Straight Sets Simon

Ben-Hur sounds like a [censored], but what he is saying is spot on. It's the split seconds of hesitation that hold Watts back, it's subtle but it's there.

Exactly.

Can anyone tell me, if hypothetically one player is found to have used a banned substance in a year his team won a flag, would that be enough to strip the team of the flag?

No, Bailey said "I had no hesitation at all in the first two years of ensuring this club was well placed for draft picks", that could mean that he delisted a lot of players to ensure Melbourne had a high quantity of draft picks, not necessarily quality of picks.

Mark McVeigh spoke a lot of sense on SEN, as with the "tanking" allegations, there's a lot of information we don't know and the media are certainly beating the story up.

For someone who writes for a living, she is truly awful at it.

Such good photos, thank you. You almost feel like you are watching some plays in slow motion as you flick through, great stuff.

Watch him, even at training he is often half a second behind everyone else and he doesn't have the killer instinct to attack the ball.

Sylvia needs to aim to get 30 touches per game, he isn't a natural ball winner and isn't mentally quick enough to be, but he needs to get try to get the ball more if Melbourne are to improve.

Why Viney in a forward pocket?

The idea was to get a "blood" red, the idea was good but it didn't work in reality, but I agree amazing it took this long to fix.

Like I wrote earlier in the thread, in this day and age all jumpers should be tailored to fit each player, especially the taller players where the larger jumpers are usually much wider, but I would be surprised if the game day jumpers were much different to the ones at training.

Still not liking the collar, it goes too far around the front. The yolk looks a bit different too. If you compare it to the 2012 jumper, the sides of the yolk now start higher on the jumper. It's only small but it changes the look of the yolk quite a bit, makes it look a smaller.

Because they are being extra cautious with him as I already pointed out.

He looked to be running a kicking freely at training yesterday.

No, this is rehab for his hamstring injury which he suffered late last year. It is connected in some way to his knee, but with someone of that size I would imagine the club wants to be extra cautious.

I was just asking the question, sometimes physical appearance can contribute to how players are perceived as leaders by their teammates and the opposition.

When he and Clark were walking the boundary, purely from a having a presence point of view you would have thought Clark was the captain. Trengove may tick a lot of boxes on what it takes to be a leader, but when push comes to shove is he the captain who can lift his team over the line?

In the ruck work, Spencer was good, Jamar was still the better player but around the ground Spencer was fairly average, still looked lost at times.

Honestly, it's just gut feeling. More than happy to be wrong, he just doesn't look to have it for me.

I'd love a player with Strauss' skills to become a regular, but he is missing one key ingredient, football smarts. I just can't see him taking the next level, even with such good skills.

I'm not talking about his commitment as such, I just don't think he has the football nous to really take the next step. If you compare him to someone like Dane Swan, physically Sylvia should be streets ahead, but Swan can easily rack up 40 disposals while Sylvia struggles to get 25. As I mentioned, he's a back seat player, he needs to be more proactive and less reactive, often it's split second decisions but they really stick out and always have.

Even just from a photo you can see that is a textbook kicking action and ball drop. Compare that with a poor ball drop like Scully:

Having only seen Viney for the first time today I thought the exact same thing.Mind you, that was the only knock I could find from what I saw. At the start I couldn't work out if he was left or right-footed as his kicking in short was so good.

Sylvia has and will always look like a back seat passenger, he just isn't quite proactive enough, always looks reactive, even at training.