Last week I was accused, not without some justification, that an unnerving air of positivity had crept in to this page. How, an unnamed punter asked, can you possibly start acting like you're enjoying football when you're writing for a blog named after a song by the world renowned miserablist Morrissey?
Good point, there was a worrying tone of joy seeping through. I was sucked in like a moron again based on nothing more than pounding the Freo thirds and some crackpot slop merchants who haven't gone near being good since I was born. Who didn't see tonight's fiasco coming? Other than me. I have a feeling that tipping us to win by 62 points may come back to haunt me in the event of an end of year tiebreaker being required in our office competition...
Funny how in the space of two and a half hours you can suffer such a wild mood swing. Not about anything important mind you but that's the lot of the sports fan. This week, against nearly 30 years of hard evidence that proves I'm no good at it I decided to try positivity. Not just after a game, not just while thumping fat fingers across a keyboard in my sordid grief hole at 3am but for the entire week.
"Are you going to win?" asked the office tipsters who know nothing but seem to win every year. Any other week I'd say either "No, we are garbage" or at least talk it down to the point where there were a million excuses why we'd get done by Gold Coast. They were assured that yes, this time we were a certainty and I harboured no (outward) doubts. It felt good too. Fast forward to 4pm yesterday, sitting there at my desk making a mockery of the concept of 'casual Friday' by wearing a footy jumper when a senior, very senior manager wandered past and started mocking me about the presumed massive defeat we were going to suffer. "Cementhead is back in the midfield!" he said in a statement that you'll never hear anybody make about Patrick Dangerfield. "Come and see me on Monday and I'll tell you all the reasons why you were wrong" I gamely ventured, starting to worry for the first time whether I'd set myself up for utter Maric style depression by being sucked in even after claiming that I never would again after the Collingwood shambles.
During my brief sunshine + rainbows phase which lasted from last Saturday night until about 7.42pm Friday I chose to ignore all the signs that we were likely to lose. It was a crucial game, at Docklands, against a Victorian side who were not Richmond or Essendon, we had just come off a good win in front of a big crowd and we were wearing that horrible white away strip which is only marginally better than our long binned silver monstrosity.
To somebody thinking rationally, or at least like a depression syndrome affected Melbourne fan, they were all fairly good signs that we were going to turn in a performance of rare garbage. But no, instead I chose to channel the spirit of one of history's greatest motivators to convince myself that all of these factors weren't necessarily a bad thing, they were a good thing. Despite the results and the fact that we stunk the joint up for long periods against North and St Kilda, considering the players on offer we were a million miles in front of that last night, and surely it was time to step up at least and beat one of the other seven Victorian teams who we haven't toppled since Carlton put in less effort than you'd have otherwise expected (otherwise known as [CENSORED BY LEGAL DEPARTMENT] in the last round of 2007. I've moved four house times since then, can you see why this is so hard for me to get my head around?
So yes, I expect that at 9am Monday morning I'll have somebody who I can't tell to piss off and throw a stapler at without being unemployed by the end of the day wandering past my desk for an in-depth discussion of "Cementhead" and friends cornholing us. Maybe he'll even tell me who Cementhead is before I walk off in a huff and kick the photocopier.
Shoulders must have slumped collectively in the Channel 7 box about fifteen seconds after the first bounce when it became apparent to everybody that the match was going to be anything but a Friday night classic and would probably end up with everybody turning over to episodes of Air Crash Investigation by the end of the first quarter. When they put together the fixture at the start of the year they must have had high hopes for this as a battle between Prelim Final specialists and rising stars. They got their wish but I don't think they expected it to be Prelim Final specialists coming off a horrible start to the year against a side that go from rising stars one week to a VFA Division 2 side the next.
Unfortunately for ponytailed executives everywhere they got us on an off week, and win or lose the quality of the game based on the first quarter alone probably stuffed our chances of getting more than one token Friday game next season. They have paid a billion dollars for the rights to show it after all, they're not going to take a risk on potential sliders vs bipolar freaks in front of 12,500 people because everyone else (and I'm looking at our fans here) refuses to go to Etihad and will sit at home watching the live telecast instead.
The excitement of draw might have scored us another game next season but with our record in Friday night games ending with one stirring victory over a pox side who had the bottom falling out already and two thrashings where we were outplayed handily should see us permanently marooned in the North/Port 4.40pm Sunday shift next year - and don't you just love ending your weekend on that sort of a performance? At least if we cock it up on Friday you've got some chance of rescuing it before having to front up again on Monday.
What became blindingly obvious right from the start was that the Dogs had sat down and looked at everything which we did predictably and decide to force us to try something else. That's when I really start to get nervous, when we're expected to reach for page two of the playbook, it never ends well. Mainly because usually they get to the book, open it up and find out that all the other pages have been torn up.
They weren't going to be fooled by us starting Jamar forward and the Experience in the middle. They knew exactly who we were going to tap it to each and every time, so on the rare occasions that one of them did beat Hudson or Liam Jones (supplementary question - who is Liam Jones?) to the tap and it went anywhere near Moloney he had three people leap on top of him and any danger of a quick centre break was lost. Trengove and McKenzie were good but they couldn't get anything happening at the centre bounces while Scully was being tagged to buggery and handling it about as well as you'd expect a 20-year-old kid to. Don't forget that it was the Bulldogs who he got 39 touches, a Rising Star nomination and 3 Brownlow Votes against last year - they weren't going to fall for that again.
To be entirely fair the Dogs outplayed us in nearly every category, though the stats would lie and show it as being more even that it actually was, but they were hardly playing the sort of game that would get them anywhere against a decent side. In the first few minutes as they missed targets and generally slopped it up coming out of their backline I thought "surely we can't lose to this lot?" After all they'd only beaten Adelaide and Gold Coast, and even we'd flogged them during randomly occurring weeks of glory. Apparently we can - and how. They've got a decent run in so good luck to them if they build on last night and make the finals, they're the Victorian side with a tragic history of failure that you can afford to get behind because they're not St Kilda. Otherwise come September I'll be the biggest Eagles/Swans/Dockers fan alive.
Worst thing was that even though we weren't winning it out of the centre with any ease, or at all most of the time, we legitimately outplayed them for the first few minutes. The Jurrahcane and Jamar both missed goals they would have kicked with their eyes closed last year, but despite Barry Hall running around making Frawley look stupid despite being 30 years his senior when Watts booted that snap I started to think that everything was going to be alright.
When you follow Melbourne there is rarely, if ever, a time in the first quarter when you should start to think that everything is going to be alright. Make sure your children understand this so they can grow up good red and blue citizens, vigilant for impending disaster at all times. From the moment Jack made us all swoon with his booming goal we walked straight into a trap and played on their terms. Hall missed after a rubbish free then two minutes later after we'd been unable to move it across halfway he got another chance when he made Frawley and Strauss look stupid by marking right in the middle of them. Chip killed him after quarter time but the damage was well and truly done by then, despite the bright (or at least brightish, considering we were getting humped in the centre) start we went into quarter time two goals behind.
At least one of them was pure quality/sheer arse highlight reel stuff so I won't lie and say I didn't enjoy Cooney's wild swipe of the boot that sent the ball flying through from 30m out. He should have had it on the lead anyway after one our traditional turnover/leave everyone inside 50 ten metres on their own set-plays but the kick towards him was rubbish and boom in it went. For once it would probably have been better if he had marked it.
What I enjoyed far less was Ed Barlow having a shot to put them put them even further in front right at the end of the quarter. Notwithstanding the fact that Barlow has somehow managed to become a starting player in my rapidly failing Supercoach team, if we're going to start copping goals from him you'd might as well shut up shop. Luckily he reverted to type after taking the piss out of the Suns last week and botched it but the signs were already there that we weren't going to get anywhere near the same Melbourne who had been so good after the seven minute mark against the Tigers. This week it was our turn to put the feet up from that point and make a couple of token comeback attempts throughout the afternoon.
Wasn't entirely sure how we managed to end the first quarter two goals down, but at least it was only two goals. Anybody can kick two goals in a minute, and that's precisely what the Dogs did to really make it interesting. First was Garland giving away the 50 which you can probably argue was there but the second was pure filth. Everyone knows that the league hates Jack Trengove because he's the top draft pick who signed on and didn't flirt with taking millions to prop up a shit team in West Sydney that nobody cares about. He's already copped three weeks and two fines this year but the shepherd free against him when Higgins just ran straight into him as he was under the ball was a new low in their vendetta against him (though there might be another phase to come in that feud, more on that later).
It was a vile decision but I'm not going to come on here and bleed too much about it because it was in the same class as Watts doing exactly the same thing at the end of the first quarter last week. Richmond fans would have been sitting on their milk crates, screaming at their black and white televisions about justice being served. Only difference was that Watts strode manfully towards the ball and took it in his stride when he ran straight into his opponent and won the free, whereas Higgins threw his arms up like a hysterical 15-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert and got the free for acting like a little girl. You win some, you lose some. We lost more than a handful tonight but that doesn't excuse the garbage that was served up around the ground.
Saddest storyline of the night was the absolute shocker that Dan Nicholson turned in. Instead of commentators trotting out hackneyed cliche about players joining an "elite club" by kicking a goal with their first kick in league football, how about they start a new list of players who fallen victim to the modern curse of being featured in the papers and then turning out trash? Even worse when it's a kid. It happened to Rivers on Queen's Birthday, though I'm still not blaming him for the 3rd, 4th and 5th Cloke goals, and last night after being profiled in The Age during the day Daniel played like Alistair and almost everything he did had a brown tinge to it.
He certainly wasn't alone, the only difference was that he'd been in the papers and Sylvia, Strauss, Jurrah, Garland, Morton and Bennell hadn't been. Out of that list Sylvia, Jurrah and Garland are easily best 22 and the last two are at least experienced even if they're in shithouse form. It wasn't all their fault though, they were just the ones who either weren't getting their hands on it or were stuffing it up, what about all the handballs in the backline? Absolutely suicidal.
Nearly everybody who went inside the defensive 50 was guilty of it at some point and the Dogs were loving it. It's not like we weren't eventually getting it out of the backline and forward either, but all of a sudden the gigantic hoof inside 50 became our only attacking option and even though it was clearly not working they just kept doing it again and again. Last week there was at least a few decent leads inside 50, today the only marks we took were either contested screamers or somebody being in the right place at the right time when a panicked hoof dropped into their arms. Might have been an opportunity to recognise that Morton has no confidence left in trying to stop goals and to throw him up the ground instead but that's never going to happen so I'd might as well stop calling for it.
For all the failed hoof we did give ourselves a chance at getting back into it with a couple of goals but that was about as good as it got. It Petterd had kicked his goal instead of delivering his second blooper shot on goal at Etihad this year (was it St Kilda or North where he missed the lot from 20m out?) we'd have been back within three goals with another two and a half quarters to sort ourselves out and at least make the Dogs nervous. We even managed to be on the receiving end of one of the great comedy capers moments in history when the spudlike creature Jarrad Grant managed to stuff up the easiest goal in the history of football. Should have taken advantage and dragged ourselves back into it but instead a minute later they came straight out of their backline, down the field in about three kicks and got the goal that the vaudeville shenanigans had denied them.
Then Morton horrifically botched a handball under the pump and it was goodbye to the comeback. Fair enough if he doesn't like being put under pressure but if that's the case AFL Footballer might not be his most suited career. Get a job working as a car park attendant if you're worried about having people put the heat on you. There's probably a thousand people around the country who would at least give you value for their spot on the list with effort alone even if they weren't as allegedly "naturally skilled" as Cale. If you were drafting a team from scratch today is there anybody who'd have him over Jordie McKenzie? I don't want to rush to judge anybody lest they suddenly do a Jamar/Sylvia and come good years later but right now I'd pass up the Sad Panda for any moderately skilled battler of the McKenzie mould.
Again despite the deficit at half time we weren't dead if we could turn it around, but did anybody have any faith that we would? When Gia got the first goal after taking the piss out of Garland, then Nicholson gave the media curse double thumbs up by handing them another to start the term it was all but over. Cue the Disaster Management Plan being swung into immediate action.
When things start to go wrong for us 21 highly paid professionals are suddenly mentally transported to the deck of an overloaded Phillipino ferry which has just hit rocks and started to take on water. Suddenly everybody's running around panicking, pointing randomly and making that they know what everybody else is supposed to be doing while simultaneously trying to throw everybody else out of the way to save themselves. Once the panic has set it then suddenly players start shitting themselves the moment they get the ball before handballing to the guy standing stationary a foot away. At the subsequent bounce everyone will stand around pointing for somebody else to fill a gap which nobody does and they kick a goal from it. Back to the centre and repeat.
Good to that in the middle of all the chaos Trengove followed through with his threat not to change his playing style by doing pretty much exactly the same tackle as he did against Adelaide. Only this time the umpire took a stand for all that is good and decent in the world by not only failing to condemn him for it but also paid a free for holding the ball. It helps that Higgins/Ward/Zeno Tzatzaris/whoever it was doesn't have a head made out of fine china like Dangerfield but if the umpires are going to reward him for it then how in the name of dutch buggery can they turn around and book him for it? Rivers did one too. Again, the recipient isn't going to wobble around like a clown then turn up and kick six next week so no damage done. Either way if they find some reasoning to continue the vendetta against JT then the umpire who paid the free should cop double the suspension for paying it.
Petterd took the near Mark of the Year, and thank god he finished it, but so what? I was there the day Juice took the MOTY against North and we got thrashed then too. Thumping it into the forward line on top of everybody's head had to work at least once. It was telling that it took an epic screamer for somebody to finally pull one in. Sylvia returned from the dead to take a contested mark and goal as well to get us two in a row and launch another half hearted comeback but it didn't last for long, a minute and a half later we gifted them another goal and went into the last nearly six goals down.
Incidentally doesn't it make you want to kick something into shards when a player gathers the ball 20m out and tries to roll it through along the turf despite there being five players in the way? Just once I'd like to see somebody try to just thump the thing over their head a'la Robbo in Perth ten years ago instead of trying to thread the eye of a needle, somehow managing to avoid an oval shaped ball hitting anybody on the way through. It's like sending a soldier onto a WW1 battlefield and having him fire his gun straight into the ground in the hope that it will skim along the mud and skip up to smash a German between the eyes.
If it had been us 33 points in front at the last change I'd have been citing the Chris Sullivan Line and the various times that we'd stuffed up a lead like that to either lose or let the opposition get closer than you're comfortable with. But there is no line with us. We've come back from five goals down at three quarter time to win three times since 1897 (1, 2 and 3) and there's no name you can give to an unexpected occurrence like that.
Watts did his bit for history by kicking the first goal and leaving the door at least slightly ajar but they went down the other end, Rivers gave away a 50 that took them to the line and we were finished. The unfortunate thing, and the killer that really made this difficult to swallow, was that from there they just wiped the floor with us.
Even Jarrad Grant, the dictionary definition of uncoordinated, started taking screamers in the middle of the massacre. It was no Petterd but it was impressive just because it ended in his arms and legs as far apart as they could possibly be without one flying off and landing in the stands. As if the game wasn't already long gone it sent another wave of red and blue clad fans towards the exits. I was particularly impressed by one gent who stopped at the bottom of the stairwell, turned out around to face the big screen and launched a last, desperate act of defiance by thrusting a middle finger towards the replay before walking out.
How about losing one with heads held high at some point (but not against Port)? The only team with a worse average losing margin than us is GC and they've got an excuse. That's what makes this painful. Like an even more extreme version of the Collingwood game you could cop losing but to roll over and get pounded like that is just rude.
There wasn't even a hint of Junktime Jurrah when it was all too late. He might still be our leading goalkicker but there's no way he's been playing anywhere near 100% for the last few weeks. Would have thought that if he wasn't right, which anybody could see, the week before the bye going into a game on (near enough to) home soil where he will want to do well would have been the right time to give him a rest. With respect to a much improved effort in the last fortnight he was hardly pivotal last week so we could have used a Dunn, Bate or Emo Maric as cannon fodder for a week while he healed up. Instead he hobbles off with confidence shot and would probably miss if we played next week.
The torture came to an end with Callan Ward taking the piss out of Scully, which was a bit rude considering that they'll be shacked up together in a harbourside mansion in six months time. I think as Ward sold the dummy and ran around him to kick the goal they might have winked at each other and done a secret gesture that only two kids prematurely made millionaires by greed can give. Surely one of them whispered the phrase last uttered at a St Kilda team bonding session, "next year it's you, me and a bunch of 17-year-olds". Fair to say whatever Ward put on top of his contract it's coming off Scully's after Tom being tagged to buggery tonight. Either way they're both going to walk into rooms for the rest of their lives with this playing but if Tom's going to chuck us to become a pin-up idol to the good, law abiding folk of Macquarie Fields then good luck with having a taste of that every week for the next three years with nowt but a bunch of starving orphans as back up. At least with us he can be guaranteed that once a month his teammates might stand up enough to let him get off the leash. Where does logic come into this though? Money talks...
Speaking of contracts, if you were in charge of putting together our list for next year would you pick up the phone today and call Cale Morton's manager, laugh heartily at him for putting contract talks off when he's playing like shite and make a final offer of one year on $20 an hour and a tray full of Quarter Pounders?
As a reward for staying until the end we not only got to see a classic MFC rollover death but we were also treated to a second round of their Freo-lite, track one of the HMAS Pinafore soundtrack, nautical theme song.
Welcome back misery and dark depression, everything feels more comfortable with you enveloping me. I'm going to spend the next two weeks listening to My Chemical Romance albums and having at myself with a ballpoint pen.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
The top three are well deserved despite the disaster. Watts was good early and tried hard all night. Howe slides in just in front of Frawley based on Chip making Barry Hall look 15 years younger in the first quarter.
5 - Jordie McKenzie
4 - Jack Trengove
3 - Ricky Petterd
2 - Jack Watts
1 - Jeremy Howe
Apologies to Frawley and the rest can get stuffed.
Leaderboard
23 - Colin Sylvia, Brent Moloney
19 - Jack Watts
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year), Jordie McKenzie
14 - Stefan Martin
11 - James Frawley (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers
9 - Jack Trengove,Joel Macdonald
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Ricky Petterd, Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans, Brad Green, Tom Scully
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
1 - Jeremy Howe
Crowd Watch
The regular 42 second minute's silence was generally well observed, but is there any danger we might add the lost 18 seconds one of these days? If you can get people through the half a minute without yelling somebody stupid and getting punched by the person sitting next to them then the next 30 seconds should be a doddle. Wouldn't want to take away from the time that they can spend trying to take our money through Betfair though would we?
One quality Western Suburbs education required for the kid who was interviewed by that filthy fan for hire James Sherry. "How long have you been supporting the Dogs?" asked the ex-children's game show host. "10 years" replies the child who presumably has a god awful name like Jaiyden. "How old are you?" asks the filth and the kid replies "five". Aww, how cute, let's all have one etc.. FFFH then attempted the frankly ludicrous move of asking the crowd to sing Happy Birthday for the kid, but despite the woman in front of me taking a second away from eating a sandwich that smelt like a corpse pulled out of a river to briefly join in before she realised what she was doing the sound of silence echoed across the ground for a second time that night. In the end even the FFFH gave up and after a prolonged camera shot of Kyieran looking silently bamboozled they cut away to something even more family friendly, the live betting odds.
It doesn't promise to get much better for young Alyix. Next time ask him how many flags Footscray have won, that should be easy enough for kids of any age to get right. Teeing off on a five year old is a new low but that's the sort of rancid mood that this sporting abortion has put me in.
Now - Etihad Stadium, the Corporate Dome, hell on earth call it what you will but last night their food outlets managed to push my hatred of the joint to levels that I couldn't possibly achieve if we played in another 20 straight losses there. Not only were they selling a thinly veiled Dagwood Dog under the utterly ridiculous name of the "Pluto Pup", but when I foolishly decided to buy one of their rancid, floppy hot dogs in a bun that wasn't even intact all the way around they tried to make me pay $0.20 for a tiny sachet of chemical mustard probably manufactured in the former Yugoslavia.
Not content with making you pay $6 for something that costs them less than a dollar, is served by somebody on minimum wage and will repeat on you for days on end they want $0.20 for condiments? Get to shite. The only problem was that walking off in a huff at this randomly introduced policy which didn't exist any of the other four times I've been to that hole this season (including 2 x non MFC games. WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF?) I forgot to take my drink with me and when they called me back collect it I had to do a five metre walk of shame back where I'd just had a tantrum. If I was them I'd just have stashed it under the counter and denied all.
Speaking of performances I sadly arrived too late to see the real life bulldog being paraded around the ground and the rumoured appearance of the Hyde St Primary School Band playing a brass heavy version of the theme from Rocky never materialised. When they started asking trivia questions where the options were Kelvin Templeton, Simon Beasley or Danny Del Re I didn't think it was that much of a stretch to just do the right thing and change their name back to Footscray.
Coaches Corner
Just when you thought the market was shut this performance has put my favourite coach back in the frame for a job in 2012.
If I see Bailey drag Morton aside, put his bald head against Cale's stick figure torso and say the words "Breathe... from your core" at some point before this year is out I'll campaign for both of them to be re-signed on the spot. Problem is for that to happen Morton has to be back in the side again. Brad Gotch could do it on Casey Fields with a hundred curious onlookers but it wouldn't have the same effect.
Also there's one guy in that ad who must surely only have gotten the call up because he looks like Simon Black.
Terror in the Top End (aka the week after next week)
Anyone want to confidently say there's no possible way we can lose to Port? Knowing this lot they'll probably show up and win by 150 and I'll get roped right back into like a total cockhead. Either way if he managed to take his head out of the oven long enough to see the way we played tonight Matthew Primus would think "bloody hell, we're a chance here".
They're such utter garbage that surely even we can't play them into form but the Northern Territory is like the twilight zone, anything could happen.
Pending any particularly storming games from nowhere at Casey the changes for mine are;
IN - Tapscott, Macdonald, Maric
OUT - Morton, Bennell (omit), Jurrah (half inj/half omit, the final victim of the curse of the Drake ad)
Apparently there's some injury concerns over the Experience, so if he's not right then Maximum comes straight back in. Almost time too for Bate to have one last crack at putting together a Brad Miller-esque end of season run which sees him given another chance against all odds. I don't think Dunn is necessarily finished yet but what's he going to add? At least if we're going to go with the idea of thumping it long to the square all the time then Maric will provide a hint o' crumb. If anybody else puts their hand up in the two's (and as I write this Casey are going tits up against Werribee) I could also go without Strauss.
The Future
What price one hard fought, fighting performance even in defeat against Hawthorn, Geelong or Carlton? We've been given the biggest fixturing free kick of the year by having the R24 game moved from Football Park to effectively neutral turf at the Adelaide Oval but I will be go off my nut if it turns out not to mean anything by the time we get there.
Final Thoughts
We deserve a government grant for continually playing shit teams back into form.
Friday, 1 July 2011
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Let them burn and we shall all clap our hands
Match of the round status, a thumping last start victory and 60,000 people watching on in the only game in Victoria of a Saturday. What could possibly go wrong? Especially considering that even during our darkest days we've either beaten Richmond or had to cheat so openly and disgracefully that we still almost won despite playing Matthew Warnock at full-forward.
As I said in last week's post, which in review was clearly written with the sort of half-Ararat that only a 15 goal win can cause, something felt right about this match-up. It's no knock on Richmond as a team, who if they can avoid self imploding and throwing it away like so many others in the last 30 years should turn out to be quite good, and not just for one season this time. What last week showed us is that when the defensive matchups don't hang our players out to dry, and when we've got a decent forward structure which features both lead and crumb we're not a bad side. Not worldbeaters by any stretch, but at least good enough to put forth a decent campaign around the lower reaches of the eight.
What we have seen in the last few weeks is that our biggest problem was getting it inside 50. Essendon let us get away with it because they were inept until the second half to shake Freo off before poleaxing them. Even the Collingwood game would have been a lot less ugly if we hadn't been thrashed out of the centre. The return of Jamar and the reunion of the Psychic Friends Connection with Moloney couldn't hurt on that front, and with the option of rotating the Russian and the Experience in front of goal we looked even more dangerous down there.
Admittedly for us a "dangerous" forward line is hardly a free-flowing attacking masterclass, but you can't ask for everything at once. It certainly looks better now than any time since 2006 but to take advantage of it you've got to get it in there to start with - and with that you have the makings of the Collingwood debacle.
What we have got is a backline that unless everything goes wrong for them (e.g Collingwood) are absolutely dynamite. Rivers has recovered from his Queen's Birthday nightmare to start doing what he does best again, there's nothing more that needs to be said about how much Garland adds to this team and be completely honest about it how much do you love James Frawley?
The fact that we took Chip one pick before Jack Riewoldt in the '06 draft means that if he hadn't turned into the killer defender that he has we'd forever have been subject to "why didn't we" wailing and gnashing of teeth by fans and media, so thank christ that's been avoided. Think how much you wanted to go around to the office of the Herald Sun and kick some tables over when they printed that ludicrous article in their paper about how we should have picked Hurley in front of Watts. If we were still waiting for Frawley to deliver on his promise while Riewoldt was running around winning Coleman Medals you could multiply that by a million.
Right now it's a spectacular win/win for both sides. I'm sure nobody would be complaining if the tables were turned and we'd picked Jack instead but my god could the Tigers have done with Frawley down back today. Problem is that if they'd picked him he'd probably have spent the first five years of his career being gobbed at by freaks who still held a grudge about his uncle's coaching.
Either way both sides can be confident they made the right decisions considering that the next five players picked after Frawley and Riewoldt were James Sellar (21 games), Daniel O'Keefe (delisted at the end of '09), Mitch Brown (four games this year), Shaun Hampson (meh) and Leroy Jetta (double meh). Sometimes the system works, and sometimes your recruiting manager is Craig Cameron.
Ironically it seems that after all that they're set to play on each other in every match between the two sides until the end of time. Riewoldt won the first meeting last year and Frawley towelled him up in the second so the stage was set for what was probably the most crucial battle of the game. Even though he's leading the Coleman Jack hasn't been anything like as dangerous he was last year. But despite that, him being played further up the ground more often and the rumours that he was playing with an injury, the demolition job the Frawley did on him played as big a part as any in our win. The only downer is that his injury at the start of the year, and slow start on return, will probably cost him a back-to-back All Australian spot when he could very well deserve it. How about some of those storming runs he made coming out of defence today? Superstar.
Having said all that you'd never have known we were on the way to a relatively comfortable win seven minutes into the first quarter. Eventually after missing four gettable shots they settled for a ten point play when Dustin Martin, the man who tattoed his own surname across his neck just in case he forgot it, stuffed up my return to the welcoming bosom of the TAB and denied Jamar his god given chance to kick the first goal.
I should have walked away and called Gambler's Helpline when I saw that they were onto the prospect of Russian starting forward and only offered 13-1, but it had taken me long enough to get to the front of the queue that I went through with it and wasted good money that could have been spent fattening up Morton on the finest from The Kaiser's Sausage (who I am still waiting to come on and give me free kransky for endorsing every week).
When Newman added another before we'd even been inside 50 it began to look like another disastrous afternoon of following up a quality performance with some sloppy garbage. At one point the guy in front of me even got overexcited and yelled out "BETTER THAN SCULLY!" when Martin got a touch. Talk to me in October and I'll decide whether or not I agree with that, but acting like a teenage girl (or an epic perve) at a Miley Cyrus concert proved significantly premature by quarter time when we had somehow come back and kicked seven goals.
How much more like the first time we played them last year could you ask for? That day they got the first two goals, dominated us for the first seven minutes yet somehow managed to concede eight goals by quarter time. And what a feature lineup of players you'll never hear from again were on the scoreboard in that quarter Troy Taylor, David Astbury, Matty Bate. Remember the 8th goal when Petterd did the flying dive into the Punt Road end pocket to knock it back in for Bate in the square? Who would have thought it could possibly go wrong for Bater from there? Now he's all but forgotten and almost no chance of a recall unless Jeremy Howe gets hurt.
This year it was dual Green goals which got us back into it. That's two weeks in a row where he's been played in the right spot and has had decent supply, thus allowing him to play like it's 2010 again instead of floundering around the middle of the ground trying to cover gaps that he's not suited to in 2011.
By the end of the quarter, with the bleating about the umpiring already reaching fever pitch, we'd turned the match on it's head by shutting their midfield down and tightening up on their wonky defenders. Ricky Petterd was already well on the way to his record breaking game for tackles inside forward 50 when he set up Howe's goal. Add the Jurrah and Trengove goals and with seconds left we were somehow, mystifyingly almost three goals in front.
But just when you thought it couldn't get any better Watts managed to rort a free out of the umpire by running straight into an opponent and claiming a shepherd before kicking our seventh goal despite the twat who operates the siren trying to stuff him up by blowing it twice during the run-up. Good, and indeed, grief. This was not expected, especially based on the slop served up in the first seven minutes but once we started to put pressure on them they - to quote that bloke out of Dad's Army - didn't like it up 'em and fell apart accordingly.
Pretty much everything from the ten minute mark onwards was an important psychological blow but it mattered not a dot if we didn't follow it up in the second quarter. One of the most frustrating things about us, now that we seem to be moving away from Bailey Quarters just when they were about to become a worldwide sensation (and I'm not declaring them completely eradicated a'la Smallpox just yet) is when we follow up one blistering, high scoring quarter with a shit one. Happened last week, happened in that Round 4 game last year when we followed up 8.1 with 0.6 in the second and more importantly happened in the North game which wound up with us losing comfortably.
After North I won't trust another first quarter lead for the rest of this year. You'd be foolish to trust any five goal first quarter lead these days, and even in the Freo match that was when the shock subsided and we briefly let them get back into it. So hands up who else thought "oh christ, here we go again?" when they dominated us in the opening minutes of the second and got the first two goals? It looked plenty like the first quarter, right down to us winding up out of nowhere and somehow outscoring them in the end.
It was only one goal more, including one to *swoon* the Experience, but it could have been even better. Both Jurrah and Jamar missed fairly gettable goals which would have blow the margin out, but with Hardwick content to waste Deledio on trying to quell Watts they were letting us pretty much do as we pleased. Vickery got a couple early and Riewoldt his only one for the day but we had goalkicking options out the wazoo and used them accordingly.
Incidentally speaking of Jamar his miss of the sitter, which was by my count his third from a similar spot this year, is a good opportunity to bring out my favourite #statmybitchup fact that until the start of this year he was the most accurate set shot of any player since 1987. Ridiculous. Mind you it's discredited slightly by the fact that his 3.4 this year has pushed him below massive names like Michael Murphy, Matthew Capuano and Barnaby French but still, it shows that he's a more reliable kick than he's letting on at the moment.
Still, even though it helps he's not there to kick goals. He's there to dominate the centre bounce, form a Psychic Connection with Moloney and be the target for kick-ins 99% of the time. The spectacular rise of the SME meant that Bailey could be comfortable leaving Stef in the starting bounce today and playing with Jamar forward, but when Richmond started getting on top he threw the Russian back into the middle and that old magic was recaptured. Apparently the PFC are still the #1 ruck/rove combination in the game despite Jamar having missed all those weeks. What does that say? Other than if you stop Moloney we're pretty much rooted.
Stef was good too, and let's be fair he's a much safer kick around the ground, but I can't help but swoon whenever I see a Jamar/Moloney tap cracker. If that was his first game after six weeks watch out in the next month as he gets fully back into it, and watch out for he and the Experience to do some damage on the scoreboard as well. There was even a moment where the SME monstered his opponent in front of goal and I almost passed out from excitement. He didn't mark it in the end, but even though I know he's a fierce competitor when the ball hits the deck I never thought I'd see him throw somebody out of the way with ease. Sure, Richmond's backline is the most intensely pox part of their team but still...
And how much better is Moloney when he's working in combination with Jamar? He's been just ok the last few weeks but it's no coincidence that today was his best game since they tore Adelaide to shreds together six weeks ago. Hard to split my love for our ruck division at the moment considering that Maximum proved such a cult figure during his brief cameo. I'd even give The Spencil a hug right now.
The only thing was concerning me at half time was the chances of us kicking another 12 goals, or near enough to, in the second half. If you took out the first seven minutes of the first two quarters we'd actually put together an entire first half of decent football and even in our best wins we barely managed to do that.
Five of the goals came directly from defensive howlers, and you can't rely on any team to hand you them on a platter for a full four quarters. Though it's not to say it was complete charity though, our forward pressure set a standard that's going to make us look pretty ordinary if they don't put the same kind of intensity into terrifying the very ordinary Footscray and Port over the next few weeks.
For all the tension, and Richmond's early domination, we had the first shot on goal from a crashing Watts pack mark - the sort which makes grown men weep with joy - and even though he missed the Experience got his second soon after and we were out to a 38 point lead. Unfortunately Jack then got sucked in to some handbags at 20 paces biffo in our backline and the umpire, clearly regretting the farce of a free he'd just paid to Stef that led to the goal, gave them the ball in the centre which they instantly converted.
From there we delivered one of the shitest attempts at putting a game away that you'll ever want to see. No doubt we were playing well around the ground but how many times could we have ended it before missed a hurried snap or a set shot? Thank god Tyrone Vickery declined an easy handball to Miller in the square and stuffed up his snap after thinking about it for 2 hours because if that had gone in we could have been in real trouble.
The momentum shift had started after the Watts free, so it was only appropriate that he made up for it by eventually getting our second for the quarter right on the siren. And what a goal too, anyone piece of Jack Magic to make you want to call the Herald Sun switchboard and yell "STICK THAT UP YOUR COLLECTIVE ARSES YOU PURVEYORS OF A RAG WHICH I WOULD NOT USE TO HOUSETRAIN A DOG" to the baffled and traumatised receptionist.
He couldn't have known there was about three seconds on the clock when he chased down Houli in front of goal after Newman had set him up with a rubbish handballs, but how about the hurried snap and evil look on his face when he slotted it just as the siren went? Everyone loves bagging private schoolkids (except Melbourne supporters because most of our fans were one at some point), and not without some justification, but the evil look tells me that he's not only becoming a top shelf forward but that he's also injected swagger into his game.
I once wanted to hire Wayne Carey as our coach (unaware that he was fighting imaginary bats at the time), that's how much I love swagger. Almost as much as I love crumb. So when Jack was doing his post match interview and mentioned that one of the three C's which the forward line are supposed to live by was CRUMB I almost jumped and down in celebration. He's right too, we've had plenty o'crumb the last few weeks (Collingwood debacle excluded) and that can't be a bad thing. It's just a shame that Demonblog's own Emo Maric isn't there to share in the spoils after his crumbtastic performance in junktime against North. Get well soon Emo.
Still, the margin might have been five goals and we might only have lost a couple of points off the lead after botching all those chances but it was by no means over. 17 points below the Chris Sullivan Line I realised that Sullivan had ended his career with Richmond. Omen nearly became reality when they got the first two of the quarter.
Down the other end Green had the chance for a steadier and put it out on the full and it was starting to look a lot like the Essendon game all over again. Luckily it turned out to have the same result. Sylvia's goal steadied the ship, and even though they got another one and could still have nicked it Trengove's third did them in and as the game limped to a conclusion we even got a piece of Jurrahcane piss taking magic when he sold the gigantic dummy around half of their backline and kicked his second.
One thing I learned today while watching Brad Miller going around was just how ludicrous it was when people threw hissy fits about us dumping him at the end of last year. Still, some were shattered when we traded Travis Johnstone and look how that turned out. No offence to Bradforth because he seems like a genuinely nice guy and I'm glad he's getting a game somewhere but his first half showed exactly why it was premature for anybody to lose sleep about us giving him the boot.
Ignoring his ruck cameos, where he was always going to get carved to shreds, he didn't do a great deal for the first three quarters other than setting up the Grigg goal which wouldn't have been a goal if our whole backline hadn't jumped from the same side of the square. Compare and contrast to having Jeremy Howe down there, Watts starting to run riot and the option to play either Jamar or the Experience out of the goalsquare and it tells me that right now Bradforth would be lining up alongside Bate, Dunn, Maric and Fev in a killer VFL forward line but that he'd be a mile off getting a game with us. Would be surprised if he was even at the Tigers next year, but we all know what he's got waiting for him at home so it's fair to say Bradforth is still the overall winner.
After being Milleresque all day I suddenly realised he was on the verge of playing the 30 minutes of his life in that last quarter and knobbing us. He set up two goals and even managed to break even with Jamar at centre bounces a couple of times. Thank god the rest of them couldn't go on with it because after losing to Bruce, McLean and Buckley this year the last thing we needed was for an ex-player to drag his side over the line in an inspirational cameo performance. Pencil in Cheney as BOG when we play Hawthorn again.
Meanwhile it's been great to see the hated (by me anyway) sub rule get a bit of a kicking over the last couple of days, even if much of it has been driven by the sooks from Windy Hill, but the bad news is that for the rest of this year at least we're going to have to deal with it. Given that can we agree that Morton just doesn't work in that role?
After a fortnight of decent, if unspectacular, performances he donned the traffic controller vest and proceeded to stink the joint up with two shockers from his first three kicks after replacing Macdonald. He recovered a bit as the game went on but if you're going to bring somebody into a close game they can't need time to get confidence. One of these days we're going to be involved in a real thriller and the Sad Panda is going to get crucified if he comes on and makes a costly cockup.
Not sure who else you'd have had as the sub from our team yesterday - I was more than happy with Bennell on field - but if you're not going to pick somebody who can make an impact coming off the bench then just don't pick them in the first place. It's a shit rule and the sooner we see the back of it (or at least extend it to 4+1 on the bench so it becomes the domain of fringe players as it deserves to be) the better.
For all our attempts to kick ourselves out of it and let them back in it was still a significant win. Richmond fans will tell you they were robbed by the umpires (and the guy who rang Triple M to say they would have won by 12 goals if it wasn't for the umps was a classic) but it wasn't the guys in green who caused Vickery to give Miller nothing. They were doing fine in rorting themselves out of the four points without having to worry about the umpires - who were pretty ordinary both ways - hurting them. Still, sook if it makes you feel better you won't get anything out of it other than a phone bill for thousands of dollars from calling every sports talkback program in the world to tell your story.
To be entirely honest I was bursting with pride inside, but had no desire to stand around and celebrate what should be the second step in a four match winning streak which sets us up for a legitimate crack at the finals. If we win next week I'll start celebrating. The downside of this lack of celebration was that I walked out of the ground, past the Kaiser's Sausage (P.S - I WILL MENTION YOU EVERY WEEK FOR ONE FREE CHEESE KRAINER AT EVERY MATCH) and onto the bridge towards Flinders Street to realise I was the only person in a sea of hundreds who wasn't a Richmond fan. If they'd decided to kill me right there nobody would have known. Thank god all the real top shelf freaks are locked in down the other end of the ground.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
I've got a feeling, having seen a few sets of votes that are completely different, that opinions might vary on the top five and which order they go in. If you violently disagree please send death threats on a postcard to the usual address.
I feel a bit sad that I couldn't somehow push Petterd up the rankings just for the defensive game he turned in today. Forget the fact that he cracked the record for I50 tackles, but have you ever seen a bigger contrast between somebody's performance with the ball and without it? His possessions heinous (33% and that includes handballs) but he was ferocious when he didn't have it. Never did I think anybody who botched two thirds of their touches would ever not only win a vote but that I'd feel he deserved more but that's how good it was. Wouldn't expect to see Dunn win a recall anytime soon if Ricky's going to play like that.
Also can I freely admit that I've got a rude mancrush on Jordie McKenzie? He didn't totally destroy Cotchin today, but he did enough to make sure he wasn't a factor. I'm surprised at him only having five tackles because he always seemed to be there when somebody was tackled - probably because he's forever lurking, ready to leap on some poor bastard when they're vulnerable. Even looked comfortable kicking it today which is a huge step up from last week.
So after tossing up between the top two for about half an hour I eventually settled on the Million Dollar Manchild. Long may he reign.
5 - Jack Watts
4 - Brent Moloney
3 - Jordie McKenzie
2 - James Frawley
1 - Ricky Petterd
Gigantic apologies to Martin, Jones, Green, Trengove and Garland. Slightly less to Scully, Jurrah, Sylvia, Gysberts and Nicholson. Most others at least good.
Leaderboard
It's a tie at the top, but with Watts and the entire ruck division lurking closely behind. Elsewhere Frawley has finally put his nose in front in the Seecamp and you'd want to back him home from here.
23 - Colin Sylvia, Brent Moloney
17 - Jack Watts
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Stefan Martin
11 - Jordie McKenzie, James Frawley (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers
9 - Joel Macdonald
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans, Brad Green, Tom Scully
3 - Ricky Petterd, Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
Crowd Watch
Once again the Ponsford Stand, around me at least, remained the bastion of all that is good and right with the world and despite being almost entirely surrounded by Richmond fans there wasn't a single moment of tension. I think that for Tigers games they make anybody who turns up in a gypsy caravan sit in the Southern Stand so that's probably where all the best action was. They can have it, I'm too old to be involving myself in wild scenes.
The only time I felt that it was about to kick off was when Watts got the free for the shephard at the end of the first quarter and the guy across the aisle and one row back went off his nut. Out the corner of my eye I thought he was about to throw a can (!?) in my direction and flinched at it. No, I did not spend the game tripping on acid so god knows where that came from. Expect that it had something to do with being in shock from the last 15 minutes of the quarter.
Speaking of the first quarter, halfway through it I saw one of the most shameless breaches of footy etiquette of all time. Now, tell me if I'm living in Cloud Cuckoo Land but if you want to get to the middle of an aisle is it not accepted that you stop at the end, get the attention of the first person then wait for them and everyone else to stand up one by one as you walk in?
Not so this Richmond gent. Despite the fact that he was carrying a coffee in one hand and a tiny kiddy backpack over his other shoulder (which is always a stranger danger alert as far as I'm concerned) he bounded up the stairs to the row in front of me and plowed straight through them without warning and with the coffee precariously hanging over the row in front threatening to scorch them at any minute. He then pushed through the startled crowd, almost to the other side of the aisle without waiting for one person to move for him. Mannerless peasant. Needless to say he wasn't wearing red and/or blue.
Ridiculously the first Richmond fans to pull the pin and leave went halfway through the third quarter after Jurrah marked on the lead. Never mind that he hadn't converted the kick yet or that countless teams have lost games from five goals in front in the third quarter, the moment the ball hit his hands, they stood up, waved to their friends and were gone. Don't worry that he missed, they would have been halfway up platform 8 at Richmond Station by the time the Tiges made it interesting in the last term and in Pakenham by the final siren.
The real exodus began with Sylvia's goal, and gradually a world record number of women with bald spots and/or men wearing team merchandise clearly found at Savers drifted out. By the time Trengove goalled the numbers of our supporters to theirs in Q34 had almost evened up, and by the end there were about three empty rows around me. Something tells me that a large number of them came expecting a win and were moderately disappointed about it. Wah, and indeed wah. Though it's not like our lot aren't guilty of the same thing.
You know why I like Richmond? Because you can use all the jokes about their fans that you would for Collingwood if they weren't so good. I wonder what happened to the guy who sat there at this game singing the Tiges theme song with altered lyrics about putting Terry Wallace in the electric chair.
Koaching Korner
Without delving completely into #welovehird/#sackhird territory you'd have to think the market on Bailey staying or going has been thrown into disarray over the last fortnight. It could all still go tits up so don't buy stock in him yet but today was a big step forward. Which is terrible news for all of you who had a sneaky fiver on the bloke out of the Deep Heat ad taking over. All I can do to comfort you is reveal that in a desperate attempt to find a picture of the Team Deep Heat coach I went onto their website and discovered that their product promises you "special 3 way action". Which is probably the best offer you'll ever get out of this page.
Personal Computing Corner - presented by Kaspersky Lab and hotxxxplumpers.com
There's nothing more tragic, yet simultaneously hilarious, than supporters being rolled into posting impassioned defences of their club when somebody has a pot shot at it online.
Shamefully we've all been there, sometimes it might have even been justified, but if you didn't read this thread before the match then do yourself a favour and take it in now before somebody gets murdered and it's taken away as evidence.
There should be one thing written above all forums, and which users should be forced to print out and put above their computer before they're allowed to post, IT DOES NOT MAKE A SPOT OF DIFFERENCE IN REAL LIFE WHAT SOMEBODY WRITES ABOUT YOUR CLUB ON THE INTERNET. Popular legend has it that we're sexually aroused by snow and love nothing more than plowing down a mountain yelling PIP PIP old chap! This is unlikely to be true (though I've not been near snow since I spent a week hiding from it playing Galaga in a chalet during an 80's family holiday so what do I know?) but people are going to drag it out for the rest of time and that’s ok.
What do you do? You could smile knowingly, nod and admit that although it is a massive fiction that you'd rather be thought of as velvet jacket toting ski bunnies than heroin addicted armed robbers. Alternatively you could go out and try to round up some actual heroin addicted armed robbers to come along and cause a scene for the media, but what you should never, ever do – and take this from somebody who has been shamefully reading internet forums since the days when it took an hour just to see one boob come up on the net – is take it to heart and launch a furious, keyboard mashing defence of your club’s integrity/origin/supporter base. Because, and please look up above your monitor at the sign you have just printed out and stuck up, IT DOES NOT MAKE A SPOT OF DIFFERENCE IN REAL LIFE WHAT SOMEBODY WRITES ABOUT YOUR CLUB ON THE INTERNET.
Still, if you think it's going to get us somewhere by going into bat against 14-year-olds from Deer Park then go for your life.
Next Week
That was the hard one. The problem from here is not that we're playing Footscray (unconvincing, Ed Barlow starring) and Port (rancid song, hacks galore) but where the matches are being played.
Next Friday night against the Dogs we fully deserve to go in red hot favourites considering that they've served up two unconvincing wins against rubbish sides but I don't need to tell you how hideous we've been at Docklands during the Bailey era. The Dogs have gone from being shite to good and back again since we last won a game at that place. And what an afternoon it was too, with Ben Holland running riot and Jace Bode making his long awaited (!?) debut.
Since then we've lost a full ten in a row, but at least there were times during both our games there this year that we did look alright so against doctor's orders I'm getting sucked in and picking us. How long does it seem since that first Jamar-less quarter against North with Juice pretending he was John Coleman up front? More of that, less of the majority of the other 43 quarters (including pre-season matches) we've turned in there since 2008.
Then for pure financial reasons we play Port in Darwin where anything could happen.
Move it back to the MCG and we'd go in $1.10 favourites with a massacre on the cards, but put it in the humid conditions where they've already won this season and it's anything but a certainty.
At least we've got form there after last year's win. Who will ever forget Leigh Colbert conducting one of the finest post-match interviews of all time with an exhausted Jamar seated on the turf of TIO Stadium? More importantly who'll ever forget Miller kicking a career high five goals in his last great moment shortly before getting the arse.
Then it gets interesting. You can all but write off the game in Geelong (why am I going? Even worse, why am I considering catching a V-Line train there?) but if we can win against one of Carlton or Hawthorn then we're putting ourselves right in the mix. If we win both the lid will be torn off and hurled into the sky with such vigour that it will start orbiting the earth.
Of course we're operating in a different world to the likes of Carlton and Hawthorn. After what we've been through for the last few years just making the eight is treated like a major milestone. Small steps. Some subscribe to the theory that it's better to miss out than to just fall in, get thrashed and wind up with Matthew Knights being sacked acrimoniously. I spit on that theory and would dearly like to update this page at least once before the end of the year.
So, on Friday night can everyone just put their hatred of Etihad Stadium aside and show up? Apparently Joel Mac might miss, so pending any mystery injuries and with Casey having the bye this week I'll bring Tapscott in for him if fit. The shame for J.Mac is that after his best month of the season he might never get back in if Tappy plays like he did at the start of the year.
Was it worth it?
If you watched on TV you had to listen to Dwayne Russell. So it most certainly was.
Let's do it all again in Round 22.
As I said in last week's post, which in review was clearly written with the sort of half-Ararat that only a 15 goal win can cause, something felt right about this match-up. It's no knock on Richmond as a team, who if they can avoid self imploding and throwing it away like so many others in the last 30 years should turn out to be quite good, and not just for one season this time. What last week showed us is that when the defensive matchups don't hang our players out to dry, and when we've got a decent forward structure which features both lead and crumb we're not a bad side. Not worldbeaters by any stretch, but at least good enough to put forth a decent campaign around the lower reaches of the eight.
What we have seen in the last few weeks is that our biggest problem was getting it inside 50. Essendon let us get away with it because they were inept until the second half to shake Freo off before poleaxing them. Even the Collingwood game would have been a lot less ugly if we hadn't been thrashed out of the centre. The return of Jamar and the reunion of the Psychic Friends Connection with Moloney couldn't hurt on that front, and with the option of rotating the Russian and the Experience in front of goal we looked even more dangerous down there.
Admittedly for us a "dangerous" forward line is hardly a free-flowing attacking masterclass, but you can't ask for everything at once. It certainly looks better now than any time since 2006 but to take advantage of it you've got to get it in there to start with - and with that you have the makings of the Collingwood debacle.
What we have got is a backline that unless everything goes wrong for them (e.g Collingwood) are absolutely dynamite. Rivers has recovered from his Queen's Birthday nightmare to start doing what he does best again, there's nothing more that needs to be said about how much Garland adds to this team and be completely honest about it how much do you love James Frawley?
The fact that we took Chip one pick before Jack Riewoldt in the '06 draft means that if he hadn't turned into the killer defender that he has we'd forever have been subject to "why didn't we" wailing and gnashing of teeth by fans and media, so thank christ that's been avoided. Think how much you wanted to go around to the office of the Herald Sun and kick some tables over when they printed that ludicrous article in their paper about how we should have picked Hurley in front of Watts. If we were still waiting for Frawley to deliver on his promise while Riewoldt was running around winning Coleman Medals you could multiply that by a million.
Right now it's a spectacular win/win for both sides. I'm sure nobody would be complaining if the tables were turned and we'd picked Jack instead but my god could the Tigers have done with Frawley down back today. Problem is that if they'd picked him he'd probably have spent the first five years of his career being gobbed at by freaks who still held a grudge about his uncle's coaching.
Either way both sides can be confident they made the right decisions considering that the next five players picked after Frawley and Riewoldt were James Sellar (21 games), Daniel O'Keefe (delisted at the end of '09), Mitch Brown (four games this year), Shaun Hampson (meh) and Leroy Jetta (double meh). Sometimes the system works, and sometimes your recruiting manager is Craig Cameron.
Ironically it seems that after all that they're set to play on each other in every match between the two sides until the end of time. Riewoldt won the first meeting last year and Frawley towelled him up in the second so the stage was set for what was probably the most crucial battle of the game. Even though he's leading the Coleman Jack hasn't been anything like as dangerous he was last year. But despite that, him being played further up the ground more often and the rumours that he was playing with an injury, the demolition job the Frawley did on him played as big a part as any in our win. The only downer is that his injury at the start of the year, and slow start on return, will probably cost him a back-to-back All Australian spot when he could very well deserve it. How about some of those storming runs he made coming out of defence today? Superstar.
Having said all that you'd never have known we were on the way to a relatively comfortable win seven minutes into the first quarter. Eventually after missing four gettable shots they settled for a ten point play when Dustin Martin, the man who tattoed his own surname across his neck just in case he forgot it, stuffed up my return to the welcoming bosom of the TAB and denied Jamar his god given chance to kick the first goal.
I should have walked away and called Gambler's Helpline when I saw that they were onto the prospect of Russian starting forward and only offered 13-1, but it had taken me long enough to get to the front of the queue that I went through with it and wasted good money that could have been spent fattening up Morton on the finest from The Kaiser's Sausage (who I am still waiting to come on and give me free kransky for endorsing every week).
When Newman added another before we'd even been inside 50 it began to look like another disastrous afternoon of following up a quality performance with some sloppy garbage. At one point the guy in front of me even got overexcited and yelled out "BETTER THAN SCULLY!" when Martin got a touch. Talk to me in October and I'll decide whether or not I agree with that, but acting like a teenage girl (or an epic perve) at a Miley Cyrus concert proved significantly premature by quarter time when we had somehow come back and kicked seven goals.
How much more like the first time we played them last year could you ask for? That day they got the first two goals, dominated us for the first seven minutes yet somehow managed to concede eight goals by quarter time. And what a feature lineup of players you'll never hear from again were on the scoreboard in that quarter Troy Taylor, David Astbury, Matty Bate. Remember the 8th goal when Petterd did the flying dive into the Punt Road end pocket to knock it back in for Bate in the square? Who would have thought it could possibly go wrong for Bater from there? Now he's all but forgotten and almost no chance of a recall unless Jeremy Howe gets hurt.
This year it was dual Green goals which got us back into it. That's two weeks in a row where he's been played in the right spot and has had decent supply, thus allowing him to play like it's 2010 again instead of floundering around the middle of the ground trying to cover gaps that he's not suited to in 2011.
By the end of the quarter, with the bleating about the umpiring already reaching fever pitch, we'd turned the match on it's head by shutting their midfield down and tightening up on their wonky defenders. Ricky Petterd was already well on the way to his record breaking game for tackles inside forward 50 when he set up Howe's goal. Add the Jurrah and Trengove goals and with seconds left we were somehow, mystifyingly almost three goals in front.
But just when you thought it couldn't get any better Watts managed to rort a free out of the umpire by running straight into an opponent and claiming a shepherd before kicking our seventh goal despite the twat who operates the siren trying to stuff him up by blowing it twice during the run-up. Good, and indeed, grief. This was not expected, especially based on the slop served up in the first seven minutes but once we started to put pressure on them they - to quote that bloke out of Dad's Army - didn't like it up 'em and fell apart accordingly.
Pretty much everything from the ten minute mark onwards was an important psychological blow but it mattered not a dot if we didn't follow it up in the second quarter. One of the most frustrating things about us, now that we seem to be moving away from Bailey Quarters just when they were about to become a worldwide sensation (and I'm not declaring them completely eradicated a'la Smallpox just yet) is when we follow up one blistering, high scoring quarter with a shit one. Happened last week, happened in that Round 4 game last year when we followed up 8.1 with 0.6 in the second and more importantly happened in the North game which wound up with us losing comfortably.
After North I won't trust another first quarter lead for the rest of this year. You'd be foolish to trust any five goal first quarter lead these days, and even in the Freo match that was when the shock subsided and we briefly let them get back into it. So hands up who else thought "oh christ, here we go again?" when they dominated us in the opening minutes of the second and got the first two goals? It looked plenty like the first quarter, right down to us winding up out of nowhere and somehow outscoring them in the end.
It was only one goal more, including one to *swoon* the Experience, but it could have been even better. Both Jurrah and Jamar missed fairly gettable goals which would have blow the margin out, but with Hardwick content to waste Deledio on trying to quell Watts they were letting us pretty much do as we pleased. Vickery got a couple early and Riewoldt his only one for the day but we had goalkicking options out the wazoo and used them accordingly.
Incidentally speaking of Jamar his miss of the sitter, which was by my count his third from a similar spot this year, is a good opportunity to bring out my favourite #statmybitchup fact that until the start of this year he was the most accurate set shot of any player since 1987. Ridiculous. Mind you it's discredited slightly by the fact that his 3.4 this year has pushed him below massive names like Michael Murphy, Matthew Capuano and Barnaby French but still, it shows that he's a more reliable kick than he's letting on at the moment.
Still, even though it helps he's not there to kick goals. He's there to dominate the centre bounce, form a Psychic Connection with Moloney and be the target for kick-ins 99% of the time. The spectacular rise of the SME meant that Bailey could be comfortable leaving Stef in the starting bounce today and playing with Jamar forward, but when Richmond started getting on top he threw the Russian back into the middle and that old magic was recaptured. Apparently the PFC are still the #1 ruck/rove combination in the game despite Jamar having missed all those weeks. What does that say? Other than if you stop Moloney we're pretty much rooted.
Stef was good too, and let's be fair he's a much safer kick around the ground, but I can't help but swoon whenever I see a Jamar/Moloney tap cracker. If that was his first game after six weeks watch out in the next month as he gets fully back into it, and watch out for he and the Experience to do some damage on the scoreboard as well. There was even a moment where the SME monstered his opponent in front of goal and I almost passed out from excitement. He didn't mark it in the end, but even though I know he's a fierce competitor when the ball hits the deck I never thought I'd see him throw somebody out of the way with ease. Sure, Richmond's backline is the most intensely pox part of their team but still...
And how much better is Moloney when he's working in combination with Jamar? He's been just ok the last few weeks but it's no coincidence that today was his best game since they tore Adelaide to shreds together six weeks ago. Hard to split my love for our ruck division at the moment considering that Maximum proved such a cult figure during his brief cameo. I'd even give The Spencil a hug right now.
The only thing was concerning me at half time was the chances of us kicking another 12 goals, or near enough to, in the second half. If you took out the first seven minutes of the first two quarters we'd actually put together an entire first half of decent football and even in our best wins we barely managed to do that.
Five of the goals came directly from defensive howlers, and you can't rely on any team to hand you them on a platter for a full four quarters. Though it's not to say it was complete charity though, our forward pressure set a standard that's going to make us look pretty ordinary if they don't put the same kind of intensity into terrifying the very ordinary Footscray and Port over the next few weeks.
For all the tension, and Richmond's early domination, we had the first shot on goal from a crashing Watts pack mark - the sort which makes grown men weep with joy - and even though he missed the Experience got his second soon after and we were out to a 38 point lead. Unfortunately Jack then got sucked in to some handbags at 20 paces biffo in our backline and the umpire, clearly regretting the farce of a free he'd just paid to Stef that led to the goal, gave them the ball in the centre which they instantly converted.
From there we delivered one of the shitest attempts at putting a game away that you'll ever want to see. No doubt we were playing well around the ground but how many times could we have ended it before missed a hurried snap or a set shot? Thank god Tyrone Vickery declined an easy handball to Miller in the square and stuffed up his snap after thinking about it for 2 hours because if that had gone in we could have been in real trouble.
The momentum shift had started after the Watts free, so it was only appropriate that he made up for it by eventually getting our second for the quarter right on the siren. And what a goal too, anyone piece of Jack Magic to make you want to call the Herald Sun switchboard and yell "STICK THAT UP YOUR COLLECTIVE ARSES YOU PURVEYORS OF A RAG WHICH I WOULD NOT USE TO HOUSETRAIN A DOG" to the baffled and traumatised receptionist.
He couldn't have known there was about three seconds on the clock when he chased down Houli in front of goal after Newman had set him up with a rubbish handballs, but how about the hurried snap and evil look on his face when he slotted it just as the siren went? Everyone loves bagging private schoolkids (except Melbourne supporters because most of our fans were one at some point), and not without some justification, but the evil look tells me that he's not only becoming a top shelf forward but that he's also injected swagger into his game.
I once wanted to hire Wayne Carey as our coach (unaware that he was fighting imaginary bats at the time), that's how much I love swagger. Almost as much as I love crumb. So when Jack was doing his post match interview and mentioned that one of the three C's which the forward line are supposed to live by was CRUMB I almost jumped and down in celebration. He's right too, we've had plenty o'crumb the last few weeks (Collingwood debacle excluded) and that can't be a bad thing. It's just a shame that Demonblog's own Emo Maric isn't there to share in the spoils after his crumbtastic performance in junktime against North. Get well soon Emo.
Still, the margin might have been five goals and we might only have lost a couple of points off the lead after botching all those chances but it was by no means over. 17 points below the Chris Sullivan Line I realised that Sullivan had ended his career with Richmond. Omen nearly became reality when they got the first two of the quarter.
Down the other end Green had the chance for a steadier and put it out on the full and it was starting to look a lot like the Essendon game all over again. Luckily it turned out to have the same result. Sylvia's goal steadied the ship, and even though they got another one and could still have nicked it Trengove's third did them in and as the game limped to a conclusion we even got a piece of Jurrahcane piss taking magic when he sold the gigantic dummy around half of their backline and kicked his second.
One thing I learned today while watching Brad Miller going around was just how ludicrous it was when people threw hissy fits about us dumping him at the end of last year. Still, some were shattered when we traded Travis Johnstone and look how that turned out. No offence to Bradforth because he seems like a genuinely nice guy and I'm glad he's getting a game somewhere but his first half showed exactly why it was premature for anybody to lose sleep about us giving him the boot.
Ignoring his ruck cameos, where he was always going to get carved to shreds, he didn't do a great deal for the first three quarters other than setting up the Grigg goal which wouldn't have been a goal if our whole backline hadn't jumped from the same side of the square. Compare and contrast to having Jeremy Howe down there, Watts starting to run riot and the option to play either Jamar or the Experience out of the goalsquare and it tells me that right now Bradforth would be lining up alongside Bate, Dunn, Maric and Fev in a killer VFL forward line but that he'd be a mile off getting a game with us. Would be surprised if he was even at the Tigers next year, but we all know what he's got waiting for him at home so it's fair to say Bradforth is still the overall winner.
After being Milleresque all day I suddenly realised he was on the verge of playing the 30 minutes of his life in that last quarter and knobbing us. He set up two goals and even managed to break even with Jamar at centre bounces a couple of times. Thank god the rest of them couldn't go on with it because after losing to Bruce, McLean and Buckley this year the last thing we needed was for an ex-player to drag his side over the line in an inspirational cameo performance. Pencil in Cheney as BOG when we play Hawthorn again.
Meanwhile it's been great to see the hated (by me anyway) sub rule get a bit of a kicking over the last couple of days, even if much of it has been driven by the sooks from Windy Hill, but the bad news is that for the rest of this year at least we're going to have to deal with it. Given that can we agree that Morton just doesn't work in that role?
After a fortnight of decent, if unspectacular, performances he donned the traffic controller vest and proceeded to stink the joint up with two shockers from his first three kicks after replacing Macdonald. He recovered a bit as the game went on but if you're going to bring somebody into a close game they can't need time to get confidence. One of these days we're going to be involved in a real thriller and the Sad Panda is going to get crucified if he comes on and makes a costly cockup.
Not sure who else you'd have had as the sub from our team yesterday - I was more than happy with Bennell on field - but if you're not going to pick somebody who can make an impact coming off the bench then just don't pick them in the first place. It's a shit rule and the sooner we see the back of it (or at least extend it to 4+1 on the bench so it becomes the domain of fringe players as it deserves to be) the better.
For all our attempts to kick ourselves out of it and let them back in it was still a significant win. Richmond fans will tell you they were robbed by the umpires (and the guy who rang Triple M to say they would have won by 12 goals if it wasn't for the umps was a classic) but it wasn't the guys in green who caused Vickery to give Miller nothing. They were doing fine in rorting themselves out of the four points without having to worry about the umpires - who were pretty ordinary both ways - hurting them. Still, sook if it makes you feel better you won't get anything out of it other than a phone bill for thousands of dollars from calling every sports talkback program in the world to tell your story.
To be entirely honest I was bursting with pride inside, but had no desire to stand around and celebrate what should be the second step in a four match winning streak which sets us up for a legitimate crack at the finals. If we win next week I'll start celebrating. The downside of this lack of celebration was that I walked out of the ground, past the Kaiser's Sausage (P.S - I WILL MENTION YOU EVERY WEEK FOR ONE FREE CHEESE KRAINER AT EVERY MATCH) and onto the bridge towards Flinders Street to realise I was the only person in a sea of hundreds who wasn't a Richmond fan. If they'd decided to kill me right there nobody would have known. Thank god all the real top shelf freaks are locked in down the other end of the ground.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
I've got a feeling, having seen a few sets of votes that are completely different, that opinions might vary on the top five and which order they go in. If you violently disagree please send death threats on a postcard to the usual address.
I feel a bit sad that I couldn't somehow push Petterd up the rankings just for the defensive game he turned in today. Forget the fact that he cracked the record for I50 tackles, but have you ever seen a bigger contrast between somebody's performance with the ball and without it? His possessions heinous (33% and that includes handballs) but he was ferocious when he didn't have it. Never did I think anybody who botched two thirds of their touches would ever not only win a vote but that I'd feel he deserved more but that's how good it was. Wouldn't expect to see Dunn win a recall anytime soon if Ricky's going to play like that.
Also can I freely admit that I've got a rude mancrush on Jordie McKenzie? He didn't totally destroy Cotchin today, but he did enough to make sure he wasn't a factor. I'm surprised at him only having five tackles because he always seemed to be there when somebody was tackled - probably because he's forever lurking, ready to leap on some poor bastard when they're vulnerable. Even looked comfortable kicking it today which is a huge step up from last week.
So after tossing up between the top two for about half an hour I eventually settled on the Million Dollar Manchild. Long may he reign.
5 - Jack Watts
4 - Brent Moloney
3 - Jordie McKenzie
2 - James Frawley
1 - Ricky Petterd
Gigantic apologies to Martin, Jones, Green, Trengove and Garland. Slightly less to Scully, Jurrah, Sylvia, Gysberts and Nicholson. Most others at least good.
Leaderboard
It's a tie at the top, but with Watts and the entire ruck division lurking closely behind. Elsewhere Frawley has finally put his nose in front in the Seecamp and you'd want to back him home from here.
23 - Colin Sylvia, Brent Moloney
17 - Jack Watts
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Stefan Martin
11 - Jordie McKenzie, James Frawley (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers
9 - Joel Macdonald
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans, Brad Green, Tom Scully
3 - Ricky Petterd, Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
Crowd Watch
Once again the Ponsford Stand, around me at least, remained the bastion of all that is good and right with the world and despite being almost entirely surrounded by Richmond fans there wasn't a single moment of tension. I think that for Tigers games they make anybody who turns up in a gypsy caravan sit in the Southern Stand so that's probably where all the best action was. They can have it, I'm too old to be involving myself in wild scenes.
The only time I felt that it was about to kick off was when Watts got the free for the shephard at the end of the first quarter and the guy across the aisle and one row back went off his nut. Out the corner of my eye I thought he was about to throw a can (!?) in my direction and flinched at it. No, I did not spend the game tripping on acid so god knows where that came from. Expect that it had something to do with being in shock from the last 15 minutes of the quarter.
Speaking of the first quarter, halfway through it I saw one of the most shameless breaches of footy etiquette of all time. Now, tell me if I'm living in Cloud Cuckoo Land but if you want to get to the middle of an aisle is it not accepted that you stop at the end, get the attention of the first person then wait for them and everyone else to stand up one by one as you walk in?
Not so this Richmond gent. Despite the fact that he was carrying a coffee in one hand and a tiny kiddy backpack over his other shoulder (which is always a stranger danger alert as far as I'm concerned) he bounded up the stairs to the row in front of me and plowed straight through them without warning and with the coffee precariously hanging over the row in front threatening to scorch them at any minute. He then pushed through the startled crowd, almost to the other side of the aisle without waiting for one person to move for him. Mannerless peasant. Needless to say he wasn't wearing red and/or blue.
Ridiculously the first Richmond fans to pull the pin and leave went halfway through the third quarter after Jurrah marked on the lead. Never mind that he hadn't converted the kick yet or that countless teams have lost games from five goals in front in the third quarter, the moment the ball hit his hands, they stood up, waved to their friends and were gone. Don't worry that he missed, they would have been halfway up platform 8 at Richmond Station by the time the Tiges made it interesting in the last term and in Pakenham by the final siren.
The real exodus began with Sylvia's goal, and gradually a world record number of women with bald spots and/or men wearing team merchandise clearly found at Savers drifted out. By the time Trengove goalled the numbers of our supporters to theirs in Q34 had almost evened up, and by the end there were about three empty rows around me. Something tells me that a large number of them came expecting a win and were moderately disappointed about it. Wah, and indeed wah. Though it's not like our lot aren't guilty of the same thing.
You know why I like Richmond? Because you can use all the jokes about their fans that you would for Collingwood if they weren't so good. I wonder what happened to the guy who sat there at this game singing the Tiges theme song with altered lyrics about putting Terry Wallace in the electric chair.
Koaching Korner
Without delving completely into #welovehird/#sackhird territory you'd have to think the market on Bailey staying or going has been thrown into disarray over the last fortnight. It could all still go tits up so don't buy stock in him yet but today was a big step forward. Which is terrible news for all of you who had a sneaky fiver on the bloke out of the Deep Heat ad taking over. All I can do to comfort you is reveal that in a desperate attempt to find a picture of the Team Deep Heat coach I went onto their website and discovered that their product promises you "special 3 way action". Which is probably the best offer you'll ever get out of this page.
Personal Computing Corner - presented by Kaspersky Lab and hotxxxplumpers.com
There's nothing more tragic, yet simultaneously hilarious, than supporters being rolled into posting impassioned defences of their club when somebody has a pot shot at it online.
Shamefully we've all been there, sometimes it might have even been justified, but if you didn't read this thread before the match then do yourself a favour and take it in now before somebody gets murdered and it's taken away as evidence.
There should be one thing written above all forums, and which users should be forced to print out and put above their computer before they're allowed to post, IT DOES NOT MAKE A SPOT OF DIFFERENCE IN REAL LIFE WHAT SOMEBODY WRITES ABOUT YOUR CLUB ON THE INTERNET. Popular legend has it that we're sexually aroused by snow and love nothing more than plowing down a mountain yelling PIP PIP old chap! This is unlikely to be true (though I've not been near snow since I spent a week hiding from it playing Galaga in a chalet during an 80's family holiday so what do I know?) but people are going to drag it out for the rest of time and that’s ok.
What do you do? You could smile knowingly, nod and admit that although it is a massive fiction that you'd rather be thought of as velvet jacket toting ski bunnies than heroin addicted armed robbers. Alternatively you could go out and try to round up some actual heroin addicted armed robbers to come along and cause a scene for the media, but what you should never, ever do – and take this from somebody who has been shamefully reading internet forums since the days when it took an hour just to see one boob come up on the net – is take it to heart and launch a furious, keyboard mashing defence of your club’s integrity/origin/supporter base. Because, and please look up above your monitor at the sign you have just printed out and stuck up, IT DOES NOT MAKE A SPOT OF DIFFERENCE IN REAL LIFE WHAT SOMEBODY WRITES ABOUT YOUR CLUB ON THE INTERNET.
Still, if you think it's going to get us somewhere by going into bat against 14-year-olds from Deer Park then go for your life.
Next Week
That was the hard one. The problem from here is not that we're playing Footscray (unconvincing, Ed Barlow starring) and Port (rancid song, hacks galore) but where the matches are being played.
Next Friday night against the Dogs we fully deserve to go in red hot favourites considering that they've served up two unconvincing wins against rubbish sides but I don't need to tell you how hideous we've been at Docklands during the Bailey era. The Dogs have gone from being shite to good and back again since we last won a game at that place. And what an afternoon it was too, with Ben Holland running riot and Jace Bode making his long awaited (!?) debut.
Since then we've lost a full ten in a row, but at least there were times during both our games there this year that we did look alright so against doctor's orders I'm getting sucked in and picking us. How long does it seem since that first Jamar-less quarter against North with Juice pretending he was John Coleman up front? More of that, less of the majority of the other 43 quarters (including pre-season matches) we've turned in there since 2008.
Then for pure financial reasons we play Port in Darwin where anything could happen.
Move it back to the MCG and we'd go in $1.10 favourites with a massacre on the cards, but put it in the humid conditions where they've already won this season and it's anything but a certainty.
At least we've got form there after last year's win. Who will ever forget Leigh Colbert conducting one of the finest post-match interviews of all time with an exhausted Jamar seated on the turf of TIO Stadium? More importantly who'll ever forget Miller kicking a career high five goals in his last great moment shortly before getting the arse.
Then it gets interesting. You can all but write off the game in Geelong (why am I going? Even worse, why am I considering catching a V-Line train there?) but if we can win against one of Carlton or Hawthorn then we're putting ourselves right in the mix. If we win both the lid will be torn off and hurled into the sky with such vigour that it will start orbiting the earth.
Of course we're operating in a different world to the likes of Carlton and Hawthorn. After what we've been through for the last few years just making the eight is treated like a major milestone. Small steps. Some subscribe to the theory that it's better to miss out than to just fall in, get thrashed and wind up with Matthew Knights being sacked acrimoniously. I spit on that theory and would dearly like to update this page at least once before the end of the year.
So, on Friday night can everyone just put their hatred of Etihad Stadium aside and show up? Apparently Joel Mac might miss, so pending any mystery injuries and with Casey having the bye this week I'll bring Tapscott in for him if fit. The shame for J.Mac is that after his best month of the season he might never get back in if Tappy plays like he did at the start of the year.
Was it worth it?
If you watched on TV you had to listen to Dwayne Russell. So it most certainly was.
Let's do it all again in Round 22.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Rollercoaster of Love
Victory. Don't it make you, as Paul Robinson off Neighbours reminded us way back in 1989, feel good?
I'm not going to come on here and lie about how I saw it coming. Some did and for that I applaud you, but maybe you don't suffer from the same chronic Melbourne Supporter Depression Syndrome (MSDS) as I do. Certainly when it came time to hurriedly do tips on Friday afternoon the Dockers were pencilled in without hesitation.
It's the MSDS that made me look beyond their ridiculously long injury list and the fact that they're as bad at the MCG as we are everywhere else other than the MCG. It's what made me think that somehow titans of the game like Clayton Hinkley and Ben Bucovaz would put in the same level of performance as the Pies did last week. It wasn't that we lost to the best team in the land last week, it was how we played and yada yada yada that's an argument to be had six days ago, let's talk about today instead and how wrong I - mercifully - was.
As promised early in the post about Monday's game I'm treating today's performance in complete isolation and not projecting anything forward about next week. Ok, maybe a little bit but there'll certainly be no going right over the top Darryl Eastlake style about it. The lid is not only firmly on, but I'm welding it up and throwing the whole pot down a copper mine in Mt Isa just to make sure there's no chance of getting overexcited about beating the brains out of an injury riddled team who spent the entire second half serving up utter filth that even we'd have been embarassed by at our lowest moments.
But next week is a problem to be solved on Saturday afternoon, for now let's talk about our biggest ever win against the Dockers. Hard to believe that we were four goals better today than that classic afternoon late in 2009 when it was pissing rain, nobody cared about us any more because we were filthy tankers and about 15 people showed up to see us thrash them. Since then Freo have turned out to actually be quite good, as long as they're not at the 'G anyway, before losing pretty much every quality player they've got to injury other than Pavlich.
There was some suggestion during the week that both Jamar and Sandilands were a chance of returning for a clash of the (not entirely fit) titans, and while we were robbed out of Russian vs Giraffe when neither of them made it at least it meant another week of Maximum Gawn Mania, a celebration of the next big thing in cult figures. If you could guarantee me that we'd still win by 15 goals I'd love to have seen Sandilands vs Gawn. Giraffe Jr. might have been thrashed but who wouldn't want to see the two most gigantic bastards in the competition jumping at each other?
Still, if you thought our tall men stocks were slightly wonky without Jamar how much must the Dockers hierachy have had to be held from jumping out the window when Kepler Bradley had to be withdrawn late? Ironically we've emerged from the Russian injury disaster with some credit thanks to the Stef Martin Experience thriving and Gawn being far better than he had any right to be based on the handful of VFL games he played before being promoted. Between them they comfortably looked after the all-star combination of Jonathan Griffin and Zac Clarke, and even though we did get beaten out of the middle for most of the first half it was anything but a disaster considering what we were doing around the ground.
Just think, if the Spencil hadn't done his knee and Juice his whatever we'd probably not have seen Maximum until later in the year, and then we'd have to have waited to have our suspicions about his cult figure status confirmed. His goal today was nearly my highlight of the whole thing, especially considering that farcical miss in the dying minutes against Essendon. Still say they should play this after every goal he kicks so we can sing along with MAXI! MAXIMUM! WHOA OH!
Gysberts going out late was a blow to us, but who could have forseen just how good Nicholson would be as a replacement? Finally given the chance to play a full four quarters instead of donning the council worker vest and riding an exercise bike for three quarters he was immense - especially considering that this time last year he was running around getting paid not a cracker in the amateurs. I see what they meant about explosive pace when he was drafted, the way he burnt off a cavalcade of nobodies and kicked that goal today was magic. It's suicidal to rate people on their first few games (you're talking to the guy who gave Kyle Cheney five votes on debut, but that was more due to the rest of the team being shite) but I'm putting him next to Maximum in my "Sure fire hits, absolutely no way they can turn out to be rubbish and make me look foolish" list. Tapscott would be there as well but I'm restricting it to players taken at pick 30 or under.
In retrospect the first quarter was great fun, but I have to admit to sitting there at the time being a depressed bastard wondering when it was all going to go horribly wrong. We weren't dominating out of the middle by any stretch, but with Scully going around getting touches at will (each one of them accompanied by this noise. At 100 touches he would have gotten an extra life), Freo botching chances up front and our backline returning to what they do best instead of being monstered by Donkey Kong style freaks we were by far the better team. "If we started winning this out of the centre we'd win by a 100" I said, unintentionally getting something perfectly right for once.
Now, like a handful of other people I was at the ground with no access to the television commentary but I will guarantee you every day of the week that there is no way whoever was calling the game for Fox would have been able to resist that old chestnut when Green smashed home the opener off the ground from close range. You just know that if Dwayne Russell (P.S - Best thread ever) had been there he'd have let rip with something like "THAT'S A GEM! HE SHORTS IT THROUGH THE GOALS JUST LIKE HE DID AT OLD TRAFFORD WHEN HE PLAYED FOR MANCHESTER UNITED! THAT COULD BE THE FIRESTARTER!" Sadly for me, but luckily for anybody who was watching on TV, he's doing the Port/Eagles game instead, where he will almost certainly suggest that "the firestarter" has just been kicked when Port snag a lucky one while 72 points behind. Still, at least if you're going to make cliched references to Green doing anything on the field not involving his hands at least today's effort would legitimately have been a goal in soccer unlike the one against Essendon which would have been more likely to decapitate somebody sitting in Row Z than trouble the keeper.
The question is did they also chance their arm on a soccer comment when Sylvia toe poked the second through? Slightly less risk to making comment about that spot of bother he had with his missus that time. Back to more savoury things I loved that goal because of the way he chased it right to the line before smashing it home after having jumped in the contest. Also because they played it in slo-mo on the scoreboard and even though the ball was clearly in play the Freo muppets around me started bleating about it.
It would have been easy to give up after jumping into the marking contest but he was rewarded for second effort. I'll bet everyone who spent the best part of five years posting "thank god we got McLean because Sylvia is going nowhere" rubbish is frantically denying they were involved now. Sadly nobody's going back through thousands of forum posts to make fun of them but I'm sitting here with years of posts that say exactly that. I WAS WRONG. My god was I wrong, and there's nothing better than being wrong when you thought somebody wasn't going to be much chop. Jamar + Sylvia = the greatest slow cooked duo ever.
In every aspect other than the clearances we were destroying them and our ball movement was pretty good going the other way. Was very happy to see Petterd playing more in the midfield after he dominated the VFL playing there last week, because how many times have you seen somebody playing in a different position in the seconds, dominating and then being recalled only to be put back exactly where they were before getting dropped in the first place?
He didn't dominate by any means but 18 touches, eight marks and 1.1 will do me very nicely as an up the ground forward/midfielder. Interesting to hear an interview from Chris Connolly before the game (yes, he is still alive and employed for more than just cracking funnies at the AGM) where he said their specific reason for dropping him was to send him back to try and get him to play more in the centre. Fair enough if it works like it did today, especially considering he could go forward as a secondary target or switch to running off half-back if required.
Funny thing about the first quarter was how few inside 50's we had for our lead. Old Owl Eyes Mark Harvey must have been tearing his hair out at how easily we were scoring when we did finally get it in there as opposed to how terrible his own forwards were. Whoever they were.
We didn't even have to rely solely on forward targets to get the job done - which was handy considering The Jurrahcane was trying his hardest but getting absolutely nowhere. Even though we weren't going inside much, and the game was being played in a gigantic rolling scrum between the two 50's, we were doing the job when we got there and I can't have been the only one beaming with favourite player pride when the Experience kicked his first goal of the year (well, there's at least two of us sporting the number on our jumper. Then there's his parents..) but even in the wildest dreams of the SME Fan Club (inc. 2009, surprisingly not by me) we couldn't have imagined that he'd get three. Even Frawley was wandering forward to have shots. Admittedly it was an absolutely putrid set shot at a time where we were really threatening to put them away, but what did you expect from a guy who had two goals in 72 games, both of which came from gigantic hoofs on the run from outside 50? I certainly didn't expect him to actually end up kicking a goal from a gigantic hoof on the run from outside 50 but that's just the sort of day we ended up having.
The last thing I wanted was to concede the last goal of the quarter, because that's always the slippery slope to throwing away a big lead, so when Clancee Pearce kicked that goal (and who can ever hear his name without thinking about Chief Wiggum's wife saying "oh Clancy"? Oh, just me? Carry on) to finally get them on board just when we threatened to keep a team goalless in the first quarter for the first time since I listened to the game against Freo on my deathbed in Round 16, 2008 and we eventually lost by fifty points (#statmybitchup).
Hooray then for Thank God For Brad Green who bounced back from his horror outing against the Pies to boot his second for the quarter on the lead (yes! leads! and oh there was so much crumb as well!) and kill their momentum going into the second quarter. His much vaunted accuracy was in question again today (as most "much vaunted" things usually are) but as an unashamed Green sympathiser I was thrilled to see him bounce back today because he's the barometer for this side.
Don't know what we expected him to do last week with the ball going inside 50 so few times (apparently the third biggest difference between teams ever on record, which is absolutely ludicrous) but he showed today what he could do with decent service. Almost killed Scully in a marking contest too which we might very well have looked back on next year and smiled about if he'd connected.
What I loved most about the first quarter, apart from the crumb and kicking to leads, was McKenzie vs Pav. I'm sure without their top goalkicker Bradley out there (yes, Freo's top goalkicker is Kepler Bradley. Start applying purple ribbons to the premiership cup now) they'd love to have played him forward from the start, but clearly that's not the done thing in the land of purple this year considering how he's not even in their top five goalkickers so far.
Problem for the Dockers is they can't have both Forward Pav and Midfield Pav. If they did you could play 15 x Jay Van Berlo and get away with it. Today at the first bounce it was Midfield Pav, and Midfield Pav was absolutely destroyed by the tackling machine from regional Victoria in that first quarter.
Can I take a minute to tell you how much I love Jordie? I'll say it every week if I have to, but we missed out big time not having him in the first half of the year. There's nothing better than a guy who just goes out there, knows his limitations and gets the job done. Today he had two kicks and 26 handballs, and that's just fine with me. Speaking of records that's got to be some sort of one. He only laid three tackles today but it didn't matter because he was damaging enough with his handballs that most of the time Freo were chasing him and not the other way around.
If Jordie vs Pav was a matchup inside 50 you'd laugh at it even more than Rivers vs Cloke, but in the middle of the ground the no frills option absolutely slit the superstar up a treat. Pav is easily my favourite player from another club but it was a delight to see him get stitched by Jordie to such a degree that they had to throw him forward in the second quarter even if it almost got them back into the game.
The move could have gone badly for us, he's dominated us at this ground before. Remember his first half that day we came from a billion points down and THE CELEBRATOR famously celebrated? Still, with the defence playing exactly the way it should again - with Rivers and Macdonald jumping all over the top and Frawley/Garland taking the big contested marks he couldn't get near it and only managed one goal from ten kicks. The big four didn't get a massive amount of help from the rest of the defenders, although Morton was ok other than a couple of howlers. Bartram and Strauss were ordinary at best, and I'm not entirely convinced by Strauss yet.
Gutted for Garland at hurting his ankle again though. You could see his frustration when he did it too, knowing straight away that he was going to be back on the sidelines again. Apparently wasn't iced up or on crutches at the end of the match so that's a good sign but it wouldn't be the first time that he seemed to have a minor injury and wasn't seen again for a year. At least it means they won't be tempted to drop Macdonald anytime soon, he more than deserves his spot at the moment. I've got a feeling that the New Jurassic Pack of Frawley/Rivers/Garland is going to achieve Seecamp/Ingerson/Shanahan '98 levels of underrated awesome in the next couple of seasons.
The only Freo player who could do anything up front consistently was the alleyway specialist Michael Johnson but they did look dangerous in that second quarter. When Watts marked and kicked the first goal within the first 40 seconds even I thought we were a chance of running away with it, but of course the worst thing you can do is get excited about a thrashing early in the second quarter because it always ends up going the other way. When they dragged it back to 19 points with a much improved forward line, were still winning easily out of the centre and had started stopping us from going forward I thought "oh shit, we're in trouble here". One to Pav and two to the alleyway specialist and we started to look a little bit wonky.
No need to mention that one of Johnson's goals was an absolutely criminal free against Bartram who couldn't get anything to go his way. There were certainly a couple of terrifying moments throughout the term, the worst being Macdonald's handball to Morton who looked up to find that there wasn't a single MFC player within 50 metres, causing him to try and hit a target 1cm inside the boundary which he missed and gifted Johnson his second goal. Still, I didn't mind his game at all today - mainly due to him never once being involved in a goalsquare marking contest.
Thank god, once again, for Green who kicked his fourth and for Frawley's epic roost which took the margin back over five goals. They got one late but for all our wonkiness in the middle of the quarter we only lost six points off the lead and were left in a position where it would take an epic cockup for us to lose. Exactly that sort of position where you're convinced if you're behind that you're no chance of winning and that if you're in front you're convinced you're going to get done.
They showed in kicking three goals in a row during the quarter that they could get a run on, and were still well ahead in the Inside 50's. I'd like to think that was the most troubling stat of all to Bailey and Co, and to the credit of all involved it was well and truly rectified in the second half.
Freo had even more injuries during the game and had to use the sub (*spit*) halfway through the second quarter but even losing their best tagger who had kept Moloney quiet until then it was no excuse for the absolute garbage they served up from the moment the ball was bounced in the third quarter. Watts got the first of the quarter within a minute again on a kick from Howe - who was super impressive again - and this time we were away to the races instead of sitting back and letting them get three in a row. Also on the podium of my favourite moments of the day was The SME, officially the smartest man in the AFL, running into the square to get the handball over the top from Trengove and stab home his second and our third from 1m or less out at the Ponsford end.
'GOVE, the half of the dynamic duo whose signature we do have on a piece of paper, was involved again with the next goal but the story of it was Maximum's tackle which set it up. That was pretty much the game done and dusted, much to the consternation of the woman sitting behind me who had a placard about her love for Freo which she barely got to wave in the entire second half except for the time it smacked me in the back of the head, so what better way to put the cherry on top of it than the Experience racking up his career high third goal after scoring a 50 which took him to the goal line? More proof that he's the smartest man in the AFL, not only did he get a 99.5 TER score but he also faux played on just enough to roll McPharlin into running off the mark and then stopping to point it out to the umpire. He's a genius. And according to my mum also the best looking player in the team, so if footy doesn't work (which doesn't look much like happening right now) at least he's got the 60-year-old woman market sewn up. Watch out for player sponsors next year, it could be the Mercado Family (all two of us) paying up to hang out with the Experience.
In all seriousness it was well and truly over at three-quarter time, but Howe's miss at the end kept us below the Chris Sullivan Line so I wasn't going to unfurl any COP THAT YOU SWINE banners quite yet. Shame for Jeremy because he was bloody good all day even before his first shot at goal. He reminds me of a more mobile Brad Miller who can take a decent overhead, contested mark - and realistically that was the only thing that stuffed Brad up (until he kicks nine next week) and stopped him from being more successful over the years.
Throw Howe onto the list with Nicholson and Maximum, and the good news is that he's proved to be far more than the bloke who took a screamer of a mark which got a few thousands views on YouTube. He topped off his day with a couple of goals during the avalanche in the last quarter which was a nice bonus for all the hard work he did pushing up the ground during the game. With that ability at contested marking he MAY end up as a big target inside 50 one day. Unless I'm getting roped into making stupid comments again just on the basis of another win over some hacks which is highly likely.
Any suggestion that we were going to go back into our shell was dismissed within the first minute of the last quarter when Watts - the first minute specialist - kicked his third straight opening goal of a term. How gutted would you be if you'd bet on him for first goalkicker today and then watched him do it in every quarter other than the first? He was bloody good today, even when he wound up playing Baileyball on the half-back line he used it well. A couple of times he was beaten comfortably in marking contests but that was usually when the thing was kicked on top of his head instead of to advantage.
Three goals and nine contested possessions amongst 24 works for me, and I'm perfectly happy for him to take the Jamar road and only kick when he's inside 50 and having a shot. Today showed why the next time Bailey picks up the phone to call for Watts to be sent into the backline somebody needs to jump on top of him, wrest the phone away and impersonate voice to cancel the instruction. He hasn't deserved to be there a couple of times this year but I'm glad we keep persisting, and he might not perform to the same level next week but his improvement this year is through the roof. We want more.
What a lovely last quarter it was. Reminscent of the Adelaide massacre we ticked off winning the game early and then it was party time for all. The sort of day where anybody who runs off the ground gets wild applause from the fans - people would have even risen to applaud Isaac Weetra they were so happy. From Nicholson's turbo powered goal to Jurrah finally getting two after a dirty day and Howe being rewarded for his performance the score crept nervously towards the big triple figures. When Jones got his goal to put us within two straight kicks of that magic mark at the 21 minute mark it looked like we could do it.
Sadly Freo then decided that they might actually try defending for the first time all half - they even kicked their second goal which was met by a mild smattering of boos from the hard to please Demon faithful who were dying to crack the ton. At least with Jurrah's second at the end we managed to wipe out the entire percentage we lost during last week's debacle - and added the extra 0.000000000000001% from winning by one point more. It's like Queen's Birthday never actually happened except that we've got a shitload of cash in the bank. Mind you we probably lost half of Monday's payday thanks to the rancid crowd who showed up today.
All in all a good day out and a fair re-enactment of the Adelaide game. As long as we don't continue the re-enactment theme and go five goals up in the first quarter next week before folding like a house of cards. For the third time this year the sporting defibrillator has been applied to our season and our fading finals heartbeat has been restarted. Any danger that this time we might take advantage of it instead of acting like somebody who gets a liver transplant and heads straight to the bar?
Even better news is that the victory has enhanced our push into the Chinese market. Yesterday the Dalai Lama was photographed giving it heave-ho in a Freo scarf, and today we do the job for our Chinese paymasters by smashing his new team. Cue an invite to tour again and to dine at an all-star glittering dinner with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and President Hu Jintao.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Stefan Martin
4 - Jack Watts
3 - Brad Green
2 - Jordie McKenzie
1 - Tom Scully
Massive apologies to Nicholson and Howe who were next cabs off the rank and then Jones, Petterd, Moloney, Frawley, Macdonald, Sylvia and Gawn in no particular order. Not too many liabilities today - Jurrah did his best work in junktime and Bartram was pretty pox but you can't get 21+1 of magic in every win.
Leaderboard
Jamar had better get back soon because The Experience is storming towards the biggest upset win of all time in the Stynes. Unfortunately Garland's injury will cost him ground in the thrilling Seecamp race while Tapscott still has a handy lead in the Hilton, but he's been lucky that Howe has missed out narrowly two weeks in a row.
As for the overall it could still go either way at the top and Jamar hasn't lost a heap of ground in the last month. Have a feeling (and there's no corruption involved if it actually happens) that Watts is going to storm home in the last few weeks.
23 - Colin Sylvia
19 - Brent Moloney
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Stefan Martin
12 - Jack Watts
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Joel Macdonald, James Frawley
8 - Jordie McKenzie
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans, Brad Green, Tom Scully
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
Scull and Crossbones
I'm so aggravated by the Scully saga that I almost don't want to post about it, but how can you avoid it? As much as I want to hate him for leaving, which he undoubtedly will (/reverse psychology), the article in the paper yesterday about how he will end up the most well paid player on our list if he stays makes me wonder whether it's going to end up being worth it.
Before I start I'll freely admit that I had a nightmare involving this blog last night. No really, it's almost too sad to admit. I dreamt that after writing something sensible yet dismissive of Scully that it got quoted in the papers and when he left he blamed my quote, leading to wild scenes online and bricks flying through my window. Fat chance any journos care what I say luckily, but all I will say is that good luck if you're going to chuck a brick because I live on the 11th floor. And if you're coming on here to write abuse in the comments at least get amongst the ads as well, not all of us are going to be on a mil every year.
Now, there are some potentially sensational players on our list - Trengove, Watts, Gysberts just to start with and Frawley who has already proven himself and will be due a fat pay rise in a couple of years. By my count the following players come out of contract over the next couple few years (and this is an old list, so if there are any extensions that I've missed let me know). Bolded are the players who I am sure would command a decent pay increase based on how they're playing at the moment. Drafted players from last year not included (all end 2012?)
2011
Fitzpatrick, Gawn, Green, Maric, Martin, Morton, Newton, Scully, Sylvia, Warnock, Wonaeamirri
2012
Bail, Bartram, Bate, Bennell, Dunn, Garland, Jamar, Jetta, Jones, Jurrah, McKenzie, Moloney, Petterd, Rivers, Spencer, Strauss, Tapscott, Trengove.
2013
Blease, Davey, Grimes, Gysberts, Watts
So, take that list and consider that Green, Morton, Bartram and Jones wouldn't be coming cheap already and could still enhance their value. Then there's the likes of Blease and Strauss who could go anywhere from here. By 2013 the only players I can see any chance of dropping off that list due to age are Green, Jamar and Davey. Even if we flog the likes of Dunn and Bate to other clubs and replace them with kids how the hell are we going to pay to keep this group together if we suddenly vault a kid who has played 30 games to the top of our payroll just because we've been pitched into a bidding war with the AFL's equivalent of a soccer team owned by dodgy Russians with more money than brains.
Tom Scully will be a star, and almost certainly a superstar but one killer midfielder does not a team make. Good luck finding replacements for Frawley and Watts (presuming he keeps improving at this rate) without having to go through the same process of drafting kids and waiting with fingers crossed to see whether they're going to be quality or not. If we throw $700k a year at Scully for four years as per this article the pressure on him to not only be the best player on our list but to shoot straight into the top echelon of AFL players will be huge. I don't expect that it will affect him, but for 3/4 of a mil every year he's going to not only have to be the ice man in justifying that salary he's going to be pointed at when a Trengove, Gysberts, Frawley etc.. are given derisory contract offers in a couple of years and tell us to get stuffed before joining Carlton and winning a flag.
So I want to hate him for leaving but on the other hand it seems a bit insane to go to the ends of the earth to keep him when midfielders, admittedly not in the same ballpark as him, are probably the easiest position on the ground in which to find a capable replacement. Right now we're like an average looking guy with no money spending every cent he's got trying to win a supermodel when the other option is an ugly millionare who can afford to set her up for life. And how often do you see a supermodel turning down top dollar to shack up with some bloke from Airport West? This is Jamie Packer and Mrs. Packer. He looks like Chip Frawley after being bitten by a poisonous toad. He is also worth six billion dollars. Enough said.
I just wish he'd admit it, put the hand up, get up and tell his teammates he's doing it for dollars, buy a harbourside mansion and stop teasing us without signing on the dotted line. Either that or start playing badly so it doesn't seem like such a big loss when he goes.
Couldn't decide whether or not I was into the 31 - Please Don't Go banner being hoisted in the cheersquad or not. One side of my brain says it's a cute token of our desparation to keep him. The other half says it's a needy token of our desparation to keep him. Just never lose sight of the fact that this isn't a decision based on anything other than enormous wads of cash - banners professing love don't buy Ferraris and five bedroom houses here.
Just hope we don't sell the farm to keep him and wind up regretting it when others are going out the door and he's suddenly one out in a sea of slop a'la J**d in his first couple of years at Carlton. As much as I want him to stay, and I will want to start referring to him as $****y if he goes that article really made me start to wonder if once we get over the blow to our ego and realise that he's going for dollars and not out of love whether we'll really be worse off. This isn't just about one player now, we just don't want to be mucked around and lied to. Sadly I think that while we're still a chance of sneaking into the eight then the football club is going to play him no matter what they know about dodgy backroom dealings.
Crowd Watch
What crowd there actually was. 19,000 is what you get when you remove Pies fans, holiday neutrals and once a year bandwagoners from the Queen's Birthday crowd. It's no great financial result, but geez don't you love being able to get food at half-time and go for a whizz without having to queue? I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to go to games with 50,000 people every week. Especially if it was at Docklands, that would nearly turn me off from going to games once every match was on live. Thankfully we play at the decent ground and only have to go to that monstrosity once or twice a year.
Meanwhile do interstate fans get package deals for seats in the Ponsford Stand? Whenever we play West Coast they give the entire middle deck to 25 of them, and today it was full of every single Freo fan in the state of Victoria. It's probably because the cheer squad are in the same place but for the regulars it really inflates the impression that the place is full of them when there probably wasn't one other person heave-hoing anywhere else in the entire stadium.
The cheersquad hardly covered themselves in glory by busting out soccer chants with Freo in them instead of following convention and restricting themselves to (team name) *clap* *clap* *clap*. If you're going to lower your standards of living far enough to join a cheersquad you're not in a position to be trying to introduce new and exciting crowd participation angles. Despite this not once did they yell out HEAVE-HO! en masse which really would have made my day even before the massacre started.
I noticed a guy wearing a t-shirt that said BANNER TEAM, as opposed to the regulars who were just wearing CHEERSQUAD on theirs. What a terrible trend. Even worse than the guy I once saw with a St Kilda Cheer Squad Official bomber jacket. Sorry sir but being an official in a cheersquad is like being president of Burkina Faso for all the respect that normal people are going to give you. Imagine if you were sitting there and somebody told you off for not waving your pom poms with enough vigour? Normal people would snot them, but normal people wouldn't be waving pom poms. Surely nobody from our cheersquad reads this after seven years of questioning whether or not the people in them should be gassed.
Amongst the cavalcade of Freo fans around us, and their classic outrage when a mark wasn't paid in front of goal because it was touched off the boot which they didn't know because they were watching the replay of the mark and not listening to the radio, there was an odd Melbourne supporting character sitting behind me who would have absolutely erupted if we lost. I can't imagine the filth he was letting out last week, and even though I'm scared of describing people because they either read or somehow manage to find themselves being mentioned on here can I say that he was wearing a cracking combo of lime green sleeveless puffer jacket and yellow t-shirt. It was a fantastic look. If you were a member of Ned's Atomic Dustbin in 1988.
He was one of those guys who just yells players names out. Not just when they're frustratedly trying to will somebody to kick to a free player, but when they get a possession or more importantly do something wrong. His two favourites were Morton and Bartram but I couldn't tell whether or not he was for them or against them by the way his voice rose at the end of each voice for MorTONNNNN! or BarTRAM! He shut up in the second half, probably stunned into silence by us actually playing well for once.
Heave Ho
Freo would be so much more popular if they'd just introduce my version of their song with more heave ho and less of the rubbish verses. In related news I'm the only non-Dockers fan in the state of Victoria who likes the song in any form.
It's a little known fact that I cracked the sads at the Melbourne Hawks so badly that at the time I vowed that I'd become a Freo fan if it went through. Presumably it would have lasted two weeks before there was either a shameful crawl back to the side with what truly would have been the WORST THEME SONG EVER or I'd given up on football entirely. Either way there is absolutely no doubt in the world that if I were sitting here wearing purple, writing Dockerblog and yelling HEAVE HO! at random intervals that my favourite player would be Garrick Ibbotson just because he's got an absolutely ridiculous name. 2nd place to Tendai Mzungu, Ben Bucovaz on the podium.
Next Week
Massive, massive, massive, MASSIVE game against Richmond. Not just because either side is hanging on to the bottom of the eight by our fingernails, and not just because everyone will be holding their breath to see if we get ahead of ourselves again and turn in a stinker. It's most important because we've treated Richmond with contempt over the last few years when we were both in the bottom division of the league, so now that we're both promoted out of Club Slop - and that we've proven we can thrash other sides in our bracket - we've got to fire the first shot in what should be a quality rivalry over the next few years. And they're the only other Victorian team other than Essendon who we can beat, so don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
It's all about the midfield. Our forwards look ok against their injury riddled defence - especially if Howe keeps going and Watts plays there instead of the back pocket - and the New Jurassic Pack has got their opponents covered on paper (remember Frawley's demolition job on Riewoldt last year?), so even if Jamar doesn't come back - and sorry Maximum, we all pray he does - and as long as we can avoid getting killed out of the centre we should be ok. One thing I noticed today was that as long as we could get it to a secondary bounce we were ok. More of the same please.
Was it worth it?
Good god yes. Dum spiro spero as the Romans used to say - while I breath, I hope.
I'm not going to come on here and lie about how I saw it coming. Some did and for that I applaud you, but maybe you don't suffer from the same chronic Melbourne Supporter Depression Syndrome (MSDS) as I do. Certainly when it came time to hurriedly do tips on Friday afternoon the Dockers were pencilled in without hesitation.
It's the MSDS that made me look beyond their ridiculously long injury list and the fact that they're as bad at the MCG as we are everywhere else other than the MCG. It's what made me think that somehow titans of the game like Clayton Hinkley and Ben Bucovaz would put in the same level of performance as the Pies did last week. It wasn't that we lost to the best team in the land last week, it was how we played and yada yada yada that's an argument to be had six days ago, let's talk about today instead and how wrong I - mercifully - was.
As promised early in the post about Monday's game I'm treating today's performance in complete isolation and not projecting anything forward about next week. Ok, maybe a little bit but there'll certainly be no going right over the top Darryl Eastlake style about it. The lid is not only firmly on, but I'm welding it up and throwing the whole pot down a copper mine in Mt Isa just to make sure there's no chance of getting overexcited about beating the brains out of an injury riddled team who spent the entire second half serving up utter filth that even we'd have been embarassed by at our lowest moments.
But next week is a problem to be solved on Saturday afternoon, for now let's talk about our biggest ever win against the Dockers. Hard to believe that we were four goals better today than that classic afternoon late in 2009 when it was pissing rain, nobody cared about us any more because we were filthy tankers and about 15 people showed up to see us thrash them. Since then Freo have turned out to actually be quite good, as long as they're not at the 'G anyway, before losing pretty much every quality player they've got to injury other than Pavlich.
There was some suggestion during the week that both Jamar and Sandilands were a chance of returning for a clash of the (not entirely fit) titans, and while we were robbed out of Russian vs Giraffe when neither of them made it at least it meant another week of Maximum Gawn Mania, a celebration of the next big thing in cult figures. If you could guarantee me that we'd still win by 15 goals I'd love to have seen Sandilands vs Gawn. Giraffe Jr. might have been thrashed but who wouldn't want to see the two most gigantic bastards in the competition jumping at each other?
Still, if you thought our tall men stocks were slightly wonky without Jamar how much must the Dockers hierachy have had to be held from jumping out the window when Kepler Bradley had to be withdrawn late? Ironically we've emerged from the Russian injury disaster with some credit thanks to the Stef Martin Experience thriving and Gawn being far better than he had any right to be based on the handful of VFL games he played before being promoted. Between them they comfortably looked after the all-star combination of Jonathan Griffin and Zac Clarke, and even though we did get beaten out of the middle for most of the first half it was anything but a disaster considering what we were doing around the ground.
Just think, if the Spencil hadn't done his knee and Juice his whatever we'd probably not have seen Maximum until later in the year, and then we'd have to have waited to have our suspicions about his cult figure status confirmed. His goal today was nearly my highlight of the whole thing, especially considering that farcical miss in the dying minutes against Essendon. Still say they should play this after every goal he kicks so we can sing along with MAXI! MAXIMUM! WHOA OH!
Gysberts going out late was a blow to us, but who could have forseen just how good Nicholson would be as a replacement? Finally given the chance to play a full four quarters instead of donning the council worker vest and riding an exercise bike for three quarters he was immense - especially considering that this time last year he was running around getting paid not a cracker in the amateurs. I see what they meant about explosive pace when he was drafted, the way he burnt off a cavalcade of nobodies and kicked that goal today was magic. It's suicidal to rate people on their first few games (you're talking to the guy who gave Kyle Cheney five votes on debut, but that was more due to the rest of the team being shite) but I'm putting him next to Maximum in my "Sure fire hits, absolutely no way they can turn out to be rubbish and make me look foolish" list. Tapscott would be there as well but I'm restricting it to players taken at pick 30 or under.
In retrospect the first quarter was great fun, but I have to admit to sitting there at the time being a depressed bastard wondering when it was all going to go horribly wrong. We weren't dominating out of the middle by any stretch, but with Scully going around getting touches at will (each one of them accompanied by this noise. At 100 touches he would have gotten an extra life), Freo botching chances up front and our backline returning to what they do best instead of being monstered by Donkey Kong style freaks we were by far the better team. "If we started winning this out of the centre we'd win by a 100" I said, unintentionally getting something perfectly right for once.
Now, like a handful of other people I was at the ground with no access to the television commentary but I will guarantee you every day of the week that there is no way whoever was calling the game for Fox would have been able to resist that old chestnut when Green smashed home the opener off the ground from close range. You just know that if Dwayne Russell (P.S - Best thread ever) had been there he'd have let rip with something like "THAT'S A GEM! HE SHORTS IT THROUGH THE GOALS JUST LIKE HE DID AT OLD TRAFFORD WHEN HE PLAYED FOR MANCHESTER UNITED! THAT COULD BE THE FIRESTARTER!" Sadly for me, but luckily for anybody who was watching on TV, he's doing the Port/Eagles game instead, where he will almost certainly suggest that "the firestarter" has just been kicked when Port snag a lucky one while 72 points behind. Still, at least if you're going to make cliched references to Green doing anything on the field not involving his hands at least today's effort would legitimately have been a goal in soccer unlike the one against Essendon which would have been more likely to decapitate somebody sitting in Row Z than trouble the keeper.
The question is did they also chance their arm on a soccer comment when Sylvia toe poked the second through? Slightly less risk to making comment about that spot of bother he had with his missus that time. Back to more savoury things I loved that goal because of the way he chased it right to the line before smashing it home after having jumped in the contest. Also because they played it in slo-mo on the scoreboard and even though the ball was clearly in play the Freo muppets around me started bleating about it.
It would have been easy to give up after jumping into the marking contest but he was rewarded for second effort. I'll bet everyone who spent the best part of five years posting "thank god we got McLean because Sylvia is going nowhere" rubbish is frantically denying they were involved now. Sadly nobody's going back through thousands of forum posts to make fun of them but I'm sitting here with years of posts that say exactly that. I WAS WRONG. My god was I wrong, and there's nothing better than being wrong when you thought somebody wasn't going to be much chop. Jamar + Sylvia = the greatest slow cooked duo ever.
In every aspect other than the clearances we were destroying them and our ball movement was pretty good going the other way. Was very happy to see Petterd playing more in the midfield after he dominated the VFL playing there last week, because how many times have you seen somebody playing in a different position in the seconds, dominating and then being recalled only to be put back exactly where they were before getting dropped in the first place?
He didn't dominate by any means but 18 touches, eight marks and 1.1 will do me very nicely as an up the ground forward/midfielder. Interesting to hear an interview from Chris Connolly before the game (yes, he is still alive and employed for more than just cracking funnies at the AGM) where he said their specific reason for dropping him was to send him back to try and get him to play more in the centre. Fair enough if it works like it did today, especially considering he could go forward as a secondary target or switch to running off half-back if required.
Funny thing about the first quarter was how few inside 50's we had for our lead. Old Owl Eyes Mark Harvey must have been tearing his hair out at how easily we were scoring when we did finally get it in there as opposed to how terrible his own forwards were. Whoever they were.
We didn't even have to rely solely on forward targets to get the job done - which was handy considering The Jurrahcane was trying his hardest but getting absolutely nowhere. Even though we weren't going inside much, and the game was being played in a gigantic rolling scrum between the two 50's, we were doing the job when we got there and I can't have been the only one beaming with favourite player pride when the Experience kicked his first goal of the year (well, there's at least two of us sporting the number on our jumper. Then there's his parents..) but even in the wildest dreams of the SME Fan Club (inc. 2009, surprisingly not by me) we couldn't have imagined that he'd get three. Even Frawley was wandering forward to have shots. Admittedly it was an absolutely putrid set shot at a time where we were really threatening to put them away, but what did you expect from a guy who had two goals in 72 games, both of which came from gigantic hoofs on the run from outside 50? I certainly didn't expect him to actually end up kicking a goal from a gigantic hoof on the run from outside 50 but that's just the sort of day we ended up having.
The last thing I wanted was to concede the last goal of the quarter, because that's always the slippery slope to throwing away a big lead, so when Clancee Pearce kicked that goal (and who can ever hear his name without thinking about Chief Wiggum's wife saying "oh Clancy"? Oh, just me? Carry on) to finally get them on board just when we threatened to keep a team goalless in the first quarter for the first time since I listened to the game against Freo on my deathbed in Round 16, 2008 and we eventually lost by fifty points (#statmybitchup).
Hooray then for Thank God For Brad Green who bounced back from his horror outing against the Pies to boot his second for the quarter on the lead (yes! leads! and oh there was so much crumb as well!) and kill their momentum going into the second quarter. His much vaunted accuracy was in question again today (as most "much vaunted" things usually are) but as an unashamed Green sympathiser I was thrilled to see him bounce back today because he's the barometer for this side.
Don't know what we expected him to do last week with the ball going inside 50 so few times (apparently the third biggest difference between teams ever on record, which is absolutely ludicrous) but he showed today what he could do with decent service. Almost killed Scully in a marking contest too which we might very well have looked back on next year and smiled about if he'd connected.
What I loved most about the first quarter, apart from the crumb and kicking to leads, was McKenzie vs Pav. I'm sure without their top goalkicker Bradley out there (yes, Freo's top goalkicker is Kepler Bradley. Start applying purple ribbons to the premiership cup now) they'd love to have played him forward from the start, but clearly that's not the done thing in the land of purple this year considering how he's not even in their top five goalkickers so far.
Problem for the Dockers is they can't have both Forward Pav and Midfield Pav. If they did you could play 15 x Jay Van Berlo and get away with it. Today at the first bounce it was Midfield Pav, and Midfield Pav was absolutely destroyed by the tackling machine from regional Victoria in that first quarter.
Can I take a minute to tell you how much I love Jordie? I'll say it every week if I have to, but we missed out big time not having him in the first half of the year. There's nothing better than a guy who just goes out there, knows his limitations and gets the job done. Today he had two kicks and 26 handballs, and that's just fine with me. Speaking of records that's got to be some sort of one. He only laid three tackles today but it didn't matter because he was damaging enough with his handballs that most of the time Freo were chasing him and not the other way around.
If Jordie vs Pav was a matchup inside 50 you'd laugh at it even more than Rivers vs Cloke, but in the middle of the ground the no frills option absolutely slit the superstar up a treat. Pav is easily my favourite player from another club but it was a delight to see him get stitched by Jordie to such a degree that they had to throw him forward in the second quarter even if it almost got them back into the game.
The move could have gone badly for us, he's dominated us at this ground before. Remember his first half that day we came from a billion points down and THE CELEBRATOR famously celebrated? Still, with the defence playing exactly the way it should again - with Rivers and Macdonald jumping all over the top and Frawley/Garland taking the big contested marks he couldn't get near it and only managed one goal from ten kicks. The big four didn't get a massive amount of help from the rest of the defenders, although Morton was ok other than a couple of howlers. Bartram and Strauss were ordinary at best, and I'm not entirely convinced by Strauss yet.
Gutted for Garland at hurting his ankle again though. You could see his frustration when he did it too, knowing straight away that he was going to be back on the sidelines again. Apparently wasn't iced up or on crutches at the end of the match so that's a good sign but it wouldn't be the first time that he seemed to have a minor injury and wasn't seen again for a year. At least it means they won't be tempted to drop Macdonald anytime soon, he more than deserves his spot at the moment. I've got a feeling that the New Jurassic Pack of Frawley/Rivers/Garland is going to achieve Seecamp/Ingerson/Shanahan '98 levels of underrated awesome in the next couple of seasons.
The only Freo player who could do anything up front consistently was the alleyway specialist Michael Johnson but they did look dangerous in that second quarter. When Watts marked and kicked the first goal within the first 40 seconds even I thought we were a chance of running away with it, but of course the worst thing you can do is get excited about a thrashing early in the second quarter because it always ends up going the other way. When they dragged it back to 19 points with a much improved forward line, were still winning easily out of the centre and had started stopping us from going forward I thought "oh shit, we're in trouble here". One to Pav and two to the alleyway specialist and we started to look a little bit wonky.
No need to mention that one of Johnson's goals was an absolutely criminal free against Bartram who couldn't get anything to go his way. There were certainly a couple of terrifying moments throughout the term, the worst being Macdonald's handball to Morton who looked up to find that there wasn't a single MFC player within 50 metres, causing him to try and hit a target 1cm inside the boundary which he missed and gifted Johnson his second goal. Still, I didn't mind his game at all today - mainly due to him never once being involved in a goalsquare marking contest.
Thank god, once again, for Green who kicked his fourth and for Frawley's epic roost which took the margin back over five goals. They got one late but for all our wonkiness in the middle of the quarter we only lost six points off the lead and were left in a position where it would take an epic cockup for us to lose. Exactly that sort of position where you're convinced if you're behind that you're no chance of winning and that if you're in front you're convinced you're going to get done.
They showed in kicking three goals in a row during the quarter that they could get a run on, and were still well ahead in the Inside 50's. I'd like to think that was the most troubling stat of all to Bailey and Co, and to the credit of all involved it was well and truly rectified in the second half.
Freo had even more injuries during the game and had to use the sub (*spit*) halfway through the second quarter but even losing their best tagger who had kept Moloney quiet until then it was no excuse for the absolute garbage they served up from the moment the ball was bounced in the third quarter. Watts got the first of the quarter within a minute again on a kick from Howe - who was super impressive again - and this time we were away to the races instead of sitting back and letting them get three in a row. Also on the podium of my favourite moments of the day was The SME, officially the smartest man in the AFL, running into the square to get the handball over the top from Trengove and stab home his second and our third from 1m or less out at the Ponsford end.
'GOVE, the half of the dynamic duo whose signature we do have on a piece of paper, was involved again with the next goal but the story of it was Maximum's tackle which set it up. That was pretty much the game done and dusted, much to the consternation of the woman sitting behind me who had a placard about her love for Freo which she barely got to wave in the entire second half except for the time it smacked me in the back of the head, so what better way to put the cherry on top of it than the Experience racking up his career high third goal after scoring a 50 which took him to the goal line? More proof that he's the smartest man in the AFL, not only did he get a 99.5 TER score but he also faux played on just enough to roll McPharlin into running off the mark and then stopping to point it out to the umpire. He's a genius. And according to my mum also the best looking player in the team, so if footy doesn't work (which doesn't look much like happening right now) at least he's got the 60-year-old woman market sewn up. Watch out for player sponsors next year, it could be the Mercado Family (all two of us) paying up to hang out with the Experience.
In all seriousness it was well and truly over at three-quarter time, but Howe's miss at the end kept us below the Chris Sullivan Line so I wasn't going to unfurl any COP THAT YOU SWINE banners quite yet. Shame for Jeremy because he was bloody good all day even before his first shot at goal. He reminds me of a more mobile Brad Miller who can take a decent overhead, contested mark - and realistically that was the only thing that stuffed Brad up (until he kicks nine next week) and stopped him from being more successful over the years.
Throw Howe onto the list with Nicholson and Maximum, and the good news is that he's proved to be far more than the bloke who took a screamer of a mark which got a few thousands views on YouTube. He topped off his day with a couple of goals during the avalanche in the last quarter which was a nice bonus for all the hard work he did pushing up the ground during the game. With that ability at contested marking he MAY end up as a big target inside 50 one day. Unless I'm getting roped into making stupid comments again just on the basis of another win over some hacks which is highly likely.
Any suggestion that we were going to go back into our shell was dismissed within the first minute of the last quarter when Watts - the first minute specialist - kicked his third straight opening goal of a term. How gutted would you be if you'd bet on him for first goalkicker today and then watched him do it in every quarter other than the first? He was bloody good today, even when he wound up playing Baileyball on the half-back line he used it well. A couple of times he was beaten comfortably in marking contests but that was usually when the thing was kicked on top of his head instead of to advantage.
Three goals and nine contested possessions amongst 24 works for me, and I'm perfectly happy for him to take the Jamar road and only kick when he's inside 50 and having a shot. Today showed why the next time Bailey picks up the phone to call for Watts to be sent into the backline somebody needs to jump on top of him, wrest the phone away and impersonate voice to cancel the instruction. He hasn't deserved to be there a couple of times this year but I'm glad we keep persisting, and he might not perform to the same level next week but his improvement this year is through the roof. We want more.
What a lovely last quarter it was. Reminscent of the Adelaide massacre we ticked off winning the game early and then it was party time for all. The sort of day where anybody who runs off the ground gets wild applause from the fans - people would have even risen to applaud Isaac Weetra they were so happy. From Nicholson's turbo powered goal to Jurrah finally getting two after a dirty day and Howe being rewarded for his performance the score crept nervously towards the big triple figures. When Jones got his goal to put us within two straight kicks of that magic mark at the 21 minute mark it looked like we could do it.
Sadly Freo then decided that they might actually try defending for the first time all half - they even kicked their second goal which was met by a mild smattering of boos from the hard to please Demon faithful who were dying to crack the ton. At least with Jurrah's second at the end we managed to wipe out the entire percentage we lost during last week's debacle - and added the extra 0.000000000000001% from winning by one point more. It's like Queen's Birthday never actually happened except that we've got a shitload of cash in the bank. Mind you we probably lost half of Monday's payday thanks to the rancid crowd who showed up today.
All in all a good day out and a fair re-enactment of the Adelaide game. As long as we don't continue the re-enactment theme and go five goals up in the first quarter next week before folding like a house of cards. For the third time this year the sporting defibrillator has been applied to our season and our fading finals heartbeat has been restarted. Any danger that this time we might take advantage of it instead of acting like somebody who gets a liver transplant and heads straight to the bar?
Even better news is that the victory has enhanced our push into the Chinese market. Yesterday the Dalai Lama was photographed giving it heave-ho in a Freo scarf, and today we do the job for our Chinese paymasters by smashing his new team. Cue an invite to tour again and to dine at an all-star glittering dinner with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and President Hu Jintao.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Stefan Martin
4 - Jack Watts
3 - Brad Green
2 - Jordie McKenzie
1 - Tom Scully
Massive apologies to Nicholson and Howe who were next cabs off the rank and then Jones, Petterd, Moloney, Frawley, Macdonald, Sylvia and Gawn in no particular order. Not too many liabilities today - Jurrah did his best work in junktime and Bartram was pretty pox but you can't get 21+1 of magic in every win.
Leaderboard
Jamar had better get back soon because The Experience is storming towards the biggest upset win of all time in the Stynes. Unfortunately Garland's injury will cost him ground in the thrilling Seecamp race while Tapscott still has a handy lead in the Hilton, but he's been lucky that Howe has missed out narrowly two weeks in a row.
As for the overall it could still go either way at the top and Jamar hasn't lost a heap of ground in the last month. Have a feeling (and there's no corruption involved if it actually happens) that Watts is going to storm home in the last few weeks.
23 - Colin Sylvia
19 - Brent Moloney
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Stefan Martin
12 - Jack Watts
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Joel Macdonald, James Frawley
8 - Jordie McKenzie
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans, Brad Green, Tom Scully
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
Scull and Crossbones
I'm so aggravated by the Scully saga that I almost don't want to post about it, but how can you avoid it? As much as I want to hate him for leaving, which he undoubtedly will (/reverse psychology), the article in the paper yesterday about how he will end up the most well paid player on our list if he stays makes me wonder whether it's going to end up being worth it.
Before I start I'll freely admit that I had a nightmare involving this blog last night. No really, it's almost too sad to admit. I dreamt that after writing something sensible yet dismissive of Scully that it got quoted in the papers and when he left he blamed my quote, leading to wild scenes online and bricks flying through my window. Fat chance any journos care what I say luckily, but all I will say is that good luck if you're going to chuck a brick because I live on the 11th floor. And if you're coming on here to write abuse in the comments at least get amongst the ads as well, not all of us are going to be on a mil every year.
Now, there are some potentially sensational players on our list - Trengove, Watts, Gysberts just to start with and Frawley who has already proven himself and will be due a fat pay rise in a couple of years. By my count the following players come out of contract over the next couple few years (and this is an old list, so if there are any extensions that I've missed let me know). Bolded are the players who I am sure would command a decent pay increase based on how they're playing at the moment. Drafted players from last year not included (all end 2012?)
2011
Fitzpatrick, Gawn, Green, Maric, Martin, Morton, Newton, Scully, Sylvia, Warnock, Wonaeamirri
2012
Bail, Bartram, Bate, Bennell, Dunn, Garland, Jamar, Jetta, Jones, Jurrah, McKenzie, Moloney, Petterd, Rivers, Spencer, Strauss, Tapscott, Trengove.
2013
Blease, Davey, Grimes, Gysberts, Watts
So, take that list and consider that Green, Morton, Bartram and Jones wouldn't be coming cheap already and could still enhance their value. Then there's the likes of Blease and Strauss who could go anywhere from here. By 2013 the only players I can see any chance of dropping off that list due to age are Green, Jamar and Davey. Even if we flog the likes of Dunn and Bate to other clubs and replace them with kids how the hell are we going to pay to keep this group together if we suddenly vault a kid who has played 30 games to the top of our payroll just because we've been pitched into a bidding war with the AFL's equivalent of a soccer team owned by dodgy Russians with more money than brains.
Tom Scully will be a star, and almost certainly a superstar but one killer midfielder does not a team make. Good luck finding replacements for Frawley and Watts (presuming he keeps improving at this rate) without having to go through the same process of drafting kids and waiting with fingers crossed to see whether they're going to be quality or not. If we throw $700k a year at Scully for four years as per this article the pressure on him to not only be the best player on our list but to shoot straight into the top echelon of AFL players will be huge. I don't expect that it will affect him, but for 3/4 of a mil every year he's going to not only have to be the ice man in justifying that salary he's going to be pointed at when a Trengove, Gysberts, Frawley etc.. are given derisory contract offers in a couple of years and tell us to get stuffed before joining Carlton and winning a flag.
So I want to hate him for leaving but on the other hand it seems a bit insane to go to the ends of the earth to keep him when midfielders, admittedly not in the same ballpark as him, are probably the easiest position on the ground in which to find a capable replacement. Right now we're like an average looking guy with no money spending every cent he's got trying to win a supermodel when the other option is an ugly millionare who can afford to set her up for life. And how often do you see a supermodel turning down top dollar to shack up with some bloke from Airport West? This is Jamie Packer and Mrs. Packer. He looks like Chip Frawley after being bitten by a poisonous toad. He is also worth six billion dollars. Enough said.
I just wish he'd admit it, put the hand up, get up and tell his teammates he's doing it for dollars, buy a harbourside mansion and stop teasing us without signing on the dotted line. Either that or start playing badly so it doesn't seem like such a big loss when he goes.
Couldn't decide whether or not I was into the 31 - Please Don't Go banner being hoisted in the cheersquad or not. One side of my brain says it's a cute token of our desparation to keep him. The other half says it's a needy token of our desparation to keep him. Just never lose sight of the fact that this isn't a decision based on anything other than enormous wads of cash - banners professing love don't buy Ferraris and five bedroom houses here.
Just hope we don't sell the farm to keep him and wind up regretting it when others are going out the door and he's suddenly one out in a sea of slop a'la J**d in his first couple of years at Carlton. As much as I want him to stay, and I will want to start referring to him as $****y if he goes that article really made me start to wonder if once we get over the blow to our ego and realise that he's going for dollars and not out of love whether we'll really be worse off. This isn't just about one player now, we just don't want to be mucked around and lied to. Sadly I think that while we're still a chance of sneaking into the eight then the football club is going to play him no matter what they know about dodgy backroom dealings.
Crowd Watch
What crowd there actually was. 19,000 is what you get when you remove Pies fans, holiday neutrals and once a year bandwagoners from the Queen's Birthday crowd. It's no great financial result, but geez don't you love being able to get food at half-time and go for a whizz without having to queue? I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to go to games with 50,000 people every week. Especially if it was at Docklands, that would nearly turn me off from going to games once every match was on live. Thankfully we play at the decent ground and only have to go to that monstrosity once or twice a year.
Meanwhile do interstate fans get package deals for seats in the Ponsford Stand? Whenever we play West Coast they give the entire middle deck to 25 of them, and today it was full of every single Freo fan in the state of Victoria. It's probably because the cheer squad are in the same place but for the regulars it really inflates the impression that the place is full of them when there probably wasn't one other person heave-hoing anywhere else in the entire stadium.
The cheersquad hardly covered themselves in glory by busting out soccer chants with Freo in them instead of following convention and restricting themselves to (team name) *clap* *clap* *clap*. If you're going to lower your standards of living far enough to join a cheersquad you're not in a position to be trying to introduce new and exciting crowd participation angles. Despite this not once did they yell out HEAVE-HO! en masse which really would have made my day even before the massacre started.
I noticed a guy wearing a t-shirt that said BANNER TEAM, as opposed to the regulars who were just wearing CHEERSQUAD on theirs. What a terrible trend. Even worse than the guy I once saw with a St Kilda Cheer Squad Official bomber jacket. Sorry sir but being an official in a cheersquad is like being president of Burkina Faso for all the respect that normal people are going to give you. Imagine if you were sitting there and somebody told you off for not waving your pom poms with enough vigour? Normal people would snot them, but normal people wouldn't be waving pom poms. Surely nobody from our cheersquad reads this after seven years of questioning whether or not the people in them should be gassed.
Amongst the cavalcade of Freo fans around us, and their classic outrage when a mark wasn't paid in front of goal because it was touched off the boot which they didn't know because they were watching the replay of the mark and not listening to the radio, there was an odd Melbourne supporting character sitting behind me who would have absolutely erupted if we lost. I can't imagine the filth he was letting out last week, and even though I'm scared of describing people because they either read or somehow manage to find themselves being mentioned on here can I say that he was wearing a cracking combo of lime green sleeveless puffer jacket and yellow t-shirt. It was a fantastic look. If you were a member of Ned's Atomic Dustbin in 1988.
He was one of those guys who just yells players names out. Not just when they're frustratedly trying to will somebody to kick to a free player, but when they get a possession or more importantly do something wrong. His two favourites were Morton and Bartram but I couldn't tell whether or not he was for them or against them by the way his voice rose at the end of each voice for MorTONNNNN! or BarTRAM! He shut up in the second half, probably stunned into silence by us actually playing well for once.
Heave Ho
Freo would be so much more popular if they'd just introduce my version of their song with more heave ho and less of the rubbish verses. In related news I'm the only non-Dockers fan in the state of Victoria who likes the song in any form.
It's a little known fact that I cracked the sads at the Melbourne Hawks so badly that at the time I vowed that I'd become a Freo fan if it went through. Presumably it would have lasted two weeks before there was either a shameful crawl back to the side with what truly would have been the WORST THEME SONG EVER or I'd given up on football entirely. Either way there is absolutely no doubt in the world that if I were sitting here wearing purple, writing Dockerblog and yelling HEAVE HO! at random intervals that my favourite player would be Garrick Ibbotson just because he's got an absolutely ridiculous name. 2nd place to Tendai Mzungu, Ben Bucovaz on the podium.
Next Week
Massive, massive, massive, MASSIVE game against Richmond. Not just because either side is hanging on to the bottom of the eight by our fingernails, and not just because everyone will be holding their breath to see if we get ahead of ourselves again and turn in a stinker. It's most important because we've treated Richmond with contempt over the last few years when we were both in the bottom division of the league, so now that we're both promoted out of Club Slop - and that we've proven we can thrash other sides in our bracket - we've got to fire the first shot in what should be a quality rivalry over the next few years. And they're the only other Victorian team other than Essendon who we can beat, so don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
It's all about the midfield. Our forwards look ok against their injury riddled defence - especially if Howe keeps going and Watts plays there instead of the back pocket - and the New Jurassic Pack has got their opponents covered on paper (remember Frawley's demolition job on Riewoldt last year?), so even if Jamar doesn't come back - and sorry Maximum, we all pray he does - and as long as we can avoid getting killed out of the centre we should be ok. One thing I noticed today was that as long as we could get it to a secondary bounce we were ok. More of the same please.
Was it worth it?
Good god yes. Dum spiro spero as the Romans used to say - while I breath, I hope.
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