definitely need a rest, at least one probably need a rest.

Billings has often shown poor kicking skills, i am damned if i know why he was even selected.

the team won even goodies brainless idea of using petty in the ruck. for someone on the ball so much and supposedly a leading target for kickins etc he did stuff all, that is because it is not his position. the rest of the team stood up and need to be commended for a great team effort. if we had someone taller who could wrestle and event punch the ball away for the taller essendon rucks who were marking everything when it was dry then we may have done even better. goodie has done well because of the quality of the players and team he has. petty has been played in the ruck multiple times and to me has failed everytime. may as well throw woey in the middle at least he could immediately tackle the opposition ruckman when they take the ball straight out of the ruck instead of going for the hitout.

put petty in the forward line and see if he can at least have some sort of presence there, he is not a ruckman, he has proven that time and time again and yet we continue to do it. wake up goodwin. team doing well a lot of good defensive work being undone by some loose checking. if they did not get those easy goals they would five or six goals behind. tighten up, no loose men in their forward line please and we should win this.

the question now is can we maintain or even increase that lead over the next 2 quarters. the boys have done well. Petty has to lift 5 disposals and given away 3 free kicks in the half when he on the ball a fair bit of the time is not great. certainly need sparrow to lift as well

these umpires are really pissing me off with there inconsistency. kozie is getting pinged for everything under the sun. And essendon players doing the same thing nothing. just before kozies last goal the man on the mark was told to stand and he continued to move and nothing. it worked out ok but where is the constency. I dont know how many essendon and even some melbourne players have been stripped of the ball but kozie gets pinged. The essendon backs are pushing our forwards fair square in the back time and time again and marking the ball and thats ok by the umpires. i think roo was deliberately blocked in going for a mark and nothing. we have played some decent football but we have let these guys have too many players on their own especially in their forward line. need to tighten up and man up.

It will be interesting to see how we go with the ruck department. while i think max is a great ruckman the number of times his hitouts go to our players is not brilliant. his work around the ground is what is really important to us. So as long as who ever is in the ruck does not give away too many free (i.e. petty) and can play that marking player around the ground we could be ok. its just that we also lose that marking presence in the forward line. also, given petty's issues with his foot i wonder if this will put too much pressure on his feet. oh well in a few hours we will know how successful or not goodie's decision to not play a ruck and leave our forward line intact.

i agree 100% Goodwin does not know how to use a fresh spare man deemed to be amongst our best 24 players at the time that we need them most. We were obviously getting run over by a faster finishing lion team and he kept brown fresh, fast and eager who saved our bacon last week sitting on the bench while others could not run. i really cannot comprehend why he would do that, he can blame the players for playing defensively but he needs to also take the blame for not giving them a running player who could have certainly helped both defensively in attack and for not moving players around to combat the lions or address our shortfalls. Last year in the finals we could have brought on a sub but chose not to. again i can not understand why you would not use that player unless you believe they are only something you go to as a very last resort, if that is the case then our choices in subs is definitely a problem. all in all i am starting to think that our flag winning team could have won under any coach, as i dont see a lot of decisions or changes from this guy when changes need to be made. i mean to say how long did it take to get petty into the forward line when he seemed an obvious option at the time. now the backline is probably the best option for him as he can work well with lever and may and the backline team to turn defense into attack again. and maybe he can get some of his mojo back and go back to the forward line when he is in better form.

perhaps nibblers was deliberate. god know i have see players walk over the line countless times in other games and never once have i seen it called. so disappointing that it happened to us, at such a time. we had our chances but did not take them. i dont know why Goodwin does not change the team up when things are not going well, Petty would certainly have helped in defense and tom may have been a good addition down forward. bringing brown on in the last 5 minutes is an absolute waste of a young fresh player when we were obviously failing to keep up early in the last quarter. and again i must say petty should not be in the ruck, he just does not have it in him. it is a shame that ANB did not try to handball the ball into the lions players leg to go out of bounds. but it is what it is ... a crappy result. as for umpiring i still dont understand some of these rules. if a player is out of bounds and plays on or is called to play on while out of bounds isnt it out of bounds? when players kick play on from the kickin and run 30 meters or more without bouncing the ball, why is that not a free against them. when a player is tackled and they try to fend off a player and are still caught is that not holding the ball. when a player is swung 360 degress in a tackle then lets go of the ball is that not dropping the ball. Pushing players in the back to allow you to take a mark is that not a push in the back not a mark. and protecting the head is sacrosanct so they say, so is it ok to just give the player who was kicked in the head a free, or is it a bit like a maynard we dont have a rule about kicking someone in the head deliberate or not. can someone forward a cartoon version of the rule book to umpire 22 so that he can learn the damn rules so that we can have a fair game of football.

what a wasted opportunity. yes they kicked a lot of points, that was usually due to our pressure, we missed a few too. our manning up in the last was woeful. that left us chasing them for the whole quarter instead of having them chase and try to catch up. our kicking to out numbered or to opposition players was again killing us especially from kickins. One example that hurt I think it was AMW had the ball on the half back line in the last with probably 10mins to go and had a player free about 20 meters away but went long down the line to a contest that we were out numbered on. why do we constantly keep doing that why do we not take the simple open option.

every game you see people ducking and getting taken high is that not staging also, they are deliberately trying to draw a free out of what could have been a fair tackle if they had not ducked or lifted their arm. i dont know how may times i see melbourne players come flying out of a pack as if they have been pushed in the back as they did not get a free because the umpire did not see a push could that be seen as staging? just because his head did not crash into the ground does not mean he could not have hit his head, strained a neck muscle etc. i dont have any issue if they AFL wants to persue this sort of thing, i would just like them to be consistent in doing so. which we have seen they arent

with all of the petty week holding the balls they have paid all night was that not holding the ball by the brisbane player who was trying to fend off the melbourne player instead of getting rid of it. that is a pathetic umpiring decision by an umpire only meters away.