Deecisive

New year, new training regime lets hope he makes something of it.

Caro read it for him

Sadly there were some signs of the same old about some of our game plan. Both North and Richmond were able to get it back out of our forward line through loose men far too easily all the way down to have a short at goal, why? stop the damn zone and man up. Zones only work if the opposition kicks it badly so you can pick up a cheap stat and rebound, unfortuntely our opposition kick the ball too well for us to intercept. Our players were following not chasing. There is a lack of team work, Brynes was going for a great run through the centre and a melbourne player moved out of the way of the North Player that tackled him, blease i think poor defensive work not protecting their mates. Dawes I thought battled well always out numbered but he made a contest of it, the question is where was the other north melbourne players opponent. poor kicking skills were evident with lots of turnovers that burnt us badly. Our game against richmond was either less inspiring, thankfully their woeful kicking kept the scores from being a blow out. I trust the team will review the game tapes and learn from their mistakes and push those who cannot kick back to Casey to learn.

The AFL seems to have bungled so many things in the last few years, what is next. Watching so many players duck their heads on the weekend and getting frees I wonder if we are going to see issues with players suing for head and brain injuries as the AFL;s rules seems is encourage / reward players who duck.

club should see if it can do some sort of streaming of the match to give supporters the chance to see it. Surely the NBN has done 90% of country areas by now!

Well if its Cols last year before he becomes an Unrestricted free agent we may actually see the best out of him, as if he does not do well no one will be beating a path to his door with offers. If he does do well he may go, we may get decent compensation and then I suspect he will fall back to his mediocre ways. An enormously talented player who has done nothing with it, seen a lot of games where he has contributed bugger all.

Caro has stated that everyone did it but the difference was that melbourne held a meeting in the "vault", so we are more guilty than anyone else so we alone should pay. This does not mean others did not hold meetings, for instance tigers coach said he and presumably his support coaches in "the coaches box" agreed to leave things up to the players during one of their tanking matches, was that discussion not a deliberately action by the coaches to NOT TRY to win. The fact that the AFL has come out with the deal mentioned means that deal has probably been done between the various parties to shove this into the closet and close the door on tanking. which essentially equates to no investigation of Hawthorn, Collingwood, Richmond, west coast and Carlton. Problem solved. Who knows the AFL may even pass a $500k grant across to Melbourne somewhere in the next year or so to cover our fine. Which makes sense because if you had found a club had won a premiership with players they received from tanking there would be an outcry from some for them to be stripped of the flag. The afl has far too much to loose by allowing this to drag on.

Re: Don’t expect too much from Aaron Davey this year. While his delivery is simply sublime when he has it in his hands, he has simply lost the yard necessary to make the electrifying moves of years past. He was unable to open space between himself and his opponent constantly, and barely touched the ball. A loose bouncing ball in the goal-square would have been a certain 6 pointer years ago, but today only resulted in a scrimmage and ball-up. Last year the opposition would have swept the ball out of the backline and kicked a goal, so a ball up is not such a bad result... he will still add great value with his delivery... small steps...

Article says he will be turning 18 tomorrow so wont be a 17 year old. I think the more important thing than age is body maturity, that he has. He will be playing with men this year, while it is not AFL the physical pressure on him will still be pretty fierce, in fact having less skilled opponents may result in them hitting him more frequently than in the AFL. I think it will be good for supporters to catch a glimpse of him and perhaps encourage a few more supporters to turn up to Casey games.

Our players just have to get used to the fact that they are going to have to win the ball all over the field. If they spray it then their team mates just have to work harder to cover and make up for it. Eventually we will weed out the poor kickers.

I think we owe a lot to Moloney for his last year with the Dees, his extremely poor efforts helped us in snaring Toumpas. I am glad to see we now have some new players looking like they are able to produce now, i hate hearing year after year of the potential of the players we have and everyone expecting this year will be the year they burst out and be stars, reality is most never will, can just hope they turn into honest hardworking footballers instead of the one match a year wonder.

Re covering the cost of our tanking defense, why not put a special assistance request to the AFL?

Hopefully this will all go away now, but I suspect that the AFL will now decide to run with some sort of charge on someone to show they are doing something, so this is likely to linger on throughout the year. Sadly we have seen another example of the AFL in their delusions of adequacy today with the dob yourself in drug cheat rules similar in vain to the tanking, the AFL has known it has been misused for years but its only when the newspapers or someone comes out and rocks the boat that they turn around and start trying to look as if they are doing something about it.

I would expect clark and dawes to stay at home with Brynes and another small, with howe and Pederson roaming up the ground to mark and kick deep.

Surely melbourne would targeting sponsors like the army reserves, or some really tough hard to destroy 4 wheel drive or VW Amarok you know something that gets a few miles to the ....

With the tackling down low, does this give the player a chance to dispose of the ball, as I assume their hands are free? how effective was this style?

As we are not playing for sheep stations, a premiership or extra draft picks this year Neeld does have the ability to experiment a little with who goes where.

I find it strange that we had such a poor year last year, recruited so well but most people are still picking all the same players from 2012 as our best defense for 2013. This years team should not be last years team with Dawes, Viney and Toumpas added to the mix. We need a more significant shakeup. I hope Neeld is not so sentimental when it comes time to pick the teams. The NAB cup will give us a chance to try most of these players out, all will be on notice that the best performers will be playing week 1. The pressure will then be on those playing for Casey to prove they are playing well enough to dislodge someone from the round 1 team. If Macdonald does not improve his kicking then he needs to be replaced, same with Frawley with both his decision making and lax approach at times. We cannot tolerate poor disposals, turnovers or poor decision making.

God its good to have choice and lots of options going forward!

Aaron has put in some good years for the demons when so many others went missing, he has received a lot more attention from opposition teams in previous years and I never really saw any concerted effort by melbourne players to run interference or assist in blocking taggers to break him free. Davey's disposal was usually first class. If the team can play as a team and support each other by blocking and shepherding a bit more then Aaron will come into his own again and he will deliver quality ball to our forwards.

Tanking was not the problem with melbourne the truth is that melbourne has been out in the wilderness for years, living off its proud but ancient history. It lost its way, other clubs took a more professional attitude and are years ahead of us, consider the state of: - our social club facilities for players and supporters. - training facilities - fitness staff ability to developing players. - our recruitment staff, who have had more 1st round draft picks than most clubs and yet we are still one of the worst performers. - no real strategy or game plan, who or what do we want to be... Neeld has given us a vision the hardest club to play against. - club culture - lack of skill - lazy players - players, we have been overpaying 2nd rate players for years because we have had to use our cap, players have not had to try or excel to get a game. How many MFC players have had 30+ possession games - we have had even had easier drawns than many clubs - debt, lack of sponsors, etc... 2009 came along at a time when all of the above was at or close to its peak. i dont believe any of the players stopped trying to play there best football, clips will show that lack of skill, lack of quality players, fitness, hugh number of injuries etc all contributed to that horrible season and several thereafter. I dont even think Bailey tried to loose. I believe he is competitive enough to want to win everytime. He may have been more adventurous in 2009 swapping players into unfamiliar positions such as in the Richmond game but what choice did he have as a coach, these moves sometimes actually worked and allowed us to almost win the Richmond game. Neeld any many others have done likewise without being called for tanking. I dont recall any games where there were wholesale changes where we left out better players, as even our better players were pretty substandard. CC and CS may have made comments and jokes about it, but in the end i doubt if that was would have influenced bailey and the players, we just were too disfunctional to do any better. If we profited by it then that was what the rules allowed. The idea that so called tanking has now made us disfunctional is nuts were were already crap and have stayed there. Neeld recognized the problems are just not having a game plan and has put into place with the football department actions to address many of the business and fundamental problems so that we have the building blocks to be a better side. Tanking is just an excuse to say we were not really as crap as we pretended we were, truth is we were.

investigators are obviously basing jack's possible contribution to the games in 2009, based on what they have probably seen in the last 1-2 years, in other words they dont have a clue about football and have not done their homework on his stats and other things that would have demonstrated his value to the team. Quite frankly I am surprised that they did not pull us up for PLAYING Morton in those games he played in, in 2009.

The journalists are trying to get what snippets of the report they can out onto the street, try to get 20 stories out of it instead of 1. They do not care about the right or wrong of it as long as they get a story out first. There is no investigative journalism at play here just rumour and inuendo. The plodders doing the investigation are making a farce of the whole thing, maybe thats why they were chosen. Anyone know if they did anything for Fairwork Australia or Treasury bribery investigations No football player or coach is going to take the vast majority of their 'allegations' seriously as being anything but fumbling and bumbling far in excess of anything shown by Melbourne players in the Richmond game. That has to undermine the whole credibility of their arguements, that is if they actually found one that will stand up to any sort of scrutiny. The 800 page report seems to propose a litany of pathetic arguments (without balance) to explain extensive tanking planned for and put into practice sometime shortly after the queens birthday match, in fact so cunning was our plan that the Dees brains trust decided to play crap football since then to cover out tracks.

For them to prove we tanked they have to prove we played substandard sides even by our own poor standards. I really dont know if there was any good players left out deliberately. All of the players out there would have been playing for their futures, more so in games like this near the end of the season. The moves made by Bailey actually resulted in us hitting the lead, so you find it difficult to say these were moves to help us tank when they worked, logical would say that if we were loosing and he wanted us to loose then he would have kept everyone where they were. Rotations are impacted by injuries, can we see stats from other sides that have had 3 players injured, did they keep their rotations up to 100. Fumbling well thats just clutching at straws. So if they cannot prove any intent to loose then we did not tank. I agree the AFL will change the charge to bring the game into disrepute as that way they go after individuals and CC's own comments will be used against him. Pretty grubby if people telling jokes now becomes the new moral standard for the AFL, your safer taking drugs. As for the tapes problem with that is do they exist and if they do then the AFL will want to hear all the tapes for the other games as well. Every cough, laugh or joke will be put under the microscope. The farce will continue.

I guess someone will take the last 30seconds apart frame by frame to see the siren sounded before the mark was completed, hence the field umpire probably took the game away from melbourne. The dropping of players is a joke, there are few players in the melbourne side that you would have said at that time had a mortgage on their position so anyone could have been dropped. I have done a number of investigations in the past and I find it remarkable that all of the facts do not appear to have been gathered, or maybe not reported. A fair investigation would look at who was left in and out of the side and investigate why, i.e. suspension, etc.. they would look at the rotations and who was rotated and not and reasons why rotations did not occur. They would have looked at the moves made to ensure they made sense given that Dean Bailey was criticized for bringing the game into disrepute by his coaching moves, moves like paul johnson, etc which resulted in us fighting back and taking the lead until the siren sounded, it was only after the siren that we lost the game. i just cannot understand any investor worth his salt not following every lead. If playing players out of position is an offense then they will be after Neeld soon for his moves playing backs forward, of course the win over Essendon could be seen as a result of Essendon tanking rather than a great move. I truely believe every mfc player was out there playing their best football, they were not interested in draft picks, i think most of them would have been trying to impress to ensure they got their contract renewed for the following year. As for fumbling, this could be the scourge of the new millennium, I suggest the AFL rules committee immediately take action any player found to be fumbling should be given a free kick this will stop the pretend fumble turnovers. Quite frankly the assertion being made that players deliberately fumbled is insulting in the extreme. Lastly I see the Hun has an article talking about Jpod playing in defence, I guess Geelong is signallying their intent to tank.