Deecisive

i still think picking Schache over Grundy may have cost us going further in the finals last year, possibly the grand final. Grundy did tonight what he did in a few games for us when max went forward. unfortunately max could not kick the goals so we dumped Grundy. Tonight he showed that we are extremely vulnerable with Max and other teams will learn from that and will do likewise, they will get in front of him, stick their knee into his back and side, whacking around the head every chance they get. Max is not a physical ruckman who will jump into the opposition player, he tries to stand there any use his reach, even the swans second string ruckman beat him many times tonight. he needs to adjust his game plan so do our players in the centre can cover the opposition winning the tapout. very disappointing performance on so many levels.

What was disappointing from max is that he did not adjust to the swans ruck tactics he just kept doing what he normally does and they kept pushing in front of him and winning the ball. They kept pushing him off the ball and marking in front of him. Every other team in the league will have seen that and will adjust their game style on Max in that way. Very few players played well, well done Viney, probably the best Melbourne players out there. So much fumbling kicking it straight to the opposition. i dont understand the zone process where we let them kick it to players alone all night long, let them switch and fail to cover them. and our forwards, both big and small apart from fritter were no where to be seen. I really worry about Van Roen, he just does not have a presence on the ground. sad to say on this performance i dont see us playing finals.

a better quarter, but then that was not a particulary high mark to reach with only 1 goal in each of the first 2 quarters. really need to improve our disposal of the ball still pretty poor, lots of turn overs and kicking to the opposition. Gawny needs to change up his routine getting beaten too easily

poor disposals all night long, poor passing, players not manning up and allowing the swans to switch and run it into their forward line without a melbourne player challenging them. our forward line still just stands there and does nothing. how do we keep doing the same dumb things. hopefully we can lift in the second half, but so far not very impressive start to the season, players have not learnt anything. bring on billings we have quite a few players doing nothing surely he can replace on of those.

i am sick of this culture bull, i agree with Brad Scott it is a day by day thing where you have 40+ guys all wanting to play football being subjected to slurs, insults, praise, injuries and that's just their sporting life, it does not take into account there personal and family issues. players/people all need help from time to time, we all do. why does the media seem so intent in belting a player or person when they are down. i don't know how many clayton oliver health issues i have seen in newspapers, online, chats, etc in the last year. does anyone deserve to see their life dragged out and misrepresented so thoroughly as the media seems to do these days. they seemed to think printing a story that depicts a player in a poor light that is likely to have a very detrimental effect on the player is ok, if they put a line at the end that say if you have trouble seek help.. just not good enough media stop rehashing and harassing people.

the thing that disappointed me was our ball handling, our handpassing was poor missing targets, dropping short, same can be said with some of our kicking. Richmond ran rings around us their run and carry not clarry was unchallenged a lot of the time down from full back to the forward line. our players just did not man up. not a great start to the season, but it is only a practice game, hopefully it will encourage our coaches to get to work on some of these things. Sides that run and carry the ball always challenge us as we do not chase, hopefully we can address that.

I suspect westcoast will trade, they need multiple players to rebuild they cannot afford to waste all their credit on one player. I would expect them to hold out until the last moment to see what everyone will offer, after all what is the hurry, the longer they hold out the greater chance someone will increase their offer. Also, the AFL would like that drama to play out on TV on draft night. i have not seen the highly rated no1 player but i would be happy taking our existing picks to the draft. as previously stated it is a lottery, players can look really good but just don't develop. There are a lot of early draft picks that have failed to actually live up to their potential.

AFL generates and has a lot of money where there is money there is self interest, manipulation, self enrichment and all the usual sins associated with greed. Salary cap manipulation, favoring clubs that have lots of supporters, throwing bones the the bottom clubs occasionally. its just business

Why wouldn’t Sydney play hardball on this. We showed how little we valued Grundy during the last part of the season. I would hope that we don’t sell him cheap l would rather keep him. We are totally reliant on Max who is getting older and is still likely to result in injuries throughout the year. I think the decision not to play him in both finals cost us a chance to win the premiership. While l have almost always supported goody this was a disgusting act, one that l still cannot understand what the hell he was thinking. I believe max needs to spend more time in the forward line to hopefully prolong his ability to play. max needs to work on his kicking, regardless of whether Grundy goes or stays. His wayward kicking has cost us games. He needs to step up and learn to kick goals.

I find it interesting that we supposedly had four seperate/independent umpires out there in the Collingwood v gws game. Twenty four frees in the game 12 each side. That would mean on average they each only paid 6 free kicks for the whole game. That’s 1,5 free kicks per quarter. We are supposed to have a game with rules the players are meant to follow and the umpires are responsible for enforcing. They obviously were not doing their job the thing l find interesting is they all seemed to be in sync in the way they umpired in not paying frees. There has been a lack of decision making in a lot of games this year from umpires. rucks constantly holding, throwing players out the way. Players falling on the ball not trying to move it on or even pretend to get rid of it gets a ball up. Deliberate out on bounds is a joke. Umpires from the gws game should be sent back to the vfl until they learn to play the game by the rules not just the occasional rule when the Occassion suits them

Media's just a bunch of muppets who like to kick those that are down, any excuse to poo poo players, coaches or sides. This week was our turn. As mentioned above we were one or two kicks, or one or two free kicks from beating collingwood and calton. We lost both of those, yes it was poor kicking, but we lost to the top sides in the dying seconds of the game. we had more shots than them and quite frankly collingwood is probably thanking their lucky stars that they are playing the Giants and not melbourne who showed both times we played them this year that we were more than capable of kicking their [censored] if we kicked straight. So, to call us runners up fragile with the injuries to our forward line, players coming back after long injuries while playing sides that close to their best teams is just stupid, they are the ones making up excuses. they just want to belittle us and talk up calton's win of the ages etc.. Aside from bad kicking the thing i think went wrong is we were complacent, well goody was, he was happy we were in front and didnt want to change the line up and put on our sub, he did not want to try to do better but keep the status quo. he needs to want us to do better not just do the same.

Bestof luck Brody our treatment of him has been poor, he should have played against Carlton. He should have come on at three quarter time if not earlier for tmac, and l suspect we may have won, we could not have done any worse. The experiment was our failure not his, as max was supposed to have been the one going forward. And if max had actually practiced his kicking a little more as a forward then again we may have won. But we did neither and went out in straight sets

Disappointed that first Tmac played instead of Grundy. Tmac has been a great player but his form has not been good, his ability to jump and his speed are real issues especially when we seldom pass into the forward line. Grundy or Schache should have played, the fact they did not replace him at 3rd quarter time makes me wonder why goodwin was not prepared to make those changes. Schache was good enough to be our sub he should have been good enough to put on the ground to replace a player doing nothing. We seem to have a problem playing our sub unless its a medical emergency, does not make sense not to use a fresh player. At times when Max was rested we had no ruckman at the contest which allowed them free reign. Was that part of our game plan. The original concept with grundy was to give max more time forward and give Max a hand in the ruck. I dont see Grundy did anything wrong, i think max failed to improve his kicking. last nights around the corner was an example that you really expect players to kick these days. Regardless of grundy staying or going Max needs to work on his kicking, stop running off to the side and learn to kick straight. It now looks like we are giving up a damn good ruckman probably for not a lot of return and then have to find ourselves another ruckman. I just done understand that.

look we obviously have some bias both for melbourne and against collingwood. but i think most fair minded people who saw nd heard the different arguements about the incident and all the so called protect the head and the player [censored] that they spout when they want to then ignore when they want to would also see this was an injustice. that the prosecution of maynard did as little as possible to not interfere with collingwoods flying frizby saga. just hearing the closing statements before they went into decide gave it away, they didnt want little maynard to miss out on the finals.

Collingwood and the commentators have done a good job in black and white washing this. Maynard stopping by with wine and flowers, calling Gus.s mother even stopping to help some poor woman during the week. I cannot believe how poor the prosecution was, really at least a dozen people on demon land had built a better case that those clowns in the afl. We have collingwood bringing in experts and highly paid lawyers and the afl had a bunch of muppets who bought all the bull about a flying frisky. There is no doubt Maynard turned the frisby into a bump when he pulled his hands down turned in the air so that he led with his shoulder. Yet collingwoods defence was he had no time to react. As stated previously he would not have acted that way if it was a Collingwood player or umpire.he did what he did because that is what he is trained to do, yes he did a natural football action which was to bump.

i dont want to see us go down to the level of collingwood it will only turn out badly for us, as we must focus on playing football not getting sucked into petty revenge on the field that could result in the umpires giving them even more frees. focus on the big revenge stopping them from winning the flag. our players need to keep their cool. first we need to overcome calton then brisbane as its a good chance that we will be playing collingwood.

The club should lodge a protest against the extremely poor handling of the prosecution of Maynard and the obviously biased review board. Especially that bozo that sighted the decision could effect Maynard missing very important games, he was there to judge if Maynard did something wrong him missing games has nothing to do with the crime and should very have been a consideration. That was a disgrace, the fact the AFL is not appealing after all the b.. over wanting to protect players shows how the power of the purse comes first. Maynard had choices how his body reacted, he saw a Melbourne player there and went the bump no doubt about it. If he was falling towards a woman or a child do you not think he would have tucked his shoulder in and hit them hard no we would have reacted in a totally different way, he may have tried to turn, reach out and push them aside, a lot of things, none of which he did. he saw an opposition player and went into damage mode because that is the military-style training drilled into them. It was careless it was dangerous and in the end I believe deliberate because his conscious mind saw an opposition player and chose how to react, i.e. his hands were above his head when he was high in the air, his arms were tucked in and he led with his shoulder when he hit gus. I quite frankly dont know why the person prosecuting this case did not consider something like that.

Of course he will get cheered by them he won the game for them against us by taking out Gus, so why would then not be hoping for a replay of that after what could they do to him.

if melbourne and collingwood play in the grandfinal you a likely to see a bloodbath AFL, is that what you want. you dont think melbourne players will not go after maynard, after what he did to one of them and got off, and you dont think collingwood will stop doing what they are doing, cox will go crazy with that knee and foot into everyone in range. god what a hopeless, gutless bunch the afl is.

Which he essentially is saying does not matter what he was going to do he was going to flattern gus, far better that he tuck his shoulder into gus's head to save himself from getting hurt. yes i think that arguement will go down well with this mob.

so the tribunal thinks about maynard not playing a couple of important games. they do not worry about gus missing those same games and potentially a lot more as well as having a life long impact on his health and well being. They dont care that that dog act cost melbourne 1 of there best players minutes into the first quarter in a game that we just lost by 7 points. They got the collingwood win they wanted, and i guess that is all that matters. i personally think we need a sending off rule for that, if you take someone out like that you should not be able to continue to play especially when you are a man up.

sorry i dont understand why they are even mentioning maynard could potentially miss out on a couple of pretty important games, what the f* does that have to do with anything. it sounds like that has some weighting on their verdict, which i find extremely unsettling.

time for the committee to go off and have a few beers for a few hours make it look like they are discussing it when in reality they have probably already decided that his is innocent What is truely disappointing is that so many commentators and other football players are saying there is nothing wrong with this. is that the way they feel about sling tackles no, this was far worse than a sling tackle.

saying maynard had no time to react also says that gus had no time to act, when Maynard came at him like a launched missile or frisby. and that is clearly not the case. Maynard seemed to hunker down and turn his shoulder into gus, so he had time to take action. he had other options, he could have put his arms out and pushed him, tried to catch chest on to him but he did not. this bull about him not bumping, how many players have been found guilty of hitting someone, raising their arm, etc and hitting someone that were not deliberate actions. its the action that counts not the aledged intent that cannot be proven. to say it was not a bump is nonsense, what are they calling it a smother. you smother the ball not the other player.

Our best football is when we get it out of the centre bounce through usually Oliver and tracks. That results in a far less congested forward line. Moving tracks forward we lose some of that grunt. l would like to see Grundy come in for Roo. him and max both need to share the ruck and forward duties. We rely too heavily on max if he is having a bad day or injured from players jumping into Him then we have no real backup. Grundy forward cannot be much worse than Roo and or tomcat. Also Grundy at any throw ins in the forward line gives us a much better chance of winning the ball. Max can sit outside 50 should Carlton win it. Our delivery in the forward line has been poor we go for volume rather than quality. We need players who can pass tonleading players. If we have three talks in the goal square on goes left on goes right and one goes straight or stays in the square preferably gawky. Each of our tall forwards should a small forward with them crumbing. Learn to work together.