Deecisive

I think that Essendon is just digging a bigger hole for themselve, where Asada was prepared to do deals with Essendon some of that may now disappear from the table. If Essendon is allowed to get away with their players having banned substances and surviving the penalties all other sportsman have to suffer then all of sport will be worse for it. I have heard a lot about essendon trying to keep the players names out of the papers for their own welfare no duty of care, but sadly do not even know what they were injected with, nor have they to my knowledge come up with a health and monitoring program to check on the impact. Being able to check on their health actually means you need to understand what they were injected with, which Essendon obviously believes neither the players or Asada need to know. It appears that essendons actions are to do with Essendon and coaches, not the players. There has been precious little responsibility taken by senor people at Essendon for the damage they could have done to the sport, the club and to the players themselves. The AFL has in my opinion been trying to smooth things over with the intention of sweeping this all under the carpet to make it go away, i.e. similar to the tanking investigation that only investigated one club. Essendon now believes they were tricked into being honest due to the AFL's involvement, whereas they would not need to have be so honest if Asada was doing the investigation alone. you have to ask what are these guys smoking.

Salem has done some really good team things, he needs more game time to bring him up. Toumpas is an excellent talant but he needs to work harder to get into the fray more often. He has had a lot more freedom to wander around and pick up kicks, etc playing on the wind and half back. So numbers alone do not tell the whole story. As for Blease and JHK Roos is making them work hard to earn a spot, its not just put in a few good games other clubs have players who have been waiting YEARS to get a game. I like the idea of keeping the side settled and making players force their way in. Salem, Blease, JHK etc will be swapped in and out during the remaining games so Roos can see who is a keeper and whos a goer. We know that our chances of winning too many more games this year is remote, so Roos will use this to provide an education experience for those players he is looking to keep.

All this scrutiny on holding the ball by the umpires means that this week we are going to see another interpretationn of the rules which could mean that they then reinterprete others, i.e. during the doggies game a melbourne players legs legs were taken out by a doggie on the ground resulting in the melbourne player falling on the doggie and him getting a free kick, which is a departure from the taking the legs out paid weeks earlier. players are not going to know how to play the game until they start to see what the umps pull out of their bag.

Instead of continuing to look towards new players coming in to save us, maybe we need to spend more $$ on skills coaches and skills training, as even our better players turn the ball over far too often and that is where we are getting killed.

Dean, not sure you can compare the delivery to Dawes in his days at Collingwood. At Collingwood, he played second fiddle to cloak and a lot of small forwards, at Melbourne he is pretty much the whole shooting match. So he gets the best defenders and as we allow the opposition a spare in defence he may also be out numbered, it at least seems that way from man of the games I have seen this year anyway. So in some ways he is actually playing better than he did at Collingwood, given the obstacles he now faces at the MFC.

Tyson does get caught a bit, but then he is in the middle of the pack with someone hanging off his coat tails all day long, he needs more support from those around him to help him get the time to dispose of the ball. JHK going back to Casey seems to have worked for him putting in a pretty good performance on Saturday by all accounts in a poor display from Casey. Re the coach at Casey not liking the Roos plan, well his plan does not seem to be doing much, dont see him getting too many offers with what he is doing with Casey, maybe if he worked more closely with Roos our players would have a more consistent game plan playing a different game style in Casey and MFC is likely to get them confused. We play a lot of the top sides in the next 5 weeks or so, so it will be interesting to see how the players respond, I am not expect us to win any but I would like to see us play a better brand of football than the crap that they dished out today. Roos maybe giving some of the fringe players a bit of chance to see if they can step up to AFL level he does after all need to free up some spots on our list. Today would have given him a bit more of an idea about a couple of players value, or lack thereof s

we lost and really did not deserve to get as close as we did. We only played 30 mins of half decent football for the whole game. As Roos has said our players need to apply themselve for 4 quarters. Poor skills. it is possible that at least one or two players may not play in the red and blue again. Others are obviously skating on thin ice. I do not understand how we can have roughly the same amount of players in our forward 50 as the doggies, but our guys have a fraction of the possessions of their opponents. Not having good crumbing forwards is killing us, maybe Gawn needs to be played as a crumber as he did a heap better than some of those playing in that position. Too many of our players did not chase and did not put in second and third efforts. very disappointing game not because we lost, but because we played so absolutely poorly.

I do not understand how players mark the ball and immediately start looking behind them or sideways instead of forward and try to move it on. Terlich is a prime example of this, he rarely moves the ball on quickly.

I do not understand how players mark the ball and immediately start looking behind them or sideways instead of forward and try to move it on. Terlich is a prime example of this, he rarely moves the ball on quickly.

what a woeful performance from the MFC that quarter. poor decision making, and even worse execution. they all need a huge blast from Roos at quarter time for that pathetic performance. The womens team played better than these guys.

we have room in our salary cap for a big named player i doubt that Roos is going to let that go. The problem with attracting big name players last year is that we looked a basket case and no big names wanted to come. now with some $$$$'s incentives and the chance to move to an improving MFC and be coached by Roos there is a much better chance of us nabbing a big name player.

Steve you do a great disservice to our back men to say they cannot hit targets up with their short passes, i lost count of the number of times our backmen passed it directly to North. Turnovers are obviously killing us probably because we do it so often. We are obviously too slow with our ball movement, players seem reluctant to play on quickly, when they run into space they are more often enough ignored as our players seem preoccupied with going sideways or backwards. Our slow ball movement kills any chance Dawes and co have of having an even contest with our opposition. On a positive side if you can call it that, we have rarely had a game where all of our players have played a great game, Dawes puts in but has not had the direct scoreboard impact needed, Frawley the same as is Watts when he is up in the forward line. Crumbing forwards hmmm maybe one or two goals a game if we are lucky. Our backs do reasonably well, but tend to be kings of the turnover which keeps pressure on them and the scoreboard. Midfield, Viney has been quiet, Tyson up and down and even Nat Jones is getting a lot more attention. So we do have a lot of upside given the fact that we have a lot of players really not doing all that well.

Anyone know if Tom and possibly a couple of the other shankers in the team are getting any specific coaching at training to address their obvious deficiencies.

We were in the game right up to halfway through the 3rd quarter when we just seemed to fritter it all away. i really do not like to opposition having a spare man in defense this seems to hurt us a lot as they run off the backline using their spare man and linking up all the way to their forward line as our players leave their man to cover the spare man. the kicking back and across ground came unstuck far to many times today....

No offense but he has not been setting the world on fire, if someone wants to pay him $800k per year they can have him, I would rather have someone more mobile and willing to chase and play hard all day long, i am afraid frawley does not really fit into that mould. Hopefully next year we will have hogan at FF and Dawes and CHF we can then invest on some good small crumbers or possibly put Howe back down there for an occassional run.

We turned it over far too often and north made us play for such poor kicking, handpassing and marking. So many of our players had disappointing games dropping simple marks, missing targets by a long way, kicking down field directly to the opposition, not being able to tackle, not picking up players, the list goes on.... skills coaches have a lot of work to do this week. a few players probably need to go down to the twos, while I like to idea of having a settled team, there also needs to be the discipline that you need to keep earning your spot in the side and quite a few did not do that today.

seen too many players in the trying to handpass to players 2 meters away surrounded by the oppositiion. doh. players marking 60 out and sending the ball all over the ground to the other side of the ground to a player 60 out who kicks it in. why bother taking these chances across ground then if that is all they are going to do. I dont know how many tackles just did not stick, or our players fell over when chasing... absolute shocker for most of the team.... really is a miracle (called vince) that we did not loose by a far greater margin.

it still rooseys first year and we get 3 more premierships wow what a coach.

I thought Pederson was just bending down to pick up the ball at the moment the essendon players committed big time to the tackle and missed him.... just dumb luck....

What a disgraceful effort by some of our players, have not been sighted, have not tackled have not chased and too many who cannot deliver the ball. damn poor effort they need to lift dramatically or this is going to blow out.

The league is trying to think up ways of evening up the competition, how about this idea, get the umpires to pay frees when they are there and not to decide before on hand who is or is not guilty based on what players are involved in a wrestle or scuffle. Its not just the decisions we didnt get i.e. seedsman taking a couple of bounces and getting tacked and doing a 360 before be breaks out of the tackle not holding the ball, dunn being thrown around all day by cloke, etc.. its also the stupid ones against us they paid against us, i.e. Bails kick under pressure in the first quarter the scooted along the boundary and over, the salem holding the ball, the Jack watts holding the ball when he tried to handpass and when it dropped tried to kick it. Giving all sides a chance to win fair and square will do more to get the lower clubs financial and supported.

Gawn did a pretty good palm down that resulted in a goal just before the end of the 3rd quarter which may have given him the nod over jamar.

Today was another step in our road back to playing good football. We were competitive for most of the game again against a top 4 side. We are very much still a work in progress and have a considerable amount of upside, so while I am disappointed with a number of aspects from todays game I am very pleased with the direction the club is going and the effort the players are putting in.

1 - Hogan, he is the only one who has not last a game for the MFC

The guys did put in they were just out classed, our poor disposal, Garland, Mcdonald were two that stood out with their poor disposal and decision making. I dont know how many times I screamed at the TV for our players to move the damn ball on (FORWARD) but them seem too afraid to kick it forward even when players were leading. I do not understand why we have no crumbing forwards or why someone does not try to assist dawes in getting on the lead by interrupting the run of his tagger. Umpiring decisions were a pain but we did it to ourselves. We kept in touch most of the game, just lack of manning up and stupid mistakes saw us fall by the way side.