Deecisive

i find it interesting that Hawthorn is playing its first game in Geelong in something like 14 years. strange how we seem to play there every year and they don't.. i wonder how many other such anomalies apply where some clubs avoid Geelong, interstate trips, etc..

The sad thing is that we have to go so far back to find highlights of the dees. I find Foxtel's footy replays pretty demoralizing as you rarely see a melbourne game and even more rare see a game that melbourne wins.

our game plan has us with more players around the ball so we can get it forward more often. but we are kicking to a forward line where we are outnumbered and it shows. We expect our forwards to beat two or three opposition players for a start, Hibberds long kicking was an asset a couple of years ago when we have players down there able to mark and put pressure on opposition players. That is not the case now. We have a team that has learnt to be lazy, dont chase dont tackle just sort of fence the opposition players in. We have difficulty in kicking the ball in when the opposition scores a point. We are underpressure all day long. Yet we constantly left west coast players alone so they can kick it in to two or more open players with no melbourne player near them. Why, where is the pressure, why are we giving any easy kicks to the opposition. If we close them down on the flanks they may go up the middle , if we win the ball back then we in a better position to go forward, instead we allow them to go to flanks with no pressure. They switch and where the hell are our guys, no where near their players. I saw players ignore the opposition player with the ball and turn to chase their man. and I love oliver but his woeful trotting behind a west coast players was an absolute disgrace and sums up who many seemed to play. i did not expect to win, many of us didnt, but we expected our players to deliver a better standard of football than what they showed. Quite frankly if the quarters had not been so short and the eagles did not fiddling around playing keepings off instead of going for the kill then we would have lost by more than 50 points. the way the team played I felt like we had lost by 60 or more points it was that disappointing. quite frankly Goody could do with a read of George's assessment of the game on the front page of demonland. i think it sums things up nicely, shame we dont have a coach or assistant coach who can see the obvious.

we have a game plan that is a an absolute disaster. they get the ball and have free players all over the ground, they have heaps more uncontested possessions. chip it into their forward line and kick goals. When we get the ball they cover our players and win the ball back, spread away kick to free players. Oliver's example of how not to chase sums up many of these players attitude tonight. At times i have seen our players turn away from the eagle player with the ball to cover their own man instead of putting pressure on the man with the ball. our players are too far away from their man to put them under pressure even if they fumble. Viney and Pickett are the only two players that have turned up to play.

what a p*** poor effort, eagles chip the ball around with ease as our players playing meters away from or behind their opponents. another 6 or 7 weeks off may help our players to hand pass and kick the ball to their team mates. To think i have been waiting months for this game to come along. depressing first quarter

Hopefully this will not be as bad as some predict. We have most of the scientist and medical people able to work on the virus either working on vaccines, or treating people.

Sorry I disagree i think we need to thing strategically and to the future. Be prepared to move players around and be more versitile. Fritsch into defense, maxxy rover, Viney rucking, and Oscar ruckrover. if that does not earn us first pick in this years draft then nothing will.

Some good signs in last nights game, but also some of the same old rubbish poor passing and turnovers, going backwards, going across field, some players just dont know how to move the ball quickly. Luckily the Hawks could not take advantage of our indiscretions. Fritsch was brilliant, but i would rather he played out of a pocket,

it could have been real embarrassing without them

thank goodness we had those vfl players to lift up our scoring

Technically we can finish in 8th and still win the flag

i wasn't going to panic, until he told me not to panic. He obviously knows something that he thinks will make me panic, so is trying to sooth our fears about it. But I don't know what it is that he thinks I might panic on, I might know it already and are not in a panic over it, but then it might be something I don't know about which now has me worried and likely to panic over it, what ever it is.

i got the same feeling that she was not exactly pleased, Even Kysaiah's face wasn't exactly beaming when called.

fischer did not look overly happy being picked by adelaide

not thilled with this constant trying to split the picks and take us further down the pecking order. we only have a very limited number of slots available. we should be taking the best players we can. Quality not quantity.

as i understand it we had to take 3 players in the draft so 3, 8 and 97. so what were we going to pick up with our last pick, not a lot. We obviously happy that any of the top 10 or so players available are all capable of giving us a good player. We can argue until to cows come home over which is the best of those available at pick 8 or 10, but truly how much better do people think pick 8 is from pick 10. The main benefit of this deal is that instead of using our last pick which would probably turn into something in the 70's we have a pick around 30. i think its a reasonable sacrifice.

is brown still a go if we go after Jackson in the draft?

he is worth a senior spot, if we dont give it to him someone else will. A rookie spot should be for someone who needs to grow into a role, and is not ready to play yet. This guy is a ready made player. pick him up now if he is available, or risk losing him to someone else who can see his value.

happy for us to bid on Green, if GWS want him then they need to paid up, or possibly give us a trade that we cannot resist.

teams will remember what Carlton did, especially GC who will have a nice crop of young top footballers wanting to leave the goldcoast in the next couple of years.

agreed Quality not quantity

we had lots of stats last year on how poor our kicking was, how poor or non-existent our tackling was, how often we turned the ball over and were scored against. Knowledge of those stats unfortunately did not really see us address those issues in any meaningful manner. I hope that we now have remediation plans to break players of bad habits.

if he is a player we want we should be trying to reel him in as soon as possible to reduce the chances of other teams snapping him up, or driving his price up.

been a demon supporter for many many years, i still remember melbourne having a massively good half back line led by Gary Hardiman that turned defense into attack with their rebound football. Frost was one of the few players who took the game on this year and tried to generate that rebound football. Lever, May, Salem and others all seem to stop and wait, look sideways, look backwards, and often go for short passes that opposition players intercept and goal on. Young is the players we need at the back end of the field with Langdon who will get the ball run 10 meters and kick it another 50 meters away from the opposition goal to one of our players. I just hope they can then mark the ball and kick straight. Faster and better delivery down field / fewer kaos balls will give our forwards a better chance to score. still not sure we should be wasting pick 8 on a small forward, again I would be looking for clean kickers, someone like stephens who has run and good kicking skills. No point getting a player who gets the ball 20 times a game but turns it over 6 or 7 of those times. If we can split pick 8 and still get two highly skilled players then great, but if we are getting two average skilled players, then forget it, use pick 8 and take the best available.

there is a lot of good players being picked up by GWS and Sydney through their academy programs. What exactly is melbourne doing in this space?