Weird and twisted nights

Well, it's TS for us again I'm afraid. At least this time you can't say you didn't see it coming.

If nothing else it brings to an end, or should do given the absolute stone cold certainty of this defeat, the first "let's kick the Dees to death" trial-by-media week of Mark Neeld's career. Actually scratch that, the magnitude of the loss and the way that blood in the water makes footy journos quiver with excitement will ensure him another run on the treadmill.

The general reaction to our defeat last week was so predictable that you could have sketched it out ten minutes after the final siren last week (or indeed halfway through the third quarter). The media sense the chance go to town, our fans drop their bundle and start trying to have half the senior list crucified outside AAMI Park and the players are trotted out for a series of cliches about doing better, trying harder, learning the lessons etc.. etc.. All well and good except for the fact that all the pledges about improvement were going to have to be backed up against a team that could very well win the premiership - and you remember very well what happened the last time we travelled out of Melbourne to play a genuine premiership contender.

Of course when you're the inaugural leaders of the 2012 Laughing Stock League it opens the door for every man and their dog to have a pot shot and for people to actually taken them seriously. Usually this is the round where you can absolutely lock in some kind of novelty comment about being crucified by the umpires as a special Easter treat but this week the entire world decided to join in. Everyone got to hammer a nail and we're still waiting patiently for the rock to roll away and reveal that the MFC has risen and done a runner. Keep waiting, it'll be a while.

In any other climate would the footy world not have fallen about laughing at Leigh Matthews' suggestion that Ben Hudson would have been a more valuable recruit for us than Mitch Clark? Forget the money for a second, but never forget it was there to spend anyway, Ben Hudson is 33-years-old. There is no further discussion required. We all know Leigh hates the Demons with a passion and spent much of the 1980's attempting to cripple our players with behind the play cheapshots (Stephen Smith, Peter Giles and Neil McMullin for starters, the third of which was playing in his second game) but I choose to believe in this scenario that he's been horribly misquoted and was only talking about Saturday. Even then it's a bloody stupid thing to say. Who would have thought he'd run a distant runner-up in "stupid MFC comment of the week"?

Speaking of multiple premiership winning coaches Mick Malthouse was next to swing for the fences. Now, Mick is not known for his long history of attempted murder on our players so we can only presume he was serious when he blamed the significant role the players had at Jim Stynes' funeral with mentally draining them before the match and that they shouldn't have formed the guard of honour as the funeral procession left. Absolute cobblers. I'm on the record as saying I'm into the 'by any means necessary' theory of winning a premiership (up to and including driving nuns off a cliff or having the players collectively off their faces on the gear a'la [club deleted - legal department]) but I will tell you this, if we have the choice between our players paying the appropriate respect to one of the greatest men ever to play or lead this club or winning one dinky football match of 22 I'll take the loss.

But that was all just ex-coaches trying to pretend they're still relevant and helping to fill the non-stop footy media cycle. Then it got really ugly. Newly irrelevant Mick might be but Grant Thomas, shooting from the zero premiership cheap seats, has been practically useless since Nathan Carroll got him the sack by crippling Fraser Gehrig in 2006 and he decided to keep his name in the press by taking the nuclear option on us.

I must admit I'd started to like Thomo over the last few months due to the fact that a) he hates the Demetriou administration even more than I do and b) he will write back to any old rubbish on Twitter but maintains a policy of following absolutely nobody, but to put it as midly as is humanely possible he stuffed up royally this week. Luckily for him the administration he hates so much is a complete farce and his mate didn't get the sack after Thomo dropped him in the shit up to his neck.

You know the story by now, he writes a post on his NineMSN blog suggestion that Neeld "may very well be the first coach to lose his players before he started" and that his hatchet job on the leadership group of old was badly handled. The first indication that he was going hammer and tongs just to get a story happening was the use of the word 'may', but then he decided to piff in a world class hand grenade vaguely accusing Neeld of racism towards indigenous players. Obviously he received a stern phone call because it disappeared not long afterwards, not quick enough that every man and their dog had seen it.

Cue the shambolic scenes where after an investigation proved that an AFL employee passed information on that was either wrong, mistunderstood or completely fictional we get Australia's least popular politician (including Anna Bligh) Demetriou defending his man to the hilt and trying to take the heat off his organisation by implying that Neeld should let loose the lawyers on Thomas. Somewhere Matt Rendell was kicking his television screen through in frustration at the injustice of it all.

The fact that Mifsud all but gave away during the press conference that the alleged concerns had been passed to him by a 'senior indigenous player' (of which we have... one) didn't help defuse the situation, kicking off a witch-hunt intended to out Aaron Davey as the source of the information. Of course even if he did actually say it, and there's no evidence that he did, he was hardly going to stand in front of a camera and go "oh yes, it was me. I invented a bald faced lie about my new coach" so it seemed somewhat unnecessary to stick him on the front page of the Herald Sun and chase him around AAMI Park sticking cameras in his face trying to get him to say something they could twist into another day's story but such is the life of a journo.

Credit went to Mitch Clark who attempted a shephard on the media crews but unfortunately in true Melbourne fashion none of Davey's long term teammates were anywhere near to help fly the flag and they still managed some more classic journalistic harassment. Good on him for having a go, he would have shot to instant fan favouritism if he'd torn the fluffy hand mic out of the journo's hand, thrown it across the turf and told them to rack off. Lucky he didn't, afterall that would have just kept us in the news and.. ahh forget it.

I was impressed with the way Neeld handled all of this, and I love his philosophy that when he speaks he's speaking to Melbourne members, supporters and sponsors (as they were at that point) but you can tell the media absolutely hate it because he keeps calling them out for asking stupid questions. Nobody ever had a cry when Mick Malthouse told them to get stuffed because he's won premierships, but when a coach walks in after his first game, stares them down with the psycho twitchy eye thing and says "do you really think that was how we expected them to play?" they think "we're the media, we'll put this bloke in his place". Because generally they're arseholes.

See for instance the introduction to the Channel 9 news story about his press conference - let us not forget a press conference about absolutely false allegations - according to the introduction he "fumbled" his way through a "defensive" press conference. No, what he did was tell the truth and not lie down and let his reputation be kicked around before he'd had half a chance to build one.

Some had a problem with his appearance on On The Couch, complaining that he looked uncomfortable and was too aggressive in his replies. Utter bollocks. When you go on a show and the second question is from the allegedly godlike Mike Sheahan who asks "surely you've got to reconsider playing Mitch Clark in the forward line?" after four quarters when he was our top goalkicker in the pre-season I'm impressed that he didn't just stand up, say "you're kidding" and walk out. "No I don't, it's been one game" he replied, almost incredulously, and rightly so too. Now that we've swung from 'crisis' to CRISIS I hope he tells Fox Footy et al to piss off when they call him next time.

What an eventful first week as a senior coach. Can anyone top it for drama? Nobody cared when Bailey lost his first two matches by 200 points total and now this guy is expected to pick up the pieces and get it right immediately. You can jam that avenue of thinking, because he's inherited just as rotten a basketcase as Bailey did.

I could not give a flying rat's clackbag if he's a polished media performer of not. If you go back in the Demonblog archives to the dying days of the Daniher regime and the Mark Riley holding pattern months  you'll see that I was calling out for a coach who was intense to the point of scariness. Now we've got one and whatever he needs to do over the next two or three years to get it right is ok with me. If the players don't like it the players can go elsewhere, and if the supporters don't like it then just give up like the rest of the yellow cowards who tuned out nine weeks through 2007 and have shown token interest since.

The way it's going for us there's every possible chance of some ugly scenes over the next few weeks, months and god forbid years but stay strong. At least get through Round 13 and unleash every piece of frustration and tension that you've got on the overpaid turd who started our run of off-field problems in the first place.

Also Dennis Commetti wrote an article sledging us for drafting a bunch of fancyboys over the years and.. well that's one article that I'm not going to argue with. At least Neeld has already started to address that - even if it did mean us not getting the fancifully named Clutterbuck in the Rookie Draft. Ok, pinpointed our plight without being stupid about it but how many more times are we going to have to hear about how badly we've mucked up over the last few years? I know we stuffed it up, you know we stuffed it up, indigenous people of the Amazon region who have never had contact with western civilisation know we stuffed it up - it doesn't change anything, and no matter how much you hurled abuse at your TV while Jack Darling did as he pleased today he never will and we have to work with what we've got.

Anyway, so far so shithouse a week. Dean Bailey was the master of trial-by-media but even he never had to go out and defend himself against falsified racial allegations. At least Neeld could sit there in his 'defensive' press conference and say that he considered it over, charitably announcing that he wouldn't sue Grant Thomas or the AFL for nearly ruining his reputation. You could have been forgiven for thinking we were going to get on with the business of being thrashed on the weekend and that all the scandals had ended. Until the next morning.

So, just when you think after the Jurrah debacle, Jim's passing, a rubbish Round 1 performance and false allegations about the character of our coach would just about do for our run of bad luck you wake up the next morning to find out that the man who is/was effectively our sole major sponsor is an classless, gutter trash clown who filled his Facebook with racist filth and defended himself by saying he couldn't possibly be racist because he had an Asian cleaner. Champion bloke. Spin it however you like, we all know you're an arsehole - although I'm not sure the cleaner defence really counts as spin.

Come midday Thursday we'd thrown away $2m worth of sponsorships from Energy Watch and Freedom SEO (ironically one Mr Ben Polis will have to do some incredible SEO work to recover from this one), winding up in the extremely rare, if not unprecedented in the modern era, situation of going into a premiership match without a fee paying sponsor on our jumper.

A disaster if you're the Chief Financial Officer but morally the right decision. It's a ridiculous amount of money to say no to but we'd be selling our soul to take this guy's cash any longer. To their credit the Melbourne Victory and Rebels both did the same, but Energy Watch wasn't their main sponsor - we're the only ones to voluntarily strip ourselves of our biggest sponsorship deal. Apparently he wasn't exactly timely with his payments anyway so the whole thing would probably have gone under eventually but it would have been nice to make it a month through the season before having to switch sponsors to Coles Home Brand Electrical Tape.

Sadly Polis is not even the biggest loser in this saga. He gets out of paying the rest of his commitment after six months of naming rights 'glory' and his company has just had more publicity than they'd get in five years of sponsoring three Melbourne based sports clubs. Maybe he set this up to try and get him out of deals he was no longer interested in? Either that or he's just a terrible human, the sort who deserve to be put in a rubber dinghy and pushed out on the tide.

You'd think that in any sensible environment his company would be bankrupt by Wednesday and he'd be eating out of a dumpster by Thursday but he won't be, the company will just change its name and keep doing what it already does. He's already "stepped down" as CEO which means absolutely nothing, they just need to ride out the scandal for a few weeks

With respect to the people who work at the company, and whoever writes their racist ads, I hope I'm wrong and the adminstrators are seen carrying out cardboard boxes as soon as possible just for stuffing us around but a lot of people will eagerly ignore the murky history of a company when there's a chance to money. How many of us have whined about being given rubbish service by a budget airline only to see a cheap fare the next time and get roped in all over again? Congratulations on being a big part of one of our worst weeks and for costing us a fortune. We will never forget, change the name of your shitbox company to whatever you like - we'll find you.

Then, just when you think that surely we're out of the woods and a public holiday would see us to 4.45pm Saturday unscathed then it turns out Gysberts has injured himself and is out for six weeks, presumably stuffing his season. Then Daniel Nicholson gets suspended for drinking while in rehab, which is not the best move for your future career when you're on the rookie list - and pure career suicide when you're playing for a coach who is going to want to beat the suitcase out of somebody over the next few weeks.

Nicholson's crime is dinky compared to what Jurrah's accused of doing when on the booze in the Northern Territory, but still why not add another fiasco to the big fuck off black cloud hovering over the club at the moment? I hope nobody in Perth this weekend eats a Cherry Ripe out of the mini-bar and fails to declare it or they'll dedicate an entire episode of On The Couch to jamming the knife into us a few more times. I think we're pretty clear from here but for god's sake can somebody ensure that Colin Sylvia is staying at home and not going for any 5am driving excursions?
 

Unfortunately at this point, having finally exhausted all the off-field scandals, I feel obliged to discuss the football match which we semi-participated in. What happens on field around this club isn't even remotely interesting compared to what happens off it these days but it's not the Abuse EnergyWatch blog so let's give footy a go instead.

Was I the only one to think that we were half a chance of keeping it respectable early on? To nobody's surprise we were being belted out of the centre but at least the backline were holding firm and we were getting it forward. Even if we weren't going to score at least we were stopping them from doing it - and I'd rather lose 30-100 than whatever we actually did lose by.

It's an understatement to say it couldn't last, because the gulf in class between the sides was utterly rude. I'm willing to give Neeld plenty of time to torch this shattered wreck of a club and rebuild it in his own image, assuming already that this year is shot, but I'm still concerned with the way we're playing. The around the boundary line thing might be done with the best intentions but do they have to do it every time? It might have worked a treat with the Pies but the last time they were a truly awful club (with the exception of their one off rubbish year) Neeld was coaching Ocean Grove. Despite drafting midfielders continuously for years we're still rubbish out of the centre, so any luxuries that he had at the Pies are not present now.

See also the bombing it long to Clark one out - I loved his one man display of crumb, more in two weeks than we did for most of 2011, but christ on a bike how about some other options? I know we're not swimming with forwards but what's Jeremy Howe doing playing the Baileyball Jack Watts role? Is it because only a man who can take screamers from anywhere is well positioned to save us from disaster when all the down the line kicks are horribly shanked? If so we're in even more trouble than first feared.

Kicking the thing long is ok as a tactic, but from my perspective it requires a combination of the following things to have any chance of creating scores. 1) A beastly full-forward who can kill his opponents in one-on-one contests, 2) multiple targets to aim at, and 3) some variety of crumbers. What we got today was no, no and Clark crumbing his own after bringing it to ground when he couldn't mark. How many of his snaps did he have a teammate anywhere near him at? It was a very Bailey-esque performance but with fumbling and shambling around the wings instead of just booting it to the opposition in the middle of the ground.

The umpiring - in the first half especially - will get a fair run, and why wouldn't it when you get one free in a half against 21, but when you lose by 18 goals in the end then it's a bit comical to go on about it as if it had some effect on the final result. Poor Will Schofield will get dropped for giving away that one free in the first half and booting one out of bounds on the full. Sadly in the early going much of it wasn't actually that bad, usually given away by one of our players (R. Bail) putting somebody in a headlock or Brad Green decapitating somebody with a lariat that Stan Hansen would rise to applaud.

Also when calling SEN to scream bloody murder in Chris From Camberwell helium style tones please remove the Frawley holding the ball from your calculations. Despite the pleas of noted commentary gumby Tony Shaw he ran about 200 metres right in front of goal and was deservedly pinched. Played a terrible first half too did Chip. Luckily Rivers was on a relative stunner early on, and that Tom McDonald was trying his guts out after coming in late for the Stef Martin Experience.


The one that really got me was when Ashton Hams (comedy name) was already feigning being tackled high before he had an arm put near him at the same time Grimes was being cleaned up by a shirtfront well behind where the ball was. Result, obviously, a West Coast free and goal. Surprise, surprise the first goal of the third quarter came from a free too. I think there is some scope to bring the standard Easter crucifixion reference into talk about the game too.

At least the Eagles were smart enough to take advantage of the shit umpiring, ducking into contests and staging at every possible opportunity. I knew we've been waffling on about integrity all week but where are our cheats? Why can't we find a lost member of the Selwood family who doesn't care if his spine is eventually shattered by leading with his head every time? And for god's sake now that we've semi-addressed the need for big bodies in the draft what about addressing our needs for some players who are absolutely shit human beings? Jones tried hard by playing up that one in the third quarter but I was the players who pray upon the stupidity of the umps by rolling over and playing dead without anyone near them. Most of the time you'll still get the free apparently. Where are the players who wouldn't even dream of going near Twitter because all they'll cop is hateful abuse? You don't see Hayden Ballantyne rushing to install Tweet Deck do you? GOOD. How will we ever get by without hearing how much he loves parmas?

When Jones got that goal at the start of the second quarter I can't have been the only one to think that we were going to be ok (where ok = a ten goal loss). It didn't last, and ten minutes later the game was not only lost but started getting ugly. If Neeld could only find four players who were reasonable last week he'd be absolutely buggered doing the same today.

I'll start him off by telling him who doesn't need to be considered. In alphabetical order, and in varying degrees of not being any good he can scratch Bail, Bartram, Bennell, Garland, Green, Jamar, Macdonald, McKenzie, Petterd, Sellar and Watts off his list for today.

Now I'm usually loathe to throw players into the "go and go now" category, given that they're trained professionals and I'm a keyboard mashing porky, but is there any doubt now that Jamie Bennell has entered Luke Williams/Scott Chisholm territory? I know our depth is wafer thin despite 200 top draft picks but if he's playing next week then all involved can slurp the plums of an Irishman. In 16% less game time Bate had 11 more disposals - and who didn't see that happening? Why Bate was persecuted again after his last quarter against the Lions is mystifying, especially when Bennell hasn't played a good game since... anyone? What did he do to deserve a start? He wasn't even in the best for Casey last week so why not, have a start against a side that is likely to pulverise us.

I'm trying desperately to not be negative towards Neeld and Co, because they have been handed a steaming turd but sometimes you just have to wonder. I'd rather have kept Aaron Davey in the side, faded to a mere shadow of his former self, than promote somebody who has a proven track record of doing absolutely bugger all and provided next to nothing in the pre-season.

The third quarter needs no discussion. We were 186-esque in our rolling over and dying, with the inability to hit a target by either hand or foot. The disposal efficiency which was almost dead level with the Eagles at half-time started to slip backwards as they went forward relentlessly and kicked goals from every available source. At the other end even when we did manage to go forward Clark was having the thing kicked to his fingertips at full extension with two opponents on him and nobody on the ground - all the time while Jeremy Howe, the sort of guy who could leap over two opponents and take a screamer, was playing a serviceable but hardly damaging game backwards of centre.

They finally let Bate out of his substitution hell with six minutes to go in the quarter and the damage well and truly done (sadly we have no record of Bennell doing the honourable thing and subbing himself). His first kick went straight to the opposition, but at least it was out of the middle of the ground which is more than pretty much anybody other than James Magner could say for their day. As the afternoon wore on he, shock horror, gained some confidence and started hitting some nice passes - how about a full four quarters next week? If he ends up as sub again I'll riot.

Everyone know he's not going to win the Brownlow anytime soon but for god's sake at least getting out of the middle will be a start even if it does wind up going to the opposition most of the time - at least it's not just pinballing straight out of the centre and down the throat of opposition forwards. If we're unable to do defensive pressure anymore at least start the ball going in our direction. For god's sake we nearly, nearly conceded the modern day record for inside 50's in a match. The same team who conceded 31 goals just a few short months ago - have the backline not suffered enough? No wonder Frawley played a shocker, he's probably sick to death of having to stop us losing by 186 every week.

There is just some sort of sick, black cloud hanging over us. In a way we deserve it for all that tanking business, and I don't blame supporters of other clubs for taking their chance to piss themselves laughing over how we've botched it so badly. It's like nothing we do will come off, and before you know it we'll be this year's Port Adelaide - duelling with start-up franchises to avoid winning another spoon. Of course while Port showed enough pride to avoid finishing last we'll be 'guided' towards defeat while our fans jump around celebrating the chance to ruin another young man's life by drafting him in the top five.

At the risk of bringing up the draft fiascos just a few paragraphs after saying I never want to hear from them again I dare say that the way we're going even if we went into the time machine and picked Naitanui and Jack Darling then Nic Nat would be palming the ball straight to the opposition and Darling would either be on the half back flank or having the ball kicked towards him at full extension with two opponents while Eagles Jack Watts and Lucas Cook slap us around.

Even our noblest warriors are looking like they've had enough. Poor old Jamar visibly slumped at one point when his tap was roved by Priddis without an opponent in the same postcode. I enjoyed hearing that he had a tete-a-tete with midfield coach Brian Royal at three-quarter-time, presumably asking when any of Brian's troops would show an interest in getting to one of his taps. Then there was Green who is playing like a broken man. I still think he's a good option as an alternative forward but if they've got no interest in playing him there then he doesn't deserve his spot in the team.

The Eagles did their best to let us get it back under a hundred in the last quarter but being utterly shit means that even when teams have given up they'll still kick goals. When Josh Hill started taking the piss even I, usually a calm and collected character, nearly threw a laptop at the TV.

But there was no violence against inanimate objects. Round 24 last year when we lost to Port (taste of things to come) I was punching sofas, kicking doors and generally scaring the neighbours. Today I'm resigned to it, and even the violence of the margin wasn't a surprise. I felt optimistic that we'd keep it to 'just' 70 something, and when that's the best case scenario then you probably follow a team who deserve to get humped by 108 points.

Time to rebuild the rebuild. It's like one of those A Current Affair 'dodgy renovators' stories where some poor, gormless bastards are left out of pocket and with a derelict house. I look forward to seeing Tracy Grimshaw chasing Bailey, Prendergast, Craig Cameron etc.. down the street with a microphone, demanding answers while they try to cover the lens of the camera. There are no answers, we're in more trouble than the proverbial. You have my permission to give up.


2012 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes

5 - James Magner
4 - Nathan Jones
3 - Mitch Clark
2 - Jeremy Howe
1 - Tom McDonald

Apology to Jared Rivers who was good in the first half at least, Trengove who tried and Bate who should have been given longer to take himself out of contention.

Leaderboard

10 - James Magner
5 - Nathan Jones
4 - Jeremy Howe, Jack Trengove
3 - Mitch Clark, Stefan Martin
1 - Tom McDonald

Stat My Bitch Up
Let the records tumble. Our biggest loss against the Eagles, at Subiaco and ever outside of Victoria. Our outright 17th largest loss in history, and James Sellar becomes the 11th player to lose by 100+ in his first MFC game.

Commentary Corner
Come back Dwayne Russell, all is forgiven. It doesn't help your mood when you're watching your side get hacked to death unmercifully but if there's even been more frustrating coverage than today I've yet to experience it.

Tony Shaw, Gerard Healy, Matt Campbell, Glen Jakovich and Fox Footy in general, How much did I hate you? Let me count the ways:

1) Mid-match puff piece interviews with players during the match. This is not NicNat/Watts propaganda, but I don't want to hear casual chats with players of any club including ours while there's play going on.
2) Lengthy discussion about what Nic Nat calls his hit-outs
3) The pisstaking of having him listed as the #1 pick in the 2008 draft in the on-screen super during previously mentioned puff-piece
4) Kiddy style giggling over the free kick count.
5) Shaw's attempts to justify Frawley's marathon run because he took a few sidesteps.
6) Healy calling a kick 'effective out of the centre' when he went straight to an Eagles player.
7) Healy suggesting that today's performance is why you can't have players like Colin Sylvia being suspended. Sylvia's suspension ended last week, now he's just got the small matter of a broken back to cope with.
8) I just generally loathe Tony Shaw's rambling, bumbling commentary.
9) Gerard Healy blazed the trail for $cully by dicking us to go to the Swans for fat cash in 1985.
10) Glen Jakovich not only talks out of his ringpiece but reminds me of what we could have been if his brother wasn't a porky, mad rooter with a dodgy back.

The good news for Fox is that we're a captive audience, so just like the AFL they can treat us with utter contempt and we'll just roll over and pay up. Good thing I like watching endless episodes of Air Crash Investigation (what can I say, I'm drawn to disasters) so I'm getting my money elsewhere - I feel for those of you roped into paying good money to watch this shit through the XBox and then finding out that there's one match every week that they mysteriously don't cover.


MFC Facebook Comment of the Week


Difficult to suggest that any insane comment hasn't got some validity after that performance but it's good to see that some people have already lost their nerve and are trying to get rid of Neeld - as if wheeling in any other living man would have any impact on this shit sandwich.


Then there's this guy who shares the same name as our ex-rookie but isn't the same guy unless he's put on about 100kg since we delisted him. Next thing a false Trent Zomer will start abusing us.


Also, for Rhys and 75% of the other commenters - it's LOSE. Just like it's TRENGOVE, MOLONEY and MCLEAN not LOOSE, TRENGROVE, MALONEY and MACLEAN. Also at least have a go at punctuation, even if you get it wrong a'la Demonblog.

I doubt anybody other than me sits down and looks at the full Facebook thread but the number of people who threaten to ditch us is ridiculous. Just do it you internet hero idiots, we know you'll come sneaking back when we're good in ten years. Especially the people who freely admit they're not members, as if they are owed something. Die in a fire you yellow cowards.

Crowd Watch
Never been there but you can tell by the audio alone that they're even bigger mutants than the Geelong crowd. 

Next Week
Another week of media hell I presume, leading neatly to giving Richmond their first win of the year. Just a reminder that it was less than one calendar year ago (June 25 to be precise) when we beat them in the clash to decide who would be the next big thing in the world of footy. Then somehow the water supply at AAMI Park began to be sourced from Coode Island and that was the end of us.

IN: Moloney, Martin (if fit) and some combination of Blease, Couch, Tapscott, Tynan and Morton depending on the Casey result.
OUT: Bennell, Macdonald, Bail and Green unless they're going to play him forward.

Final thoughts

You can officially wipe out the "best case scenario" section of the pre-season preview, and fire your lighter up underneath all the ones that don't involve us being shithouse. If you've got a sensitive disposition you might want to close your eyes now.