Deecisive

The answer is obvious the players were waiting for goody to tell them to do so, instead of thinking about it themselves. Kind of reminds me of the St kilda game we lost in the last 40 seconds type scenario.

i still dont understand this hostility to the coach, if our players had kicked straight then we would not be having this conversation. yes he played some players that did not work, but at the same time he has played others that did during the year. A few weeks ago a lot of supporters were bagging frost selection are now praising it and next week may be bagging it again. All plans go out the window once the ball is bounced. you deal with what you have at the time. We cannot have a team waiting for the coach to tell them the obvious. Our players did not adjust, they did not man up and they did not cover/chase. We can match it with any team on our day, our problem is our sometime crap kicking, what sort of score would we have had if even half of those kicks that went to aliir went to one of our players. we have proven we can get the ball into our foward 50 against all sides, what we do with it inside 50 is the main problem. I think jeffy needs a rest, he does not chase and pressure as i would expect a small forward. our players seem to think we have a high marking forward line so bomb it in. We dont, Hogan and mcDonald are good marks but not consistently in packs. they do best one on one. we need our players to take more care when sending it into our forward line. try putting it in front of our players so they can run onto to it. kick it back. spread. Lastly MFC should really invest in a sports psychologist to help hogan with his runup and kicking. he does not need a kicking coach he knows how to kick, what he needs to learn is to relax and get his runup flowing and hopefully his kicking will improve.

Like several other games this year we should have won it, but failed to deliver, we choked. I did not expect melbourne to go far this year in the finals i had hope but did not expect a lot. we are now on the verge of missing out in playing finals. So many poor kicks for goal, so many poor passes, no chasing, etc.. Players now know they have two weeks to salvage their season. We have the talent but do we have the heart. hopefully we will get a couple of players back next week. i think we can beat the eagles , but its the players who need that belief and know that to achieve that outcome they need to fight every minute of the game. it would be good if they could also pick a more balanced team.

the demons need to concentrate on their own game, we have shown often enough how we can lose to teams that most people expected us to beat and beat well. The GCS could just as well use Lynch as an excuse to pull together as a team. They beat Sydney a couple of weeks ago and many of the results of the round so far has been close with a couple of surprises. Let us hope the dees go out there and play attacking football. A few more percentage points would not hurt, if we win we should go to fourth on the ladder.

i worry about the fact that so many supporters write off our players so easily, most are still young and developing and will over time get better. Bugg seems to be a reasonably good option going forward or even as a tagger, he is hard at it. yes he has missed some goals in the past but he has also kicked a few. We need to best team out on the field for the next few weeks to get us through to the finals and hopefully get some Viney and co back. To disregard his form and take others who are not doing as well in the VFL is foolish. during the year there has been a lot of people putting down frost, he has come out and done the job better than some of the newer recruits. We need to give these guys time to improve and not write them off so quickly. supporting a club also means supporting the players.

agreed that frost and smith both were pretty good, yes they made mistakes but they were typically under pressure from the opposition. they will both get better with time in the side.

In our game against Geelong when the Geelong player was kicking for goal after the siren and we had about 10 players on or behind the mark. Would it be legal to have had players behind the mark held up a tall player on their shoulders to make the man behind the mark another 2 feet taller, not only off-putting but would require the kicker to change their trajectory, given they cannot run around?

agree the advantage call by the umpires was absolute crap. When they played on they took the advantage of the melbourne players stopping for the whistle.

we should be able to win this, we have so many players down and playing poorly, we only need a few to step up and play. it would be nice if hogan put in a bit more, he is terribly slow at moving the ball. only a couple of kicks behind, man up and please tackle..

Omac is usually the last line of defence, the ball often has gone from end to end passing up to 17 other Melbourne players who did not stop it. as other have pointed out, it would have been hard for even the best fullback to stop about 5 of those goals. Our high press means we leave their forward line open making it hard to stop the bullet like delivery. While our forward line is crowded as hell with our forwards typically outnumbered most of the time.

I don't see why we have so much anger at Goodwin, we have 3 games that we lost by a kick. If we had won those we would have been in the top 4. Would we still be calling for his head then. I don't agree with a number of things we do with our setup, but what we do has worked pretty well so far this year, when we are on we are damn good and play attractive football. We will beat top sides playing this style, but only after some of our players mature, we perfect our game plan and rectify those things that result in junk time and soft frees/goals. Yes, some moves Goodwin made did not come off, or were not made, or made soon enough for the likes of supporters. some did so l am happy to leave those things to the coach. Some games are won and some are lost, i see we lost this game rather than Geelong won it. we failed to capitalize on our forward entries and shots at goal I don't see that as being the coaches problem. yes, he could have moved frost on to Hawkins earlier, but that could not guarantee that Hawkins would not have taken those marks after-all their delivered to him was pretty good. Who knows if shifting frost would not have freed up someone else to kick the goals. Trying to speculate on what could have happened is fantasy stuff. I hope that we will make the finals, I don't see any sure-fire guarantee. I hope we can at least play 2 finals this year, not expecting us to go too far, but what is important is playing attractive football, getting more supporters and being an attractive destination team for future drafts and trades. next couple of years are where I see our serious tilt at the premiership should happen.

yes agree on Hogan, he is certainly not a chaser, we will get found out by better teams who will have whoever is on Hogan running down the ground creating a free man as hogan trots after.

Who knows if Trac had tried to pass it that the Geelong boys may have intercepted, they were up for the final minutes whereas we were not. Trac tried to get the ball as close to our goals as he could trusting our forwards to get it or hold it in. again we lost it with our poor kicking for goal. At the moment we are still a possible finals chance, possible, none of the teams we play is we certain to win as we have shown recently with our form against port and Saint Kilda. hope that we do play finals this year, if we do scrape in I doubt we will go far given the way we fold under pressure. I wasn't expecting us to win the flag this year, just make the finals. I hope one day these guys will start to realise they have to play the full 120 minutes, and no matter how far ahead you are you keep trying to keep attacking

Omac got a towelling because the delivery to Hawkins was pretty good. While we put a lot of pressure on their midfield all night but the still were able to run through the centre in uncontested waves far too often. In contrast our delivery into our forward line was poor. if we had an open forward line and a leading forward we would have done just as well. every time we kicked it forward we were outnumbered and they rebounded and often scored. I do not understand this stupid approach of having fewer players in the forward line especially when so many of our kicks are to an outnumbered Hogan or McDonald. We kicked ourselves out of this, too many players just did not kick straight and missed easy goals, yes there were some crappy umpiring decisions but if we had converted more of those points to goals early we may have killed off any resurgence. we make a horrible habit of giving up junk time goals.

we are playing better than Geelong, just need to keep up the pressure, Hogan has to get moving and needs to chase, he is a lazy football, who seems to figure once his jumped for the mark he does not need to do anything else. Tyson needs to learn how to handball, seems like he is trying to do some clary jump and handball over the player moves that are just not working out, he keeps loosing the ball. Another half like the first with straighter kicking and we will win this one.

yes i think its a bit premature to start calling for his delisting. his first game in a while and he did a lot better than some others. Showed a little give him a little more time, he could be pretty handy.

well hopefully having the dogs so close will spur these guys to come out and play football. disappointed in the poor tackling and the way the dogs are waltzing around groups of melbourne players all too intent on something else to go after the man with the ball. if we cannot put this team to the sword in the second half then you can kiss our finals goodbye.

difficult conditions they may have been, but Freo managed to kick 7.6 so the did not seem to find kicking for goal as hard as our lads did.

fritch should always play in the forward line he is good mark and goal kicker. putting him in defense was an absolute waste. Viney should not have been tagging, the last quarter proved that, sad that it took so long for the penny to drop. Trac, Hogan and Tyson another poor performance. How many in a row before we do something about it. Petty and Smith both selection choices, they really must hate Frost. Without Max it would have been a 10 goal loss instead of 2 points. another game where we went in thinking we had it won before the ball was bounced, so no need to chase or put in. oh we will hear about the lessons learnt, etc.... when you are behind in a game why the hell do you not man up.

so many players just did not turn up for this game

regardless of the umpiring we have a lot of players not doing anywhere near enough especially in the forward line. These guys need to put their bodies in and need to chase and tackle. i wouldnt mind if they tried to kick a few goals as well. We are keeping port in this game, with the sheer weight of inside 50's we should be miles a head at the moment we are damn lucky to be in the lead. if these guys want to play finals they need to go out and prove it and not just leave it to Viney and others

the final score did not emphasise how bad we played. Collingwoods run out of defence which is an area we have tended to excel at did us in. our forwards except for Tom gave us very little. Pederson was a major disappointment, as were many others. we just do not get up for big games, when it counts we just dont turn up. We did it when after Jimmy Stynes dies, we did it last game last year against collingwood and we did it again today. i dont know if these players just get ahead of themselves thinking they have this won, or just being lazy when then need to put their footdown. We were fortunate to only lose 10% in percentage it could have been more, lets hope that such a percentage loss does not come back to haunt us like it did last year. gutted again!

another insipid, gutless lazy effort when it counts. too many easy goals from Collingwood as our players fail to man up, chase, tackle, they obviously came out again as they often do thinking all they have to do is turn up to win.

games is not over yet there is a lot we can improve and hopefully if that is our worst quarter for the game then we can still win this.

it is not the fact that we lost that worried me it was the failure to cover geelong when the ran and chipped. they had some many easy possessions because melbourne players did not chase, did not tackle well and did not deliver into our forward line well enough to give our forwards a chance. A lot to improve. We had quite a few players who kicked points in the last who could have won it for us, we were just not good enough.