Bluey's Dad

Maybe he asked the performing players to stand up and critique the non-performing ones, and the age/experience thing just fell as it did. But yeah, sounds pretty demoralising.

http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/neeld-sacked-report-20130617-2ocws.html No details yet.

Indeed. Still haven't seen Mitch and Dawes on the park together yet, and are unlikely to until next year. In the words of Mr Neeld, it's very frustrating.

On the bright side, we know that if the Roos are 5 goals up they'll probably do their best to help us win.

Luke Ball and Kurt Tippet might disagree.

It'd be pretty unfair to expect him to be a duplicate of his brother, but damn I hope he is and really wants to play side by side with him. We keep saying we'd love to clone Jonesy!

Dunn

I so badly want to post a 'must not fap' gif, but I'm pretty sure the mods would delete it.

Is this not the antithesis to the complaints about Jamar? I think someone posted the other day that the way the game is played now, you need your ruck to play as another midfielder or high forward. Jamar doesn't seem to have that ability and we end up one player down. If Fitzy has that potential, we'd be silly to ignore it.

Not taken as condescending at all, we all need to find it somewhere if we can. I agree on Toumpas and Jones. I can't help thinking how much better they'd be right now with a better midfield to learn from. Look at Tom Mitchell from Sydney. He's played 2 games but has a killer midfield around him. It makes him look fantastic and gives him huge amounts of confidence. Toumpas and Jones, as good as they are, start behind the rest of the pack because of our lack of established midfielders to model themselves on.

Being a high draft pick is no indication of talent or surety of success. Surely as a demons supporter you should know this better than most. I wouldn't describe Gysberts as a 'gun' at all. If he becomes one, more power to him, but it was not going to happen at our club. Any evaluation of Pederson needs to be done with this in mind - he did not cost us much.

Worth remembering that we got him for Gysberts. Even with his poor form it's still an upgrade from where I sit.

The press conference for me at least indicates that Neeld has the right attitude. He's not bowing to external pressure and he's putting his money where his mouth is when he says he's focussing on development and not the scoreboard. For me it alleviated some of the doubt, however it still doesn't indicate how good he'll be as a game day coach. I want him to succeed, I really really do. But let's not have another Neeld thread eh?

Lol, sorry I'll fix that, thanks. Good to see some posters share my optimism. I know we're a long way off, but I honestly think it's not as far as the score-lines would indicate.

I know I'm going to cop a flame for this, but I want to say I actually feel better after watching the Collingwood game than I did at the start of the year after the Port one. I feel really hopeful and I reckon we're on the right track, as horrible as that may seem right now. What I saw in that first quarter was nothing short of remarkable. Sylvia laid 5 tackles. The boys played with real intensity. If not for 3 (I think it was 3?) posts, we would have been way in front. I normally don't subscribe to the "what-if" scenarios of hindsight, but in this case, those 3 goals would have made a huge difference. Collingwood looked demoralised, and would have been further had those been on the board. But the real hope IMHO came in the press conference. Neeld said something that really resonated with me, it was something like "we could have stuck Howe and Trenners on half back and limited the score, but then they wouldn't learn anything." He makes an interesting point. Does it really matter if we loose by 50 points or 90 points? It's a loss either way. The important thing is sticking with the structures and making sure the players actually learn something in the course of the game. I'm also encouraged a bit when I look at our injury list. We played 3 quarters of the game without Dawes, and we didn't have Clark, Frawley and Grimes. Garland did a great job on Cloke, but his job would have been much easier had Frawley been there, plus Grimes in the centre to help prevent the ball coming back there as often. Clark and Dawes ARE the forward structure. The best teams can cope with the loss of 4 of their best players, but we are in the unfortunate position that we can only replace them with VFL standard players or developing ones. We have no depth, but I'm convinced that our best 22 is much much better than anything we've seen this year. So the players play as if Clark and Dawes are there, and when they get back, the team will be used to the structure. I'll deal with the losses being larger in the meantime if the result is a team that learns their structure quickly and are ready for when those players slot right back in. /flameshield on. edit - spelling

Even torrents letting me down. Found one for last week's episode though, maybe someone will upload this week's soon. Stupid that I would even have to consider torrenting something on free to air.

Does anyone know where I can watch this? Missed the show last night. It doesn't look like channel 9 have the footy show as part of their 'catch-up tv' service.

Interesting. It avoids the normal 'tanking' problem since no one is going to torpedo an entire season for a 25 year old 'could-be'. It's even hard to imagine a bottom of the ladder 'race to the bottom' style last game of the season based on that incentive, but I suppose it could happen. It would happen anyway in a uncompromised draft for a better position. Should also allow that player to be traded for a pick or another player if the club wants to do that. I like it

Holy crap check out the guns on Hogan! This guy is what, 17? 18? Crazy. Can't wait to watch him play at AFL level.

Yep. Also worth noting that Jones wasn't near the footballer he is today when that decision was made.

Would love it but it completely undermines the whole reason the AFLPA lobbied for free agency in the first place. The AFL has also stated that it is happy with free agency compo as it is. They don't want to increase it because they don't want clubs manipulating situations to get ridiculous levels of compo.

Who do you think we are? GWS?

No mention of the AFL's culpability of introducing the a flawed priority pick system in the first place, or a free agency system that clearly advantages those already on top, or greatly compromising the draft with expansion teams and concessions at a time when the MFC was trying to rebuild. On those things alone, we should get a priority pick.

It's the topic. We didn't need another one. Flogging a dead horse, thought it was pretty obvious. I assume this one will be locked at some point.