Sims 24

When the first Demonblog post went up in 2005 you'd have got better odds on Melbourne winning a flag than me going into a 20th season but here we are. It's also been about that long since I was last this woefully underprepared for the new season. Probably since the inauspicious inaugural match review when I accidentally missed seeing the first quarter. It's not that I wasn't interested in 2024, despite all our recent seasons ending in massive flakeouts, my brain just couldn't comprehend that it was time to go, even after realising that we had something approaching a game at the marquee time of 10am Sunday morning.

I'd like to blame my struggle to warm up for 2024 on the Donald Trump Appreciation Society being defending premiers, or our involvement in the absolute nonsense that is 'Opening Round', but it's probably just self-defence because I'm scared that we're going to spend another six months battling our guts out to make finals then blow it by playing as if drunk again. It'll be years until the flag anesthetic completely wears off, but you still can't help feeling like we're walking into an ambush this year. Between our questionable depth, injury concerns, and let's politely say 'off field issues', everyone's waiting for a big, face-first, comedy flop. I don't think that's going to happen, but at the same time wouldn't have five cents in Chinese money on us comfortably finishing top four. Can't lose two finals in a row if you don't get the double chance [insert picture of the guy who looks like Eddie Murphy tapping his head]. 

Hopefully we reread this post at the end of the year and go "blimey, I didn't expect that to do happen", like in 2021 when the campaign of a lifetime started with an even more obscure 9.30 Friday morning game against the Tiges. At least we could watch that for free through the website, I had to reactivate my Kayo subscription before schedule to see the modern equivalent. Apparently they're cranking up their price soon, and you could see why when the long break 'entertainment' provided was an interminable segment of Ben Dixon and Andrew Gaze having a vom while eating sardines. Otherwise I think they've still got the rights to Slippery Stairs and the European Tram Driver Championship, so I'll look forward to that.

I'll be saying this in practice match posts until dropping dead, but it still feels crazy that we can even watch these games. It took long enough to get all the official pre-season games broadcast, and there are still a few from the early 2000s where nobody bothered to record all the goalkickers or quarter-by-quarter scores, but being able to watch really off-brand matches like this is relatively new. If you're past it like me and count 2015 as new anyway.

Of course, this was not officially a 'game', but a 'match simulation'. Not sure what the difference is, unless it's an administrative scam to make sure people can't bet on it then dispute whether the result counts at the end of four quarters, or after the full seven period/episode/chukka extravaganza featuring fringe players, comeback stories and VFL players you'll never see again.

I'll take it that there's a good reason why they don't just play a proper four quarter senior practice match, then another four quarter 'reserve' match after. Nobody's going to riot if the curtain-closer is called off early due to lack of interest, but it would be a lot neater than this weird seven part series. Any credibility the game had went out the window when it was revealed that a Richmond player didn't have to turn up because his sister was getting married. They didn't even make him participate in this tepid kickaround for a couple of quarters first. Just "nah, this is bullshit anyway, don't bother coming".

The players who turned up took it seriously, but they were about the only ones. It didn't even get the real Fox Footy treatment. No stirring orchestral theme, a scoreboard that looked like it had been generated by the Sega Megadrive, and a pair of break-in-case-of-emergency commentators who opened coverage with a reminder that we'd gone out in straight sets last year. Which gender? Doesn't matter.

Somewhere, somebody was probably taking things really seriously, and they'd have been emotionally spent after what turned out to be a ludicrously up-and-down game that everyone would remember for years to come if it happened in the real stuff. But it didn't, so you can file it alongside other low-profile pre-season matches of the last decade like our trip to Craigieburn, Spencil Does Subiaco and somebody tripping over the power cord. 

We've seen enough pre-seasons to know that they can give some clues to the future (e.g. Petracca going nuts against Adelaide), but ultimately there's little relevance to what will happen under normal conditions. They're arguably more interesting when your team is shit because you can squint and try to pretend there's light at the end of the tunnel. Now that we're a couple of years off our glorious peak and you can make a case for going backwards, this was more like watching through your fingers and hoping that none of the key players shattered their spine, or needlessly shirtfronted an opponent into another galaxy. I think we got away with it, and that's about as much as you could ask for.

As much as I'm desperately trying to play down the relevance of this game, the first possession was a thing of beauty. The Gawn years have taught me that centre bounce rucking is the least important thing a ruckman does, but his fancy backhanded tap to a charging Viney was a reminder that there's some things you can't recreate by just sticking any old player in there and hoping to win the ball when it hits the ground. The joy of seeing artisan ruckwork lasted about three seconds before our first forward entry of the season died in the hands of a defender who outmarked two forwards. Barring disaster we've still got Petty and McAdam to come in attack (+ McDonald and Brown if they ever walk again), but that was the earliest 'here we go' moment in history. 

I've got a misguided confidence that we can find a way to put up decent scores this year, but you could have put Coleman, Carey and Lockett down there and they'd have walked off in disgust when the next forward entry saw Petracca scrub the most 10am Sunday kick of all time along the ground. That was a slight blip before he went back to being awesome, but it did make me wonder whether I really needed to be watching this live. But like a complete tool I did, for the first four bits anyway. Mystery players are my passion, but even I couldn't justify hanging around for parts 5-7 just to see Andy Moniz-Wakefield and Kyah Farris-White play the hyphenation derby. Was going to watch the rest later. Didn't.

So far, so 2023. Getting the ball inside 50 was one thing, putting it to the advantage of a forward was another. After JVR dropped what looked from the cheap seats like an easy one, it was time for the old 'everyone get out of the way and let a superstar do his work' when Petracca gathered in the pocket, did a fancy step, then snapped it. According to the on-screen scoreboard we were 6.1.7, which was interesting. By the time Fritsch got another soon after they'd consulted the laws of the game and put us back to 2.1.13.

The suspicion that we weren't supposed to be taking any of this seriously increased when Richmond fielded a player named after the band Steely Dan, who were named after a dildo. So he's got that going for him. It may have been the silliest name to appear at Casey Fields since Freddie Clutterbuck's famous MFC pre-season. 

There wasn't anything new in Gawn/Viney combos, or goals from Petracca and Fritsch, so if you were looking for a new and exciting angle to concentrate on may I introduce you to Kynan Brown. Crazy name, crazy first goal. He gathered with the ball as hard as possible on the boundary line with his back turned, then kicked it off his left foot with chuff all space available. It was tremendous, and he did several nice things that made you think he might turn out to be one of our few father/son success stories. It shouldn't be hard to crack a top five that's currently Barassi, Viney, [THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THE SUN], Other, Other.

If you were somebody intent on taking this contest overly seriously, you'd probably have been thinking flag when we pelted straight from the middle for a fourth unanswered goal. Or if you prefer to gently drape the Veil of Negativity over your eyes, romp the regular season then explode in September like a Russian fighter jet. 

This was all very good, and when a Brown HTB ended in Petracca hoofing his second you couldn't have had many complaints, but the house of cards nature of things was best demonstrated when we turned to Josh Schache as second ruckman. He's going to do as much as anyone else when Gawn's not available, but no matter who does it they've got to kick a few goals in the other 95% of the game or we may as well have just held Brodie Grundy hostage.

Because it's the pre-season I wasn't even worried about being five goals up. Normal people wouldn't comprehend that sentence, but I still need a lot of convincing that any decent lead is real and not the start of a slapstick comedy routine. 

Under normal circumstances I'd have been sweating up at the prospect of blowing that lead (or, you know, conceding the next 10 goals in a row) but under normal circumstances there wouldn't be somebody in the crowd dressed as an unhealthily green banana, roaming just behind signage for the local swim school.

And that's where things temporarily went tits up. At this stage of the season, savagely ramming home the advantage isn't particuarly important, but I could have done without going to sleep at the end of the quarter/bit and letting in three. Nobody's at their best in February, including the graphic designers, but the backline looked excessively wobbly all day. I'm very much trying not to fall into the trap of thinking this means anything, but there was a little part of me that thought "we're not going to kick a score, we're going to concede heaps, oh dear god". It didn't last long.

For once it wasn't blowing a force 10 gale at Casey, but the scoring action quickly resumed to the left of screen. Before long scores were level, and if this happened in May I'd clamber up an MCG light tower. On February 18 it had the same effect on me as a mid-winter Port Adelaide vs Gold Coast superclash.  

Conceding goals hand over #fistedforever was one thing, but things got a bit drastic when top draft pick and potential Round 1A (fuck 'Opening Round' in the ear. That will be referred to as Round 1A, the next game will be Round 1B, then we can stop doing American things) debutante Caleb Windsor briefly looked to have broken himself running in an opponent. Fortunately he returned later with no harm done. He was pretty good in senior company for the first time, and given that like 75% of our list Lachie Hunter is injured he'll probably play from the start. Explaining to the kids that you debuted in 'Opening Round' will be like the poor bastards who played 10 minutes as a sub in their first game. God knows what was happening on the opposite wing, where you could easily have missed that Langdon was playing. Might be time to go through the middle a bit more.

Richmond's 10th unanswered goal came from May completely botched a simple mark inside 50. I don't blame him, the poor bastard probably still harbours resentment at playing one of the best key position defender finals you'll ever see against Carlton before being stitched up by everyone else. I'm not that worried, he strikes me as the sort of White Line Fever character that would struggle to get excited about a flimsy contest like this.

What level of rot there was finally ended with a Gawn set shot. Given the A4 paper depth of our ruck division it didn't fill me with joy that he already had massive bandaging around his lower leg. Never mind, there's always Tom Fullarton. Oh he's injured too. What's the Spencil doing these days?

We got another after the siren when Chandler clearly didn't mark in time but the umpire invoked the Fake Game rule and let him have the shot anyway. It dragged the margin back to 19, which was way better than the direction it was heading but still hardly indicative of what we're going to be seeing in Round 23, 24, 25 or however many rounds are in this bloody season now.

By now I knew I had better things to do. So did the coaches, who packed Gawn away for the rest of the game. It would have been a great time to have a look at the rest of our ruck division but we don't have one. Verrall played the rest of the game, but he's a longer-term project than high speed rail so we'll be in a drastic state if he's called on again.

The comeback rolled on with a Pickett goal after half time, before we gave it back x2. Novelty value went through the bloody roof when Lever kicked a goal but it was still unlikely that there'd be dancing in any streets if we overrun them to win. I was still happy for Brown to get his second goal straight from the next bounce, then Schache put us back in front, and for something that didn't even qualify as a real game this was an entertainingly off chops start to the year. Maybe I was just enjoying a Melbourne game where I didn't have to live and die on every kick, shortly before spending the next six months taking things way too seriously. 

Our lead didn't last to the moral three quarter time, wiped out by a Richmond goal after the siren. And that was about where I really lost interest. Coincidentally this came just as Richmond ran away with it, including a homecoming goal to an ex-Casey player who wasn't even officially on Richmond's list yet. And from there Richmond merrily bolted away to win comfortably, despite Verrall becoming the most unusual pre-season goalscore sincer Trent Zomer.

I can't think many people were watching this to start with, but as viewing figures dropped to community TV levels the commentators got bored and started pretending that (relatively) high scores in a defence optional kickaround was going to translate to the regular season. This happens in the first couple of rounds every year before coaches realise that they love nothing more than squeezing the life out of the opposition and scoring floats back down to normal levels. If that's the sort of rubbish they were left with in the main game I'd hate to think how the last 90 minutes went.

And err... that's it. This doesn't bode well for my performance in 2024 but let's just pretend I'm a big game writer and see what happens when a big game turns up.

2024 Paul Prymke Plate for Pre-Season Performance
5 - Christian Petracca
4 - Kysaiah Pickett
3 - Jack Viney
2 - Kynan Brown
1 - Jake Bowey

Next game
All our 2023 straight sets disasters come together when we play the team that knocked us out of the men's comp at the ground where we were knocked out of the women's comp. All it needs is for some Collingwood buffoon to shirtfront Angus Brayshaw while he's lining up for a hotdog and we'll have the full shithouse. I'll be taking the result of this one a little bit more seriously but still not reaching for razorblades if it goes tits up.

Final thoughts
Get on with the real stuff.