The big top is back in town

After years of misery it was about time that a down-on-their-luck side with depressed supporters finally got an opportunity to take their frustrations out on an overwhelmed group of VFL standard players, and congratulations to the Essendon Football Club for embracing their opportunity.

It was another in a long line of disappointments for us, but what's the point in wasting the mental energy in getting upset about this result when there's 22 games left for us all to lose the will to live. After all, it was always going to end in disaster wasn't it? From the moment the Bombers replaced half their squad with off-cuts last night was a danger game. Much like last week had Footscray completed their comeback nobody would remember it in two months time, but as it's happening right in front of you it feels like death.

As I left the office on Friday afternoon for the short walk past Demonblog Towers II and into the most evil place on earth (via standing at the lights with Dwayne Russell and opting not to heckle in person because I'm ultimately a keyboard koward) an Essendon supporter started telling me about how easily we'd win. Oh really? After pointing out that Melbourne fans never take any win for granted it rapidly devolved into a "my team is worse than yours" competition. Neutrals take note, this is a game you should never contemplate taking a Melbourne fan on in because you won't win. Eventually the (good-natured I should point out) conversation took in several other Essendon fans who adamantly told the fellow office Demon and I that there was no possible way that they could win this game. In the end I had to drop the nuclear option and ask the room to raise their hand if they'd ever seen their side lose by 31 goals. Game over.

Having said all that I confidentially thought we were going to win, which was an odd position for me to be in and one I shant be repeating any time soon, Apparently it was the shortest price favourite we'd been for a game since 2000, and just to prove that even in a Grand Final season we could find a way to shame ourselves that day we almost cocked that up against the bottom of the table Saints.

Without appearing to be making excuses it should be noted that Essendon did have a significantly better side in than when they lost to St Kilda a couple of weeks ago. Sadly out went Magner and Clisby alongside most of the other nobodies, and they were left with just two players with numbers over 70. No doubt numbers 75-99 still have an open invitation to return in a few weeks if shit hits the fan at the doping tribunal, but I think we all know that's not going to be necessary once the penalties are tailored to suit all parties involved. Either way it was arguably a better side than we fielded at times during 2013 but one that should still not have gotten past 'brave in defeat'.

However, and it's a big however, while they were less reliant on ring-ins from Ringwood it's not like the players they'd got from Coates Hire were being replaced with the superstars of the competition either - whereas we were playing close to our top side, missing Vince, Howe, Kent, JFK and Pedersen at best and even then only the top two could be considered crucial. The question was whether our best side was better than a top eight side's reserves, and the answer is 'apparently not'. Though it doesn't help when the extended pre-season team allows you to field several players who have no business being near the Round 1 side just for the sake of it. Is there anybody who can honestly make a case for M. Jones, Bail or Toumpas being in that side, but here we were lured into playing them for four quarters each because somebody had to fill the extended bench. At least we're still waiting for the Toump to come of age, the other two are running up and down on the spot as others stream past them.

The good was in the first few minutes was that it seemed were going to do exactly as the bookmakers expected. We were dominant up and down the ground, kicked the first two goals, moved the ball well, were hitting targets and Essendon didn't look like they were a hope of scoring. God almighty we were even kicking to leads inside 50. They were all on the boundary line and came to nothing but it was a start. Sadly while good sides would have used their 15 minutes of domination to bang on five goals and crush the fragile spirit of a team with a player called Freezer who might have been recruited from Ganmain-Grong Grong Matong FC on Thursday afternoon we opted to waste chances liberally and let them get themselves back into the game.

We were getting the ball forward enough but the marks inside 50 usually led to a torturous process where whoever got it had to stuff their first instinct of having shot deep inside and instead try to work the ball to the goal square-by-square as if playing a dice game from the early 90's where we were continually rolling a one. At least at that point the midfield was on top and the backline was absolutely taking the piss out of Essendon's forwards. For a solid quarter of an hour the prospect of keeping a side to an MFC-esque score at the first break for a second week in a row was alive and well. You could tell we weren't going to get the morale boosting 105 point win that we'd dreamed of in our weaker moments, but it still seemed like we were a step ahead. Then in the blink of an eye Essendon were level and all that good work had gone to waste.

The Gentlemania trend of trying to give your teammates a goal would continue throughout the first half where they'd pick up the ball from a pack inside 50 and instead of just having a blind shot on goal they'd try and handball their way to somebody in a 'better' position who turned out to a worse option entirely when no score was recorded. There's team play, there's an understanding that they can't always just 'kick it' but this was ridiculous - team orders probably trump all but somebody just have a ping. If only Marcus Bontempelli had looked up from the Etihad Stadium pocket deep in the last quarter of that Bulldogs game last year and thought "shit, I'd better try and find Jarrad Grant in the interests of team play". Of course if your only option was actually Grant you would try and kick goal of the year from the pocket instead.

It's not like Essendon were playing that badly, but we certainly had an advantage and you felt that one well-timed Michael Hurley vs Taxi Driver style blow might have killed them off. A portent of the evil to come with the score at 15-0 when a small child on level one (let the historical record show that level three was closed or that's where I would have been) was practically carried up the stairs by two adults looking like he had no chance of getting past me let alone to a safe area before unleashing an all-time power spew. I missed Essendon's first goal because I was too busy concentrating on them getting him past me before he heaved, and that was the point the tide turned. The kid was later carried back to his seat to resume watching the game, which I feel was exceedingly cruel. I won't judge until I've taken my own kid to a game and turned a blind eye to Chicken Pox until the final siren but they could have sat up the back out of what remained of the sun and nearer to a bathroom if the NAB Challenge meant so much to them that they had to be there.

By half time I felt sick too, because it had become blindingly obvious that not only was a thrashing off the table but that we would struggle to beat a side would be in the battle for 17th if it played during the regular season. Then again we lost to St Kilda in Round 1 last year and they turned out to be marginally worse than us, so if you were a fair and reasonable fan you'd put it down as a bump in the road and blame Docklands for the evil hold it has over us. Unfortunately I'm not a fair and reasonable fan, I'm a member of the Internet Melbourne Community and it's either deepression or an insurance job on the MCG. Hold fire (literally) on the second one and I'll tell you if we need it in a few weeks.

It's not all bad news though, our recruits continue to be in the best - Frost is a tackling and chasing machine, and while I'm still not convinced he's going anywhere as a forward at least it's a throw back to the glory days of the Stefan Martin Experience being able to fill three roles in an emergency. Newton was handy without being flashy again, and Jeff Garlett is officially the crumber of my dreams. Throw in his chasing, tackling and handball-intercepting and on a cost/benefit analysis giving up picks 61 (Clem Smith?) and 79 (PASS) for him could be the greatest get since we turned Troy Longmuir into pick 19 (20th century Freo were total crackpots) which delivered us 254 games and 350 goals of Brad Green. Tyson/Salem vs Kelly could be up there as well, but that will be a win for everyone instead of a side necking themselves with culpable trading.

Up and down the wing the Harry O Show kept rolling on, despite the efforts of Ballbag Barrett to harpoon his Buckley free start with pissweak 'scandal' involving him hanging out with people who like to wake up with a breakfast bong for religious purposes. You know an article's a winner when they even italicise the weasel words like 'it is understood' and includes a paragraph that includes a dictionary definition. The only thing that stopped it from achieving the Denham Award for Landfill Journalism was the lack of "Fans have taken to Twitter to voice their frustration" and some embedded whinging by Pies fans. At least it was the perfect game to play immediately post-'scandal', because no Essendon fan's going to hang shit on somebody for being inadvertently caught up in drug use are they? Personally I have similar views about him (Lumumba, not Barrett) to David Brent's views about Ian Botham.

Of the non-recycled players vandenBerg - the most thrillingly spelt Demon since Yze - all but sealed his Round 1 start by kicking goals as well as being a big bastard, and while Hogan's overall performance fell somewhere between Daniel Hughes and Juice Newton on the MFC key-forward scale at least he worked hard for the whole game and we didn't have to sub him off as a precaution against a mystery injury. I will not be held responsible if he slips on a banana peel in the next two weeks but I'm confident that we can at least get him on the ground for Round 1 before he's buried under the weight of our expectations.

Those who expected a fade-out in the second half were disappointed - Essendon and Melbourne fans alike - and even though the standard was completely toxic the eight or nine neutrals in the undisclosed crowd that the AFL won't even admit to (no more than 10,000 without massive rorts) would have enjoyed it. Not sure flashing LED lights and TV screens that go GOAL! GOAL! GOAL! whenever anyone kicks one would convince them to come back but at least it stayed close. For our games they should also load up one that goes LOL! LOL! LOL!

After Essendon looked like they were going to be the ones running away early in the third quarter while we resorted to dinky little 11 metre kicks to forwards 60 metres out hard on the boundary line, we rescued the situation late in the third quarter but even when we got back to two goals in front midway through the last quarter it still seemed like it was going to go horribly wrong at some point. It was another opportunity to put them away but impotent as ever that was the end of the scoring at our end.

By this stage Essendon were plodding around without much spark themselves and we might have held on, but just when you thought you'd seen the last humiliating defeat masterminded by a coaches box containing Mark Neeld and Neil Craig up pops Jack Viney with an incredible howler to gift them the winning goal. Easy enough for people to complain about how you never kick across goal but you might want to have a closer look at what we've done 72 times a game in the last three weeks if you think the coach subscribes to that philosophy. In stark contrast to both Jamar (who was actually kicking rather than handballing and having some success) and McDonald who have looked much better by foot in the last couple of games this was just flat out ugly. Certainly not the type of guy I want doing tricky stuff in the backline. He'll be fine, and I know being a average kick didn't hold his dad back but if his name was Jack McGee he'd cop a lot more shit for his wonky accuracy than he does now

At the risk of another round of excuses I'm not entirely convinced that Roos cares about winning these games. Gawn came on at three quarter time but Frost spent as much time as him in the ruck, and in another moment of MFC innovation Jordie McKenzie became the first unused substitute/interchange player since about 1978. I know it was a meaningless match but what's the point of picking a tagger as the sub if you're not going to give him a decent run? It looks as if they were saving him for a full game at Casey the next day, but surely a half in a nothing AFL game at a real stadium is about as good as a full VFL match on the frozen tundra of Casey Fields? The question is whether they never intended to play him and only had him trotting up and down the boundary line at the 22 minute mark of the last quarter so we wouldn't get investigated for match fixing.

Aside from the chance for him to lose for Casey instead of Melbourne (which naturally he did), why not start him then bring on somebody like Michie (Kennedy-Harris apparently injured at training. Of course he was) who can add a bit of jazz to the side. It's like when they used Riley as the sub last year, any danger of the proverbial impact player getting a go? We've now officially been abysmal at using the sub for impact across five different senior coaches. It's a shit rule but it's not going anywhere, no need to launch a dirty protest by bringing on taggers when we're six goals behind. Speaking of useless rules I note that North Melbourne kicked three 'Supergoals' in the first quarter the next day while we've kicked none in two years. I'm happy enough when we kick three regulation goals in a first quarter.

You can tell yourself that the game meant nothing until the cows come home, and I can make Tankquiry style assumptions about what the coaching staff really wanted out of the match, but the fact remains that it's growing increasingly difficult to imagine a time where we're not a national joke. I just want one week where somebody doesn't have a suggested addition to the #fistedforever list.

So good luck to Essendon. Their fans who aren't so insane that they want to ransack the contents of James Hird's toilet bowl for their own personal use deserve some good times no matter how pointless the match is in the grand scheme of things. Much like the Bulldogs last week it also continues a run of good close games between the sides (with the unfortunate exception of one cricket score on a Saturday night in 2013) and gives us something to look forward to when we play them in Round 15 when they're peaking (not like that) because 90% of their squad only started playing two months before and we're doing our traditional second half of the year impersonation of a floating goldfish.

I'm usually fairly openly to ridicule (well you'd have to be wouldn't you?), but now that I've retired from being a half-kit wanker due to old age and public outrage (from the same people who think nothing of 80% of a soccer crowd wearing the shirt) it was easy to casually slip the scarf off at the final siren and slide into anonymity. As I sat down on the train the girl opposite asked "who won?" and when I said "not Melbourne" she was unable to work out what that meant for the result and sat there like a dog being shown a card trick. I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she didn't know who was playing and said Essendon only to get the old fist pump and "yeah go the Bombers!" back. Always great to see loyal fans rewarded with victory.

Paul Prymke Plate for Pre-Season Performance
5 - Jeff Garlett
4 - Heritier Lumumba
3 - Aaron vandenBerg
2 - Ben Newton
1 - Dom Tyson

Apologies to Dawes, Salem, Jamar, Dunn, Watts, Jetta and N Jones.

Leaderboard
Congratulations to H. Lumumba - winning gongs, not ripping bongs - for etching his name on to the lengthy Demonblog honour roll as the first award winner of our 11th season.

13 - Heritier Lumumba
11 - Jeff Garlett
8 - Christian Salem
5 - Daniel Cross, Jesse Hogan
4 - Nathan Jones, Dom Tyson
3 - Aaron vandenBerg
2 - Sam Frost, Ben Newton,
1 - Dean Kent, Tom McDonald, Billy Stretch

Crowd watch
There didn't seem to be all that many Essendon fans present (though they'll all claim they were there now), but the ones who did show up seemed to have an absurd level of love for Paul Chapman. You'd almost think he'd won three premierships for them instead of nipping in at the death of his career to sneak a few more games in. Admittedly I will probably provide either Lumumba or Garlett with the same rockstar reception if we start winning, but poor old Brendan Goddard is the guy that's wheeled out every second week to pretend that everything is ok and he's happy to have chosen Essendon so maybe give him something even if he did almost get rubbed out for six weeks when an elbow swipe missed Viney's head by about 1mm.

Best on ground was the guy I sat behind during the third quarter who was threatening to go absolutely insane every time we did something stupid. There's a man with more fire left in his belly than me. A lone Bombers fan sitting within close proximity threatened to escalate the situation by celebrating every good thing they did in an inappropriately loud fashion because he had the biggest pair of headphones you'll ever see on and obviously had no idea what volume he was blathering on at. Can't confirm if he was the same person who spent the entire first quarter walking back and forth along the level one concourse yelling "ESS-E-DON" as if the letter N had never been invented.

Was it worth it?
Not bloody likely, but at least members didn't have to pay for it. I did, however, risk grievous bodily harm by foolishly paying $6 for what probably ranks as the #1 worst 'hot dog' I've ever had at a footy game. There's a lot of contenders (e.g. every single one I've ever had that wasn't made by the Kaiser), but while the following anecdote may as well be archived by the National Library under "first world problems" I'm going to put it on the record anyway.

Not only did the 'hot dog' go down like swallowing like a lump of cement but as part of their continued  commitment to 'fan experience' they won't even give you little packets of condiments now and you're expected to get your sauces from a giant pump action dispenser. Which has been done before, and wouldn't be so bad if it were located in the concourse outside but being the people moving experts that Etihad Stadium management are they've decided to put it in the middle of the queuing area, leaving people to filter around some poor bastard (me) desperately trying to sauce their ropey hot dog while simultaneously hating themselves for buying it in the first place.

I should have put it back and walked out at this point but when it comes to unhealthy food I am a weak, weak individual who will wind up having a weak, weak heart. While people attempted to get around me to the register I ended up having to practically elbow drop the bloody thing just to get a sliver of tomato sauce out, then a slight tap of the 'mustard' caused it to carpet bomb half my hand with a substance that ended up tasting more like Mustard Gas. You can connect to free wi-fi at the stadium if you're keen, but stiff shit if you want to apply sauce with dignity.

At this point I still hadn't even got my wallet out to pay, and when I did - precariously balancing this oversauced 'dog' on its flimsy packaging - the guy on the counter excused himself and went off to do something or other in the drinks cabinet. If I wasn't such a law-abiding citizen who still harboured ambitions to become prime minister I'd have just wandered off.

What a horrible place it is in all aspects, and I am entering a self-exclusion program to ensure that I never spend another cent than is absolutely necessary inside it. At least the MCG has recognised that they sell gutter slop and have slashed prices accordingly. Take me home.

Next week
Nothing for the senior side but Howe and Vince are supposedly going to play in a VFL practice match to try and make it for Round 1. Good, we can use them both. Still not going to help us make the top 15 though.

The week after
Rumour has it half the Gold Coast side are either injured or recovering from surgery. Lucky we've got a demonstrated track record of taking care of weakened sides eh? Based on the practice matches, and availability for Round 1 of those who didn't get rubbed out needlessly in the last game of 2014 here's what I want against the Suns. I have a feeling the only time I got close to my preferred side last year we were thrashed so take it as a serving suggestion only. Actual positions are - as always - a guide only because no team ever lines up like this these days.

B: Dunn, Garland, Jetta
HB: Lumumba, McDonald, Salem
C: Tyson, Jones, Vince
HF: Howe, Pedersen, Watts
F: Garlett, Hogan, Kennedy-Harris
Foll: Jamar, Cross, Viney
Int: Grimes, Frost, vandenBerg, Newton

Apologies to Kent who only drops behind JFK because he missed the last two games. Newton or vandenBerg can be the sub.

Final thoughts
It's 1-0 Neeld, but at least he was classy enough not to do a lap of the boundary making offensive gestures towards us.

A succulent Chinese meal

It was cheap, it was nasty and it fulfilled all your base needs. It left you with a bad taste in your mouth, but in the morning you wanted more because it made you feel alive. Not a sleazy one night stand, but the sort of fugly win that we've gone far too long without enjoying.

Even a similar victory against the Bulldogs in 2013 (when it counted for something) was welcomed without question at the time because at that point there were major concerns about us ever winning another game again. This was arguably the filthiest win we've had since struggling to put Gold Coast away in the weeks after 186, and even though it meant absolutely nothing I'll take it with mostly open arms.

Nobody cares about either team enough to admit it but we're developing a decent rivalry with the Dogs. We've only won once in a real match but there hasn't been a dud game between the sides since that glorious night in 2011 when we went into Friday night thinking we were a finals team and enjoyed the lowly Bulldogs pantsing us by 64 points. At the time it seemed terrible, but if I knew what was coming a month later I wouldn't have been so upset. It's a competitive rivalry at the moment (also in that we're competing for 16th), but what it really needs is some sort of on or off-field controversy before our next match to take it to another level.

Perhaps it was with an eye to a competitive match that the league picked us to play them in Ballarat, or as the ground announcer reminded us 27 times throughout the afternoon "The Bulldogs' new home ground". Shame then that their fans supported the venue by turning up in their dozens. Neutrals had the numbers but I can't remember the last time we seemed to have an advantage over the opposition in a game against a Victorian side. I suspect many a trip was cancelled when the Bulldogs team came out and it was full of kids, but because they almost beat us let's also admit that they had some handy players available too.

Looking back on the game two days later the idea that I actually got nervous at the end seems absurd, but while it felt nice to be braining them with what seemed to the naked eye like actual positive football in the first half the idea of adding another chapter to our catalogue of buffoonery by throwing away a 50 point lead left me shitting it in the last few minutes. It wasn't the sweating bullets Saturday night terrors of the last few minutes of that 2013 Bulldogs comeback but it was about as close as you get when the ground 'caterers' are allowed to dish out cans.

Maybe it was the traditional first live game of the season at a venue with no big screen when you spend most of the day relearning how to watch a match, but tension peaked in the last couple of minutes when a Dogs player was standing right in front of me 55 metres out hard on the boundary line but I somehow convinced myself that he'd play on and kick a 'Supergoal' into the wind to beat us by a point. Never mind that everyone else had forgotten that the nine-pointer was even on offer, throwing away a huge lead felt like the perfect way to warm our supporters up for the new season. On a bonfire.

It probably wouldn't have mattered if we'd lost. In fact in the long term it would have meant squat. From what I could tell without watching a replay we were hardly striving to slam on 10 more goals in the last quarter, and with Hogan off for a precautionary scan on his everything a lot more time was given to the B-Team midfielders. The Bulldogs mids got wind of it, got a run on and it was too late/too pointless to throw everything into stopping them. It would have been the sort of debacle that seems hilarious when it happens to other clubs, but there would have been no call for relocating the family day from Luna Park to St Kilda Pier so people could jump into the bay.

All I'll say for that last quarter when it seems we barely touched the ball is that at least the goal that eventually won it for us was majestic. Jamar jumped over Minson (handy player for a "VFL" standard side) and whacked it forward for Lumumba to run to the 50 and have a shot on goal fall short find Watts for a strong mark in the square and a breathing space goal. Jack was as rusty as can be when he came on in the second half but seeing him forward again warmed my heart. He knows how to get into space, he can take a mark as long as it's not contested (and that's what Hogan's there for after all) and will be back to being a good kick for goal when he's played more than 40 minutes for the season. I have a dream of he and Howe flying up the wings taking marks all year, but I'm willing to settle for one of two.

When I briefly wondered why I was standing around in Ballarat watching a practice match instead of watching the live stream the answer became clear when it was revealed that it was a Crocmedia production and that calling the game would come second to flogging all aspects of the coverage to a range of minor league sponsors. To nobody's surprise the commentary received generally negative reviews, and if I find out we paid them one cent to cover it I'll call an EGM and spill the board. Hutchy is like $cully, nobody seems to like him and he's been involved in some shonky transactions but has found a way to make far more money than me so is ultimately the winner of the argument.

So even though we were seemingly taking on oxygen in the last quarter, but I'm not sure the wind was as strongly in our favour during that final term as some might have you believe. I made the mistake of going through the highlights of the last quarter to see that Watts goal again and they're talking like it was blowing like a hurricane in our favour when it was more of a gentle sea breeze (without the sea). It helps the buffoonery narrative to pretend we almost lost despite a five goal wind in our favour but on the arbitrary wind-to-goals scale I'd say it offered us one or two maximum and if anything was starting to blow across the ground. Speaking of the highlights Hutchy should also spring to get the cameraman a course of Beta-Blockers because the poor bastard was seemingly having major issue controlling his tremors. I was almost seasick watching one passage of play, god knows how some of you managed four quarters of it.

Better to be there after all, even if being shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow fan for the first and hopefully last time all year was an unwanted distraction from the action I was squinting to see on the other side of the ground. It's not their fault, I just don't play well with others but my god do footy fans talk a tremendous amount of rubbish. We routinely abuse Dwayne Russell, Tony Shaw etc for their commentary, but a Googlebox style show broadcasting the conversations of footy fans during a match would make you realise that Derm, Basil and even David bloody King could do a lot worse. Then again at one point in the video on this page your friend and mine Hutchy says: "The Demons are having an absolute picnic here in Adelaide" so maybe some people are a chance of achieving on either side of the fence.

The undoubted 'highlight' of the afternoon was the woman next to me going through the program and saying "Lin Jong? He must be an Asian" and her male friend confidently explaining that he was "the first Asian to play AFL". Which was something of an insult to Sudjai Cook but flat out spit in the face of Peter Bell. Then there was "JUST KICK IT FORWARD" shortly before an expertly executed switch of play opened up an attacking opportunity and several variations on "they won't know how to cope with wind in an open ground" as if 3/4 of the players involved didn't spent most of their life playing on VFL grounds - especially Casey Fields which more often than not resembles Mawson Station in Antarctica.

Oh there was so much hilarity when a Bulldogs substitute with luscious locks trotted past us. Because, you see, he had long blonde hair and.. well we didn't. It was like being at the tennis when any peanut in the crowd can yell out a comment and people will laugh at it, but even worse after each of the 'humorous' comments to the kid the woman next to me would replay it to her dull husband as if it was the funniest thing ever said. It might be good for my karma as a member of society and for Crowd Watch style material but take me back to the top of the Ponsford Stand where lone males go to watch footy while steadfastly refusing to engage in social contact with each other.

Having to associate with people notwithstanding it was a reasonably enjoyable afternoon. The ground is obviously crying out for the redevelopment before it can host even the smallest premiership match, and it would have started to get uncomfortable with any more than the alleged crowd of 5500, but as far as secondary venues for practice matches go it was far better than Casey. They were even generous enough to put on free parking, which worked for me but seems like quite the missed opportunity to coin in on hapless locals and visitors alike. It was a neat balance for me after I foolishly paid Ticketmaster $9 to pre-purchase my free ticket because I was tense about turning up and finding the match sold out - which was an almost comically stupid theory but I wasn't taking any risk of going there for the entire weekend and getting stitched up. Turns out every fence in the ground could easily have been jumped if the situation required it so keep that in mind for next time.

There's not much else to say about the last quarter and a half where we died in the arse/or began to show a Paul Roos in Sydney style distinct lack of interest in winning the match, so let's instead rewind back to the first half when for the first time in god knows how long we were vastly superior to another team of any sort.

You can argue that the Bulldogs were understrength, and they certainly had more of their best players out than us, but I'm quite happy to keep playing our best available side in these games. Other clubs can suit themselves by playing three rookies and hapless internationals but getting off to a rolling start instead of trying to get the side together for Round 1 will do me nicely. It's not like we're going to be contending for the finals so who cares if it gets to Round 18 and half our squad falls apart with fatigue? For the sake of general morale (not to mention selling memberships and corporate packages) we desperately need wins in the first few weeks, and this gives us the best possible chance.

We certainly played the first half like any club other than Melbourne. It took a lot of possessions to accomplish it but we were genuinely moving the ball well and switching without any obvious clangers, only to run into the Bulldogs flooding like buggery to block us from kicking to a target inside 50. It's hardly fair for us to point fingers at other sides for adopting negative tactics so best of luck to them, but in a stark contrast to last year when we'd hoof the ball inside 50 and watch it fling down the other end in record time this side seems to have both the pack destroying forward of your and my dreams in Jesse Hogan and a dangerous crumbing department courtesy of Jeff (never 'Jeffy') Garlett and Jay Kennedy-Harris (always JFK).

While we dominated at first it was for little on the scoreboard. For once fans could enjoy the spectacle of another team kicking aimless and thoughtlessly into their forward line only to see it whizz back past them. Attacking atrocities aside the defence was superb all day, and only conceded three marks from 44 inside 50s. The best of the talls was McDonald, but the revelation was Christian Salem. They've put him right where he can't help but get the ball and he's living the dream - can kick, can chase, can tackle, can mark and would have been best on ground if it wasn't for my new main squeeze the artist formerly known as Harry O who wasn't just doing it down back but in the midfield and across half-forward as well. All is forgiven, not that he ever did anything to me in the first place.

My chums in the crowd eventually decided that they "only hated him because he played for Collingwood", which is rubbish because any prominent player who behaves differently is going to cop hell no matter which club he plays for. I'm as guilty of taking the piss out of his previous antics as anybody, but if you remember back to the reaction when that picture of him having a cafe latte with Roos came out there were people set to do drive-by shootings on Brunton Avenue if we recruited him - now they're trying to wind it back to being Pies related because it appears that he's going to be a good guy at sports. Enjoy the ride, I certainly will. As I've said before I'm never nominating a favourite player again because it always ruins their career but.. well, enough said.

It took about ten minutes to finally crack the 18 man Footscray defence, and when we did it was courtesy of a surprisingly non-crumbish goal from Garlett after a great passage of play through the middle of the ground. It was quick, everyone hit the target they were supposed to and Garlett took a strong overhead mark. Good times, but nowhere near as good as what happened next with the Sam Frost chase. This is worth watching the abridged Hutchy Highlights for - he took off after his opponent inside attacking 50 and like an Animal Planet documentary on animals chasing each other across the plains of Africa almost ran the bloke down by the defensive 50 only for the umpire to come to the party and nick the Bulldogs player for running too far. The replay shows that there was no way he actually ran too far but the chase deserved to be rewarded. If he'd actually managed to bring down a tackle it would have lifted the roof off the earth's atmosphere. I've got next to no interest in Frost as a forward but for the prospect of chases like that every week I'd be willing to shelve my doubts and enjoy the ride.

Garlett backed up for the second goal as well, in the more traditional role of crumbing after that man Hogan brought the ball to ground in a marking contest. It was almost worth getting excited over even if Footscray were apparently playing a 13-year-old full back from the Galapagos Islands who was born without a right arm.

Admittedly they were playing like total shite, and were sporting less than household names like Toby McLean, Declan Hamilton and Roarke (!) Smith in their squad but the one thing I can confidently say I loved which will translate to matches against top 16 sides was the tackling - it was fierce and they often went in two-on-one to make sure the bastard who was tackled stayed tackled. When they totally lost the plot in the second quarter it must have been how opposition fans watch their side play against us. Six goals in a quarter is better than we got in some matches combined last year, and even better they were held scoreless.

It was at this point, with JFK running riot at one end, Salem at the other, Lumumba everywhere and the dreamboat hair today/gone tomorrow combination of Jones and Tyson in the middle that one had to reminded that it was only the pre-season. Newton also continued to press his claims for a Round 1 spot - especially if Vince isn't ready. The only downside was that we missed out on seeing more of vandenBerg (crazy name, crazy guy) because he sliced his head open in the first quarter - will hopefully be ok for this week because I'm dying to see play a full game.

Then just as it appeared we were heading towards a morale boosting massacre instead of the usual sort everything came crashing to a halt. Once the Bulldogs were a chance they turned it up about 1000% from the gash that was being served up in the first half, and all of a sudden our run stopped dead. Where the ball was pinging out of defensive 50 unmarked and being carried up and down the wings with the greatest of ease early on they were now blocking us up halfway.

We briefly pushed past the fabled Chris Sullivan Line during the third quarter, but as anybody who has read long enough to remember a time where we were 46+ in front at 3QT (e.g. the elderly) you'll know it only counts at the siren. The Bulldogs got the last two goals of the term to seemingly make it 'interesting', but who knew they were going to make it so "interesting"? Not the Dogs fans seen leaving at three-quarter time to beat the traffic that's for sure. What a bunch of poltroons, coming all that way only to chicken out because they were getting thrashed.

In the end we had 20 marks inside 50 compared to their three despite having less entries but it still only translated to a score of 69 points, so there's still a lot to work with but I feel there's something happening here. Again, it's not something that's going to see us reach the top 15 but respectability may be just around the corner - and not a minute too soon.

Paul Prymke Plate for Pre-Season Performance
5 - Heritier Lumumba
4 - Christian Salem
3 - Jeff Garlett
2 - Nathan Jones
1 - Tom McDonald

Apologies to Cross, Dunn, Garland, Grimes, Jamar, Jetta, Tyson and Viney.

Leaderboard
9 - Heritier Lumumba
8 - Christian Salem
6 - Jeff Garlett
5 - Daniel Cross, Jesse Hogan
4 - Nathan Jones
3 - Dom Tyson
2 - Sam Frost
1 - Dean Kent, Tom McDonald, Billy Stretch

Was it worth it?
It doesn't count for anything in the end, but at least after 257 days my kid has finally been alive for some sort of Melbourne Football Club victory. Not that she has any particular interested at 8.5 months old, but it would be nice not to be 10 wins behind Richmond in the same period. The clock continues to tick for premiership games though, and she's already got my 237 days between appearance and victory (Round 2, 1982 to be precise) covered. I didn't care until I was about seven, there is somewhere between no and fat chance of her getting away with it that long.

Next Week
Good luck getting there if you work anywhere further away from the city than Richmond, but it's Essendon B at Docklands in the experimental 5.50pm slot. Perfect for those of us who work right next door mind you.

I'd be happy for Hogan to don the bio-suit and sit in a controlled environment for the rest of March. Might as well use it to work out what we're going to do with the suspended Dawes in Round 1 and give either Fitzpatrick or Pedersen a go down there. It appears Angus Brayshaw was amongst the best for Casey last week so with any luck we'll get to see him as well.

There is major potential for disaster here, I can feel it. Maybe we should 'play the kids' (how will anybody be able to tell) and lose deliberately to make them feel better about themselves before the whole squad is wiped out for the first six rounds?

Soap Opera Central


Football rudely interrupted the never-ending saga that is the Melbourne Football Club, and our weekly reminder that we truly live in exciting times. Then again so did the people of the middle ages who spent their lives trying to avoid the Bubonic Plague, but they didn't have nearly as much to worry about as us. After an opening performance last week was best described as "not entirely shambolic" I'd have thought we were overdue for a week's respite from rumour and conspiracy theories. But where would the fun in that be? What's following this club without a bit of tension?

First came the hastily rescheduled open training session on Monday where Jesse Hogan failed to appear. That would have been alarming enough on its own given his mystery back injury last year, then when it was announced that he was "training indoors due to soreness" alarm bells went off like World War III had just been declared. There was a counter-rumour that he had stayed late in Perth to hang out with family and friends (not, we understand, Ross Lyon or Adam Simpson) which now seems to be false but made more sense at the time than a suspicious 'indoor session'.

On Tuesday afternoon good news came through unexpectedly and it seemed that while his back was fine that he'd actually had scans on his foot because some Fremantle oaf had stepped on it late in the game. Which explains the subterfuge with the 'indoor training' (training on being a patient in an MRI machine I'll bet) because if they had announced he was off for scans on a foot injury given his history and what happened to Clark that evening's membership drive would have ended with a lot of phone calls unanswered because people were rolling around on the floor crying. Just so you knew he was still capable of standing up his membership telethon shot featured him doing just that. The following picture is enormous, but so is our love for the great man even before he's played a game so go with it:

.@jesseBhogan mans the phones at tonight's membership telethon! Call 1300 336 667 to join! #myheartbeatstrue pic.twitter.com/8ezVx8F1l3
— Melbourne FC (@melbournefc) March 10, 2015

As we'd later find out in Ballarat he was fine, but at the time there was no telling if they had two rookies and a work experience kid providing a human pyramid so he could remain upright, but I choose to accept that this time we've dodged a bullet. Still, until he's played about 50 games in a row I reserve the right to have elevated blood pressure any time he goes near the ball. I'd be quite happy for him to put his feet up against Essendon this week, but knowing our record with Docklands he'll probably slip on some spilt tomato sauce in the stands and land on his head.

So if a belated reveal that the most hyped player ever (including Jack Watts' debut when we ran a video package which made it look as if he had just been elected to the Hall of Fame) hadn't torn his foot asunder was by default the good news then what are we meant to think about Jeremy Howe adopting the latest trend beloved by almost all players of a reasonable standard and "putting off contract talks until the end of the year"?

Your first instinct might have been to scream "WHY?" at the heavens and tip a bin over - but I just laughed because the only other options is outright insanity. As far as I can remember we've got a perfect record with players who do this - $cully, Rivers and Frawley all put talks off and all eventually went elsewhere under varying degrees of darkness. So history would show that we're stuffed. What's the overall league record on this? Travis Cloke stayed, but did anyone else?

The classic MFC aspect to all of this is that GWS made us an outrageous trade deal for him late in the piece last year. I'm glad we turned it down then, and I'm still glad now. At this point in time we need a) cult figures, b) excitement and c) somebody who can mark nearly any kick no matter how shit at either end of the ground more than we need another kid who may or may not relocate himself to the Belgian Congo before Round 1.

Ask me again when he's trotting off at the end of the season for pick 25 because it's the best we can get rather than lose him for free (presumably to the Giants who appear to have a bottomless salary cap) but there's time to give him the prize pack of a lifetime to stay around for a couple more years. The old "I'm waiting to see improvement" is well known as the sort of lie that causes a man's pants to erupt into flames, but no doubt it'll get a run at some point. There might be some dignity left in that statement if Frawley hadn't made it last year then conveniently forgot to sign on long enough for us to die in the arse again and justify him making an enormously courageous decision to join the two-time defending premier.

Howe's agent already put the MFB on high alert when he said: "This is the most important contract of Jeremy's career, so it needs to be a very considered decision. He needs to have all the facts available to him to make an informed decision". I'm not expecting "we're hanging out for a motza" but what a a steaming pile of bullshit that is.

I won't assume it's going to end badly yet, or start delivering passive aggressive pot-shots until at least after Queen's Birthday, but all I will say to Howe and anybody else in or approaching the prime of their career who is considering abandoning ship in order to chase 'success' elsewhere is that in 20 years time Nathan Jones will be able to walk into the house of any Melbourne fan who lived through this era, flick through their magazines, grab something to eat out of their fridge and do basically whatever he wants because he will be revered as a loyal servant and legend of this club on the same level as Robert Flower.

Rivers and Frawley might get polite chit-chat on the front doorstep of Melbourne fans, but unless they win a flag fans of their new clubs will totally forget about them five minutes after they're through the door. Hopefully when Turncoat Tom comes door-knocking for the More Money For $cully campaign he ends up being chased over the fence by a vicious dog.

Howe will be 25 at the end of this season, hardly one step from the knackery, and while it seems like I said the same thing about Frawley what about making it clear that you want to be part of the solution instead of diving for the too hard basket? Jones and Dunn are said they were up for the challenge but it'll be no bloody use if our best players are nicking off around them every year. I have stupidly misplaced faith he'll do the right thing, but if it's down to a dispute about which end of the ground he plays at for god's sake stick across half-forward - an area we have been absolutely toilet at over the last few years - kick it in his direction and set your Foxtel IQ for the three hour long highlights program.

I feel far more strongly about keeping him than Frawley because kids aren't interested in dour key defenders who regularly make a mockery of Jack Riewoldt, they're interested in players taking massive screamers. If your kid has a #38 jumper get them write a heartfelt Chris Grant style letter to him then chuck a fiver of your own in the envelope before sending it to Brunton Avenue. Footy players don't fall for that sort of thing these days, but at least we can use it against him if he leaves.

Do the right thing Jeremy and become a legend of this club instead of joining the Soldier of Fortune mercenary ranks.

On the other hand if any mercenaries from other clubs want to come to us then I'm prepared to welcome them with open arms.

Final Thoughts
Winning is infectious no matter what. I want more.

2 teams, 0 cups

Having had six months to prepare for tonight's official opening of the season I still spent the entire day metaphorically sweating bullets. Every year before this day I overdose a bit on a mixture of excitement and panic and worry that this sort of thing isn't going to float my boat any more. Of course it always does, and that's without a Seagal style training and meditation regime.

If anything the game itself settled me down because seeing them go around at a suburban ground was reassurance that winning or losing was ultimately meaningless but at about 5.10pm I was ready to punch on at Spencer Street Station to defend our honour if necessary.

Presumably others feel the same way too (though admittedly there there are also many who couldn't give a shit until premiership points are on offer), so before we indulge any lunatic theories about abolishing the pre-season please consider the effect this might have on the physical and mental health of people like me. Obsessives need a pre-season too, and we can't simulate the effects that we'll feel during games by running around an oval.

Fox Footy was nice enough to put on an opening ceremony featuring that comeback against the Dockers in 2008, and when the lights went down on that glorious afternoon (well that glorious second half anyway) footy was officially back. Technically it came back last week, and generally I wouldn't acknowledge that other clubs were involved all it took was a couple of serious knee injuries for the NAB Challenge to go from a welcome warm-up for the real stuff to the biggest evil facing Australian rules football today. It's not like anybody influential was suggesting it, but as horrible as it is for any player (let along 2x best and fairest winners) to end their year in a throwaway match I'm not sure the "start with Round 1" crowd have really thought their idea out.

Firstly if you want a sporting hard luck story you consult a Melbourne fan, and in this case we can tell you about Gawn and Petracca going down with ACL injuries as if shot during training. If we hadn't played tonight you'd think the space would be filled with more intra-club games, and with no other competitive matches to be played the intensity would be turned up from an AFL 9's match in Dubbo on a Wednesday night to the point where we're right back in the same place and extremities are exploding as if players have wandered into a minefield.

So apologies to Mark Stevens, Grant Thomas et al but you're speaking out of your ringpieces. It appears that the dreaded ACL injury appears to be caused more often than not by a player turning at speed so good luck stamping that out no matter how often the league rigs the rules in an attempt to engineer exciting outcomes for neutrals reduce injuries.

Besides, is there any team sport in the world that doesn't play some sort of practice/trial/pre-season matches? Maybe the Cayman Islands J'ai Alai Super League, but nothing that's taken seriously. It's wacky thinking that somehow Tom Liberatore's knee blowing out would somehow be better if it happened in Round 1 rather that at the Whitten Oval. Nobody seemed to care about infrequent carnage when teams were playing for the fool's gold of the Fosters/Panasonic/Wizard/NAB Cup as long as it was pure accident and not caused by surfaces which resembled the face of the moon. Those who remember Schwarz doing his knee in Albury, Morton his knee at Princes Park (was never the same) and Jurrah his shoulder on some god-forsaken South Australian country oval know if you lost in the early rounds of the cup you ended up playing meaningless games on Quambatook Oval anyway.

So what's the alternative? Rolling up to Round 1 with players as rusty as fuck then having to listen to every pundit claim that kicking on both sides should be added to the national curriculum to ensure a higher standard of footy? Bollocks to that. Besides, if you think the AFL aren't going to keep doing this just to stuff around with cricket, soccer, rugby league and god knows what other sports then you're kidding yourself - they'd be playing practice games at 11am on Boxing Day if the players weren't in a union.

I'm not even sure why 'journalists' would attempt to lead the charge on this (other than Stevo, who is incredibly even more one-eyed than me) considering that until about Round 4 when they can switch to trying to get coaches sacked the only thing getting them up on a Monday morning are the injuries. Imagine if there were no players hobbling into clinics that you could surround with cameras and ask them to describe how they're feeling ("Pretty shit actually Mark, how do you think?") as they go in to find out the bar news. They've not extended the nightly news to an hour so their sports reporters can do Four Corners style investigative journalism.

These games are a necessary evil, and I for one welcome them from behind the couch while covering my eyes in terror that somebody's going to get injured or suspended and miss Round 1/the decade. The first good sign was that Dwayne Russell was absent. To avoid him I'll even put up with Dermott Brereton offering a 1/9 genuine insight to tripe ration on special comments - and it was certainly the latter when he pondered aloud just seconds into the coverage that it would be interesting to see which end Garland would play at. Given that he's been a defender for about 111 of 115 games I'd say the odds were fairly strong that he'd continue doing that, but Frost up front was a surprise so perhaps Derm knew something we didn't and botched the delivery. It's his pre-season too, and both of us will still be waffling to an unnecessary length in late August.

It ended with a margin that I'd consider perfectly acceptable against a strong Fremantle lineup, but with a typically low final score courtesy of not managing a goal to the right of screen for the entire match, but there were enough signs in the Dockers keeping us at arm's length for most of the day to say that while there's no chance in hell that we'll be contending for the same spots on the ladder as them this season that we can at least go into games against genuine top eight sides not fearing a battering.

If you got home late and missed the first few minutes then you missed the best stuff by a mile. Straight off the bat Tyson won a perfect clearance and went straight inside 50 looking for Hogan - which is a combination I will quite enjoy seeing on Grand Final Day in about seven years time no matter who they're playing for. The Fear came into play for the first time when the ball hit the ground and Hulk did a quick double turn to try and find it - like somebody's life flashing before their eyes as they're dying his knee injury flashed before mine. Fortunately it was just me panicking and he got through the game seemingly unscathed (though I said that in the Geelong practice match last year and we never saw him again). As long as we can confirm he's actually boarded the plane and is flying back to Melbourne then let's put his performance down as an encouraging learning experience and enjoy the ride from here.

The first goal of the season came from Ben Newton taking a great mark running back with the flight of the ball, and an equally great kick from 50m out on a tight angle. He looked really good in the first half before running out of steam and then copping a whack around the head which caused them to sub him off. Centre clearances, leads, midfielders kicking goals from set shots - when would it all end if not with Nathan Jones lifting the premiership cup in September? Apparently with Garland giving away a free and a goal right in front, and that was the end of us for about half an hour.

It was noticeable in the first quarter, before we slowed to a crawl near the end, that while we were getting flogged in the taps that we were also winning the clearances comfortably. Even the ball movement looked reasonable (which is up from 'cringeworthy') with a couple of the expected random clangers but we were still horrible at delivering it inside 50. Until Hogan started pushing up later there was nothing happening along the half-forward line (some things never change), and while he was deep inside 50 they knew we were going to kick it to him every time and wouldn't let him get away. The one shining light forward was Kent who was involved in everything. I'm never adopting a favourite player again because it always kills their career but I'm in love with him because he clearly hates humanity but is also quick and can both dispose of AND get the ball.

Nevertheless even when we were winning it still looked like Enthusiastic Amateurs XVIII vs a group of highly paid professionals and it wasn't long before Fremantle took over. The heat probably didn't help, but given that we usually fail to get through the two halves of one quarter then it was far too much to ask for an entire half of quick, attacking football.

All was not lost even as Freo skipped away during the second quarter with barely a fingernail raised in defiance. Tyson and Jones were doing Tyson and Jones type things, it was impossible to fault Cross and Lumumba appeared to do exactly what I expected Grimes was going to a few years ago before we Melbourned him.

On the other hand my Max Gawn for 1st ruck campaign was left in disarray due to him kicking like The Spencil, but give it a few more weeks we're not at Round 1 yet. He still had more touches and more marks than Jamar despite having a mare so I'm not giving up on the dream just yet. Pedersen looked more 2013 than 2014, Toumpas will be 'better for the run' (e.g. I have hope we can still get out of this), Salem looks good when he gets the ball but that's not very often, JKH was nowhere near it and I'm sure Matt Jones is a top bloke in real life but the less I see of him in the senior side this year the better.

A one point second quarter was a handy flashback to the good times we enjoyed last season, but even then when it appeared we were gassed and would sink without a trace in the second half I was sitting on my couch in the All New Demonblog Towers IX pledging not to crack the shits until at least next week. Then in a grand twist to keep people from turning over to Keeping Up With The Kardashians we turned up and started playing like a real said again. Oh hello, where I have seen this before? Essendon in the Miracle at the MCG anybody? Bulldogs at Docklands? Port in Darwin? Letting a team get a five goal lead up before storming back at them and usually losing was a trademark move of ours last year, and here it was again but it's better than when we don't storm back and get pumped by 10 goals so I've got to go with it.

The third started well with Lumumba - given a run in the centre - gathering and hitting Hogan with a perfect lead which must have made the nation rise to applaud. Viv Michie and Chris Dawes did do the same thing in Round 23 last year, but given that I think the last people to be involved in a perfect kick to a lead before that were Cameron Bruce and David Neitz it's still something to get excited by. It was a good enough passage of play that I'd probably have still gone home happy if he'd kicked it out on the full, but happily Hoges gave us a taste of things to come by slotting it. No pressure, just a thousand of those in the senior career thanks Jess - preferably more than 750 of them for us.

Frost up forward didn't work, and when they moved him back we got to see a magnificent run off back which made a mockery of the idea I had of him being another one-dimensional tall defender - never let him start forward of centre again thanks. Was also very keen on vandenBerg when he came on, and even keener when it became clear that the MFC are going with the brilliant ethnic spelling even though he's probably never been to The Netherlands in his life.

Garlett was the last of the newcomers, and while he did next to nothing for the first three quarters except provide the opportunity for commentators to hang shit on him, he hit a UFC style tackle near the end of the third term which gave me chills. I'll forgive him for not playing five star games instantly considering he's been in all sorts recently but that - and his improved performance in the last quarter - gave me hope that we're entering another glorious era of forward pressure. Begone the dark years where attacking inside 50's were usually the worst thing to happen to our defenders.

Meaningless as the whole thing was it would have been nice to get a win, if only to spark a few more membership sales, but in the rare situation of a side other than Essendon handing us the opportunity to win on a platter we shat ourselves and failed to take advantage. First Jamar gets a free right in front and manages to kick it out on the full from two metres out (have I mentioned lately that at one point he was the most accurate shot on goal of any player since 1987?) then when the Freo player manages the even more absurd feat of hitting the opposite behind post on the full with the free kick Salem gets the chance to put us in front and kicks it out on the full as well. To nobody's surprise they got a goal about 10 seconds later and it was over.

No point going back to watch a pre-season game, but if you haven't seen it yet just look at the way their players get free inside 50. It's a thing of beauty, and tonight we got a new toy and were obsessed with using him. Once Watts gets down there as well and Hogan/Dawes learn to work together as a team I think we can probably get to the point where we score more than 60 points a game - and what a gloriously mediocre achievement that will be.

Commentary Corner
We don't give a shit about what you did during your career, just call the bloody game. Get a job on the Channel 9 cricket coverage if you want to spend all day trading 'playful' barbs about how the other guy was no good. I enjoy Hudson because he rarely if ever indulges in this sort of stupidity.

Crowd Watch
Not exactly the return to the Western Oval as far as public interest went, but starting it at 6pm on a Thursday for the benefit of people on the east coast (thanks!) probably didn't help. Perhaps having been there before the locals knew better than us to stay away from Fremantle Oval due to it sporting the worst siren in the history of footy. Some things are charming and rustic (like when I found a washing machine in the stairwell at Princes Park), some make it sound like a Scud missile is about to land in your living room.

Paul Prymke Plate for Pre-Season Performance
5 - Daniel Cross
4 - Heritier Lumumba
3 - Dom Tyson
2 - Nathan Jones
1 - Dean Kent

Apologies to McDonald, Newton (first half), vandenBerg (second half), Frost (second half) and Dawes

Leaderboard
5 - Daniel Cross, Jesse Hogan
4 - Heritier Lumumba, Christian Salem
3 - Jeff Garlett, Dom Tyson
2 - Sam Frost, Nathan Jones
1 - Dean Kent, Billy Stretch

Next Week
Admittedly I'm more excited about returning to Kryal Kastle for the first time since being surprisingly roped in to a rave in 2009 than the footy. What happy memories of spending the evening in the fields of a castle watching OD victims being wheeled past by paramedics while wrapped in tinfoil. As a family man I can now only hope that it's more like when I went in Grade 2 and saw two crunts jousting, but if it turns into a frenzy of pill-popping and overheating I'd probably give that a go too. And then it's off to see us play the Bulldogs which could either be delightful or a total drag depending on the quality of the two teams and our final score.

Final Thoughts
Everyone survived (I think), result irrelevant. Still a bottom three side.

These are the breaks - 2015 season preview

In the last generation to grow up before the internet came along and made life worth living you had to make your own fun. With what we know now about the joy of watching ads from 1985 on YouTube this sounds hideous, but it kept us well out of the clutches of perverts on the internet and back where we belonged within arm's reach of perverts on the street.

Long before my digital Mt. Rushmore arrived (Trove, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube with apologies to AFL Tables since you asked), and in the dead years before the introduction of the Sega Megadrive destroyed any interest I had in official education my favourite hobby was reading compilations of Peanuts cartoons. There's a lot of phases in my life where I'd like to go back now, apply a tight headlock and demand changes but this would not be one of them - they were ace then and by god I'd gleefully read them all again today.

Of all the great running gags in the series my favourite was Linus' annual attempt to lure The Great Pumpkin into his pumpkin patch on Halloween only for it to end in disaster and utter humiliation. There has perhaps never been a greater portrayal of #farceshambles in history than the moment Charlie Brown loses a bowling tournament by accidentally rolling his shot out the door where it skittles Linus as he waits in the pumpkin patch, but I digress.

The point is that no matter how many times he was left looking like a total buffoon his faith never wavered. He always had a good excuse as to why the Great Pumpkin had failed to judge his pumpkin patch as ‘the most sincere’ and would do it all again the next seas.. err year. Comrades, we are Linus, the MCG is our pumpkin patch and good times are the elusive Great Pumpkin.



There is no group more sincere than the modern Melbourne supporter, and so just over a week from the first competitive (albeit ultimately meaningless) match of the year we kick the dirt from our patch, rearrange the pumpkins and ask - in the words of professional miserablist Lloyd Cole - "are you ready to be heartbroken?" Technically as there's only one thing to win in the AFL these days (unless you recognise the Transfield Services Shield as a major trophy) the fans of 17 clubs are destined to be 'heartbroken' but it would be nice to at least be involved in the conversation again, even if it's just yelling from the end of the driveway,

Waiting patiently for sustainable success is one thing, but what I'm in a hurry to experience is that simultaneous light-bulb moment for somewhere between 15 and 40,000 fans inside the MCG when they realise we've hit the point where we can start hanging shit on other clubs again. It'll be the modern version of that fantastic day when we tonked Sydney and everyone there yelled "Jesus H Christ!" in surprise, only this time hopefully without it all going to buggery shortly after.

It's rinse and repeat year after year but I still can't visualise a time where we're legitimate contenders. Doesn't mean it can't happen, and if I try hard enough I can imagine us making the eight, but after the false starts and surprise fistings of the last few years I've just forgotten what it feels like to be in the mix. The other night I saw the post-match of the Essendon game on Fox Footy (surely their highest rating program of the summer) for the first time, and considering the way we quite rightfully went off our collective faces for a Round 13 thriller there is the very real prospect of casualties if we even qualified for the finals let alone won one. And if we won the whole thing? Well, you can celebrate for me because it's almost certain that I'll have keeled over and died from tension five minutes into the first quarter.

A full recap isn't necessary thank god, but you know as well as I do that following Melbourne since Round 1 2007 has been a unique experience. Of course sides have had it worse in the past, Fitzroy fans watched their team burn to cinders while the AFL stood by gleefully throwing logs on the fire, but we've had practically everything but the white screen/shotgun combination thrown at us since then. Every day above ground is a good day, but since Brock McLean's foot exploded that night we've been spat at, slapped, kneed in the knackers, Mike Brady wrote a We Are The World style charity song for us and let's be frank - technicalities aside - at times watched our own club try to avoid winning if at all possible.

A book I recently read had a chapter which touched on the wild scenes when South Melbourne snuck into the finals on the last day of the 1977 season after being gash for the best part of 30 years. It's unlikely anything could match the scenes at the Western Oval in the last round 10 years later, but the description of grown men weeping and strangers leaping into each other’s arms is what I expect it would be like if we did the same now. A few pages later a filthy turncoat who admits to jumping off the Dees and adopting Essendon describes a mid 1980's win against Carlton as “particularly beautiful, but not worthy of hugging strangers over. That’s premiership stuff” and there – if you didn't already know the feeling – is the ultimate demonstration of what it’s like to be one of the haves or the have-nots.

Here's a good way to spend an hour if your health fund counts following Melbourne as a psychological disorder, go to a hypnotist and ask them to make you think you're a Hawthorn fan. There was an article recently where they were asked if they were comfortable with an extended half-time break in a night grand final, and it didn't infuriate me because of the presumption that they'd be involved in the next one (because they probably will be) but because it's impossible to imagine being in the position of ultimate, balls-out power that they are now.I suppose it could happen, but for now I'd treat 11th like a flag. In the meantime I'm sure our media manager's phone rings hot when the press wants comment on 1.10 Sunday games held in front of friends and family.

As rough as it's been we should never forget the brief period of lucidity from Round 4 2010 into early 2011, but a look back through the archives shows I was trying to topple the coach 13 weeks before 186 so it's hard to claim now that it was all good times even when we were making a mockery of Adelaide and Freo. What great afternoons they were, treating somebody else like they were second rate. Since those fantastic afternoons they've both nearly won flags, the furthest we've been is the Northern Territory.

If after a lengthy reading of the various misfortunes that have befallen us in the last few years and the tendering into evidence of our record over the same period most people wouldn't be able to say under oath that they recommend anybody start following this club without committing perjury, but I'm here to tell you there are still several fantastic reasons to get involved. One is the amazing online support group of fellow travellers who you'll undoubtedly meet along the way, one is the promise that one day we will proudly stand tall atop a pile of our enemies' bodies but it's mostly about being able to use the MCG whizzers without having to queue for 10 minutes. And that the train carriages are half empty. And being able to buy a pack of soggy chips for $6 without self-loathing in the line for five minutes first. It is the opportunity to stand up at your seat during play if you really want, or to move to one of the 40,000 empty places in general admission if you wind up sitting next to a total poon. It is, in the end, glorious no matter what psychological dramas are inflicted between the sirens. I went to a Grand Final once, it was horrible.

Urinary convenience aside I understand that the more members and numbers on the gate the better so I'd gladly go three-deep in the hot dog queue if it meant another 10,000 on our average gate and hundreds of thousands on our end of season profit. Market forces (there's your opening CLICHE of the season) also dictate that the more popular your club is the more suckers you can convince to open their wallets and give you money for practically anything. While Collingwood fans pay three times what we do to sit in the exact same seats I can afford 16 games, a reserved seat I use once a season and a guaranteed Grand Final ticket (hah, yes I know) for less than what some otherwise reasonable people stuff down the g-string of a stripper after a few drinks on a Friday night.

And it still feels as if the club appreciates our business. They certainly need our money, so they'd want to show us the love but while there's only so much a club can do to keep spirits buoyant and no way of pleasing everyone without on-field results to back it up I'm the experience is less like being a customer at a ruthless corporation. Somebody close to me once floated the idea of moving an amendment to the constitution at an AGM and Peter Jackson himself invited him down to the club to patiently explain why it was a dud idea. Magnificent.

Perhaps the chance to waste the time of a highly paid executive doesn't make up for it always being the Year of the Twat on our Chinese astrological calendar but if following Collingwood or Essendon is the equivalent of being the customer of a corporation playing out of Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge following Melbourne is like turning up at Ashton Gate to watch Bristol City. If one season ticket holder at Highbury or White Hart Lane (but never both) throws his hands up in the air and stomps off to join the rugby league there'll be another customer eager to take his spot, but when lowly clubs lose fans they have to fight like hell to fill the spot. That's why the club chases you down vigorously if you 'forget' to renew your membership,

I'm sure all clubs wheel players in to try and lean on the uncommitted, wavering or flat out suddenly disinterested (like when Chris Dawes' dad rang my mum and dropped the name only to find out she had NFI who Chris Dawes was) but at Collingwood the players probably let the phone ring once, say nobody answered and duck out the side door for a 30 minute ciggy break. Deep down everyone wants to be the super successful club that plays in front of 80,000 four times a year but unfortunately at this particular time (e.g about September 1964 to the present) it's not our lot. If there was a way to stay comfortably afloat with just the few nutters we've got now I'd gladly take it but there probably isn't so come one, come all and why not buy a membership for your World Vision sponsor child too.

So sure there are off-field benefits like ground attendants who can't even be bothered checking tickets in premium membership areas and Docklands crowds so small that you don't feel like a deadly stampede is going to break out on the way to Southern Cross Station but believe it or not I actually feel like we should have a bit more fun with what happens on-field as well. This is after all the core reason we're actually involved, scarfing kransky and enjoying a short queue at the TAB are just added benefits.

What right do I, as somebody who has probably done more than anyone to permeate the atmosphere of dread, have to suddenly start waving around lofty goals like finishing 16th in an 18 team competition. Well there is concrete evidence that points (and I must stress POINTS – the legal department wants me to make it clear that this does not constitute a binding guarantee of good times and that no refunds will be offered) to further improvement. But I'm not going to tell you what they are until we stop sooking about the distant past and sook about the near past for a bit instead.

It was the most average of times, it was the not quite worst of times....

2014 - Look back in anger
When the name of the sacred Great Pumpkin was first invoked on these pages in July 2013 it was in regard to the prospect of luring Paul Roos as coach. At the height of my bad-news induced hysteria I was convinced the AFL were going to change the locks on us at any minute so it seemed a bit rich to be wheeling in Million Dollar Saviour shortly after going to the league cap-in-hand. The last thing I wanted was to gamble everything on one last throw of the dice and end up having to hock our gaming venues/boxes to pay the accumulated debt by misadventure a few years later.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody it seems I was wrong. I plead not guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity caused by excessive consumption of siege mentality. Whatever we ended up paying (including contributions from headquarters that we'll eventually be forced to work off with degrading deeds) proved as worthwhile off-field as on in the early stages of the experiment. When virtual reality simulators really hit their stride I'll go back and prove that anybody could have improved that side compared to how it looked during 2013, but what I didn't factor in while mixing a Molotov Cocktails in my basement was how Roos would help the club to go about our business with something approaching quiet dignity for the first time in a couple of years.

Having an experienced, respected figure in the chair also provided some cover against journalists, 'commentators' and "commentators" who lock-in on easy targets like heat-seeking missiles. Imagine if Mark Neeld had come out with that nonsense about tanking causing us to cark it in the last 20 minutes against the Lions, he'd have been howled out of the press conference only to then have to run through Docklands while axe-wielding supporters pursued him. When Roos did some of us (mainly me) briefly cracked the shits that got on with our business because who are we to argue with a premiership coach?

In the end the entire club found a great way to ensure everyone forgot about the Brisbane capitulation by putting on the muntiest performance of the year against GWS a few weeks later. If we hadn't rolled over and carked it in spectacular fashion on that fateful afternoon at the MCG then the entire season would be looked upon about as fondly as you can when it finishes with 10 straight losses. Even the comically tiny scores we put up throughout the year could have been easily excused due to occasionally dragging a good side like Sydney or Collingwood down with us, but that GWS result was like a return to the days where you were as likely to be under the early train than on it.

Expectations weren't high going in but it wasn't so bad, even if it started with us as beaten favourites against the eventual wooden spooner and ended with 22 North players trotting about desperately trying not to get hurt before the finals. With the benefit of time having wiped most of the minor details from memory a lot of what happened between rounds 4 and 14 was - other than our shithouse scoring rate - Perfectly Acceptable Football. Good for any 9th to 14th team at least, and at this point if we can drag that out across a season while kicking a few more goals I'd be delighted.

Without re-reading last year's preview I seem to remember that considerable length was given to claiming that we must stop wallowing in the misery of the past and start looking forward with optimism. My own adherence to this philosophy survived a disappointing Round 1, spluttered through the next two weeks, briefly came to life when we had three (3!) wins and peaked on that glorious night when the Bombers imploded and allowed us to steal one of the most unlikely victories of my lifetime. By the end of the year I was grimly trying to make the case for priority picks.

As the air in our balloon slowly deflated over the following weeks, The Fear began to creep back in with a vengeance and the question became "what if that is all there is?" What if our fate is to be a chopping block for the rest of the league until the end of time? Of course with the draft and salary caps rigged in favour of dud teams it's nigh on impossible to be horrible for as long we were from the mid 60's to 80's, but you often get the sense that if any organisation is capable of having a go we're it. These are the sort of psychological crises that crop up when you emotionally over-invest in stuff like this, in reality while there's absolutely no guarantee of improvement by the time we got to about Round 15 the best thing to do was forget about 2014, shepherd everyone through to the end of the year unscathed and begin List Rebuild III: Rebuild Hard With A Vengeance.

By the time it was all over you could sense many of the players had hit the wall and were desperately looking for the finish line, but perhaps with an eye to the future many of the fringe players who were on the way out were either lightly used in the last few weeks or left to wither away on the frozen tundra of Casey Fields. As much as I'd have liked to have given Blease more of a go and players like Clisby or Strauss any sort of go at all I suppose in retrospect it was better to get games into the players of the future rather than wasting our time with ones who were about to get the chop. Still don't know why we bothered continuing to play Frawley in the last few weeks, but they were probably worried about another Tankquiry breaking out. What constitutes genius list management for an 11th placed team equals call a lawyer you cheating filth for 17th.

While the last few weeks were hard to sit through, and I couldn't have paid less attention to that Hawthorn game if I'd sat at home on the couch injecting heroin into my eyeball for four quarters, deep down I still secretly love being there. The buzz before a game is unbeatable, and no matter how quickly I go through the stages of grief once the match starts at least I had rush of absurd excitement between waking up and tits up. Even having lived through the worst era of our lifetimes I guarantee that you'll still remember Jeremy Howe's screamers and Nathan Jones carrying an entire club on his back for the rest of your life - and if it was gone you'd have a hole in your heart as deep as a well so fight like hell to make sure it lives on in its current form forever. From my cold dead hands etc..

Now, for the future. Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip, and come onto the mothership...

2015 - Look forward in anger


Oh, you want to know about the signs? Well whatever they are they're not going to necessarily translate into a spectacular rise in our ladder position, but what we should hopefully see is a further levelling of the playing field, more close games where we hold on to win, more creditable performances against top four sides and for god's sake let's beat a couple of shit teams this year while we're at it.

I've felt this way the last couple of seasons and we've ended up having neither good times or a rise on the ladder so why not third time lucky? Remember that year I felt guilty picking us to come 13th, that would seem optimistic by today's standards but I'm reasonably confident that we can end the season with our heads held high. But before this section gets so positive that people think somebody else has taken over writing it let's remove any suggestion that I think we're going to finish anywhere near the top eight by using my patented bracket prediction system, showing groups in which teams could finish anywhere. And wow, look at those bold predictions for the top two.

1 - Sydney
2 - Hawthorn
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3 - Port Adelaide
----
4 - North Melbourne
5 - Geelong
6 - Fremantle
----
7 - Gold Coast
8 - Collingwood
9 - West Coast
10 - Richmond
11 - Essendon (obviously lower if half their side is replaced by James Magner, though maybe this time Neeld won't try and turn him into a defensive forward 10 weeks in)
----
12 - Brisbane
13 - Adelaide
----
14 - GWS
15 - Carlton
----
16 - Melbourne
17 - Footscray
18 - St Kilda

It seems perverse to aspire to be GWS but other than their lost fortnight when they were tonked by 250 points and let Jack Riewoldt kick 12 their record in finishing third last in 2014 would probably suit me. Six wins and 76.6% would be two wins and eight percent better than us last year so I'll call that my personal pass mark and vigorously celebrate anything beyond it. Your acceptable level of performance may vary, and that's fine but I absolutely refuse to be roped into the annual "if everything goes right we could slip into the eight" conversation. Considering the last week we've had we'd be lucky in anything went right from this point on let alone everything, I'd love an amazing 1998 style run to the finals even more than I did that year (and it is my favourite season ever) but let's aim for at least one season of mid-table obscurity before getting overly excited thanks.

A key reason why I feel like we can contend (for 14th to 15th) is that while we crashed on final approach last year we at least demonstrated an ability to stick with a lot of top sides for the first time since quite frankly Round 1, 2011. Of course this was achieved courtesy of hit-and-run guerrilla defensive tactics which unravelled badly when fatigue set in but we've had more players do the full pre-season, have added more experience and nobody's run off to join a death cult so that's a good start. Not a great start considering important players like Watts (up your jumper, I'm standing by him. Until rounds 3, 12 and 19 when I'll be jumping off again) and Vince are still recovering from off-season work or minor injuries but better. If only a dodgy paleo curry had gone through Christian Petracca like a freight train the night before that fateful training session the feelgood factor would be off the charts right now.

The news that the kid had done his knee was shattering. Not for any immediate on-field reason, I'm fairly sure he wasn't going to have a John Coleman style rookie season, but because it just reminded us again that there is no end to the bad luck one club can have. I felt bad that I felt so bad about it, because it ultimately means nothing to me compared to him having to rehab for a whole year and then wonder if/when it'll go again but while a lot of our woes have been self-inflicted this was just fate kicking our lifeless corpse. He'll be back so if it's the worst thing to happen to us all year I suppose we might have come out at the other end pretty well but what I will say is that he took it bloody well, watching him smiling in an interview afterwards actually made me emotional. Maybe that mental strength explains why he's an elite sportsman and I am pretty much the polar opposite.

We will go on but it was the moment where our Farce Bingo card went beyond billboard size and to the point where it was so large that it became the first document which can be read from outer space. If it were MFC: The TV Series this is the point where they'd have to throw in an uplifting storyline to stop the viewers from necking a slab of Hemlock Gatorade, but in real life the only standing thing between us an another world's best practice debacle is dumb luck. "Garlett forgets to go to court" is a minor annoyance in comparison but I'm patiently awaiting the 4 Corners investigation which reveals the entire 1970's were spent using the club as a front to smuggle arms to the South African apartheid government.

Watching a kid with the world at his feet go under the knife was an enormous downer, but before it's suggested that Mark Neeld attempted live-baiting in a last ditch attempt to save Cale Morton's career take a deep breath because there are signs (nobody's saying they're providing accurate wayfinding information though) why we can at least become a respectable side in 2015. It would be ignoring the lessons learnt between 2012 and 2013 to suggest that it has to get better but there's a plausible case to argue it will.

It starts with the results of the last rebuild. Apart from Vince coming back from shoulder surgery the recruits who were so successfully rolled in from other clubs last year don't look like taking a step back. Even Bernard is experienced enough that he'll probably slip straight back in without batting an eyelid, and more good players going in around him will obviously help. If any of them are going to go backwards it'll probably be Cross due to age, but he was still so good late last year that I think he'll get through the season comfortably then probably give it away.

Vince was good, but it was Tyson - he of the world famous luscious locks - who shot to the front of the queue faster than anyone had expected. We've been roped in by single seasons before but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes one step better in the best and fairest this year (note: not my fault if he gets injured now). As for the others neither Viv Michie or Aidan Riley set the world alight but both showed they were worth persisting with - and based on the price paid for each of them I'd say there wasn't a miss amongst the lot. You cannot in any way have too much depth, and that's what players like them are offering - not everyone needs to be in Brownlow contention to be useful.

So Tyson, Vince, Cross alone are a reasonable group to start with. Add Jones and Howe who you know will have a good game most weeks, assume at least two of the 2014 surprise packets Dunn, Jetta and Pedersen will go on with it, assume players like Garland who took a step backward last year due to injury will get back into it and factor in better times for enigmas like Watts or Dawes who can go from end of the scale to the other several times in a single game and you've got something approaching an AFL standard side.

None of the the draftees stood out in 2014 (as shown by the criminally low score to win last year's Jeff Hilton Rising Star) but Salem and Kennedy-Harris did more than enough for first year players and after previous experiences it's probably better at this point if we're not teased and just enjoy the ride. Suspend your disbelief based on previous screwjobs and assume 2-3 year players like Toumpas, Viney and Kent will improve and we could just go alright. By our standards.

Then of course there's Hogan, possibly the greatest white hype ever at this club in my time. Before Petracca went down I was convinced he was pretty much going to go around like this all season...



... but now I just want to see him play one senior game. I'm scared of another mystery back injury, I'm scared of any sort of injury. I don't think I've been as nervous about watching a player with the threat of him being seriously hurt since Schwarz came back from his last knee injury. I'm not saying there's any pressure on him to generate some goals but our currently reigning top forward combination is Dean Kent/Tom McDonald and nobody's kicked four in a match since Fitzpatrick vs Brisbane in Round 17, 2013. It's the football equivalent of starting a new job where you replace somebody who was completely shithouse, you cannot possibly look bad as long as you make it through the front door to clock on in the morning.

It probably contributed to him being cursed but Petracca was the only one of the draftees I had anywhere near my Round 1 side, so now that he's gone I'm not expecting anything massive from the rest. Brayshaw will undoubtedly play this year but there's no need to rush him into it, while all of Stretch, Neal-Bullen and Sizzle Jr can take their time at Casey under no pressure for the first half of the year then get a taste later on as their teammates start to drop like flies/lose interest in life. Besides, now that the Scorpions coach is officially on our payroll and as I understand picked by us at least we can be sure that they'll be doing the right thing and developing our kids instead of playing Fev 2015 at full forward.

There are also two spots on the senior list to be had, and assuming a ruckman crisis won't necessitate the introduction of Max King just yet that leaves Harmes, Vandenberg and White battling to get the call up. Having never seen any of them in my life I'll back a Harmes/Vandenberg combo based on second year rookie/subject of pre-season 'training the house down' style chatter. The good news is that all of them should play in the NAB Challenge so we'll be able to make our judgement on who's worthy of a promotion then asked surprised when highly paid football coaches have a different opinion.

The key is going to be this year's 'recycled' recruits, and even though he and his manager clearly haven't learned how to set calendar reminders on their phones I have the feeling Garlett for pick 600 is going to look like the bargain of the century at the end of the year as long as they don't try and get smart by playing him as a half-back flanker or something stupid so we can finally see some much needed crumb up forward. Remember, if all goes well we're going to have an enormous figure down there crashing packs and taking grabs - having somebody with pace at his feet will be massive. More options up front means more chances to kick inside 50 instead of dinking around with it in the middle of the ground before turning it over.

Ben Newton comes on board as midfield depth without much AFL experience to point to it going one way or the other yet and Sam Frost likewise as a key defender - we ended paying more for Frost than we otherwise might have had to if St Kilda didn't psyche us out on the last day of the trade period but it wasn't a huge price in the end anyway and it means depth, the sort of wonderful depth which we've been missing for so long.

The wildcard option - in more ways than one - is Lumumba. This could go anywhere, but I actually think he'll work a treat. As I've said before until he grabs the MCG house microphone and gives us an update on Karl Marx then judge him solely on the question "Is he better than the person he's replacing?" and with respect to Dean Terlich's first season at the club the answer is good god yes he is. I'm not sure he'll turn out to be a Paul Hopgood style prankster, and he's not going to single handedly lift us out of the mire but he's a good solid player going into a spot where we've had all sorts of trouble over the years and again we basically paid nothing considering Clark was going to be gone for nowt anyway. He's a tripper but now he's our tripper so I'm on his side.

The best thing I can say about the side that I'm predicting runs out for Round 1 is that fill-ins like Terlich and Matt Jones are no longer required starters just to be a mature body in the side. They're hanging around if required but thank god we've gone beyond the point where two battlers can finish in the top five of our Best and Fairest and people treat it as a heartwarming underdog story instead of an enormous, glowing red DANGER button.

Demonblog's 22+1
B: Jetta, T. McDonald, Dunn
HB: Lumumba, Garland, Howe
C: Tyson, Jones, Vince
HF: Watts, Hogan, Kent
F: Gawn, Fitzpatrick, Garlett
FOLL: Jamar, Cross, Viney
INT: Grimes, Pedersen, Bail
Sub: Salem

Dawes would be at full-forward if he hadn't gone out and needlessly got himself suspended by 'flying the flag' in that meaningless North game. Also I refuse to recognise the substitute as a legitimate position but everyone else has given up the fight now so I guess we're stuck with it. I'd prefer Howe taking screamers on the HFF and Gawn as the #1 ruckman but I'm also realistic enough to know that's not going to happen. Chances of all of these players making it to Round 1? Again, not my fault if anything goes askew.

The fun starts in earnest next Thursday when the Fremantle Oval joins world famous sporting venues such as The Oval in London, the Hitcham Air Force Base in Honolulu and Bulleen Park in hosting an MFC practice match. The glee when I discovered it was one of the games Foxtel is broadcasting was not worthy of an actual - not even glorified - practice match but it means as long as there's no mystery fourth NAB Challenge game scheduled for Port Lincoln that I'll get to see every game we play this year either in person or on TV.

Next stop is Ballarat for the Bulldogs, and I'm planning to make a day of it by dropping it at Kryal Kastle on the way to find out if the village idiot is in fact a Dees man, before it's back to the city for the first classic pre-season banana skin game since the days when the night series featured horribly overmatched interstate teams being put to the sword by the entire VFL. It's at Docklands so that's a bad start, but the fact that it's against the Essendon Seconds with a skeleton staff of AFL players, suburban ring-ins and two ex-Demons probably keen to stitch us right up is where it could all go horribly wrong.

The potential complication to this storyline is that on the 18th of February the AFL claimed it would take a month to go through the evidence before delivering a verdict on their case (which sounds suspect to me, you'd get a verdict on a murder case in half the time) and we play them on the 20th of March. I can only imagine the scenes if their players actually do get wiped out - we might finally see Docklands destroyed without having to do it ourselves, but in the more likely scenario that the whole thing is finally wrapped up without anybody doing hard time the Bombers could unleash their full squad on us with great vengeance and furious anger. If that happens the game will have to be put back 10 minutes so their fans can throw rose petals on the ground in front of James Hird as he walks out, but as we're accustomed to fiascos let's just assume for now a glorified VFL team is going to be involved. And they'll be playing Essendon. The scene is set perfectly for a loss which will have people beating the panic button until it breaks in half or a win so unconvincing that they just hover their hand over it in readiness for Round 1.

What a glorious first fortnight of the regular season it'll be too, games against Gold Coast and GWS in quick succession. Ask me again when I'm climbing the steps of a Light Tower 2 with a sniper rife but at the moment it feels like moderation is the best course of action no matter what (within reason) happens in the first two games. I can't rule out some red-faced screaming over the race by a few people who haven't realised that Gold Coast have gone past us by a mile, beat us the last three times and weren't all that bad in the two before that either but we're not playing for a flag here so let's not completely lose our mind over failing to take advantage of yet another 'favourable' draw in the first round. People were about to tool up and form gangs after Round 1 last year, and as shithouse as the opening fortnight was our best footy of the season came in the next few weeks.

There's still a stigma about losing to the expansion teams, but there won't be 21 weeks later. Let's at least try (and this will come back to haunt me when I flip out with white line fever) to concentrate on the bigger picture and the fact that we're far more likely to be jostling for position at the foot of the table with Victorian clubs than these two. Alternatively we could win, which would be nice in Round 1 for the first time in 11 years and/or any time we play $cully. I won't get ahead of myself but if there's positive results I'll be throwing a premiership party at the all new northern suburbs location of Demonblog Towers.

On the other hand if like me you don't think we can get out of the bottom five is that some sick freaks are already talking draft, and I expect to be reading that thread no later than Round 5.

Off-field antics
Right up until the AGM things it looked like we were experiencing our most prolonged period of combined political and financial stability since.. well, pretty much any time in living memory. We’d even reversed a deficit that would make the Greek government shift nervously in their seat (courtesy, funnily enough of whatever the exact opposite of austerity measures are PLUS a big fat bailout from the central bank) and made a modest profit.

Good times. But even before the Petracca Disaster the dream that we'd get to Round 1 without any famous traditional #fistedforever moments was shattered when this story blew up. More accurately like a dud hand grenade it smashed through the window, caused everyone to hit the floor in panic then failed to ignite. It’s not to say that there isn't some truth in it – because why would you think positively as a Melbourne fan? – but usually all the big time journos (and enthusiastic amateurs like Greg Denham) pounce on negative stories about us like a pack of wild dogs devouring raw meat. Weeks later we've heard nothing else. Admittedly it was sprinkled with more “it is believed” style disclaimers than a Women’s Day celebrity hatchet job, but even then you'd expect some follow-up.

For the sake of my own sanity I choose to believe that it’s either a stitch up or the President has been verballed again like his Yankees debacle before Queen's Birthday last year, but as no doubt it will turn out to be 100% correct let's acknowledge that the idea of going out and getting the best CEO in the game is a noble one. However it’s not like you’re replacing a 60-year-old with some hot-shot 40-year-old who has the golden touch and will reign gloriously for many years to come.

If the idea is that Jackson is going to retire at some point in the near future anyway so we may as well have a pop at the best option available then the logic is sound, but as somebody who has never sat on a board and at times should be restricted to using plastic cutlery it feels like if this were true that we'd be getting a bit cute for our own good. Instead of gambling on another messiah at what is reported to be a significantly higher cost than the current option maybe we should be swiping the next big thing from another club (if there is such a person) and having them work in a succession plan with Jackson. If the idea is good enough for a coach why not for an administrator?

Without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes I’d certainly much rather stick with the guy who is doing a good job now than spend an alleged fortune upgrading in the hope of getting a better result out of what is currently the worst side of the 21st century. The gaming venues are practically keeping us afloat, so unless there's a mystery strategy to roping more people into pumping their life savings through the pokies at the Bentleigh Club I'm not sure how much more the turd can be polished without on-field success to drive even more revenue.

It seems to me that given the rubbish he inherited and the position we're in now that the incumbent has done pretty well considering, so if he wants to go on and he’s not doing weird things behind the scenes that seem to point to looming insanity then let him get on with it. Anyway, knowing our luck we’d have Jackson marched out the door by security guards then Cook would get hit by a bus crossing Brunton Avenue for his first day on the job.

Who knows how CEO and President get along, but I know which position is more important for a footy club in 2014 and if it turns into a brawl in Yarra Park I'll be swinging a chain around for PJ. Not that members can do much these days, for all the talk about toppling presidents that goes around it’s almost impossible to do – and believe me every second person was considering having a go in June 2013 – but there shouldn't be any need for toppling, let’s hire and fire on performance and not the off chance that we'll finally land on the SAVIOUR section of the wheel of fortune. If we miss Cook and he's at the helm when Footscray win nine premierships in a row then that's more bad luck and I'll probably be on hypocritically lamenting us not getting him, but after the debacle of Schwab’s unnecessary and in retrospect quite offensive contract extension during 2012 how about we just do the obvious, safe thing and stick with a top administrator while we've got him rather than trying to indulge in Machiavellian antics like we’re a powerhouse club and not one a step above Woodville-West Torrens.

Peter, please keep sending the cheques to the usual address.

Paul Prymke Plate for Pre-Season Performance
Regular readers will recognise this as our award for performance in all pre-season matches, and to keep it interesting intra-club games are included. God knows how anyone gives votes under the circumstances, but @demonsbeth was kind enough to dish out the first arbitrary judgements of the season live our seasonal residence in Cranbourne. The three NAB Challenge games and any other pre-season matches will help sort of the winner, and it's no pressure Jesse just win this, the Coleman and a Brownlow thanks.

5 - Jesse Hogan
4 - Christian Salem
3 - Jeff Garlett
2 - Sam Frost
1 - Billy Stretch

Actually if he could just make to the MCG in playing condition on Saturday April 4 that would be great.

Final thoughts
I'm too old to spread myself across several teams in different countries in the hope that one of them will deliver something as meaningful as an AFL premiership. I'm just going to have to go all-in on this dream. 

2015 betting markets (pre-season update here)
And for those of you who are into this sort of thing, but buried at the bottom in case you're trying to beat a ruinous gambling addiction, it's our annual look at who's most likely to win some fictional awards. Addiction or not we encourage you to enter side bets with your friends and family in an attempt to win a motza.



A rising tide supposedly lifts all boats but the blocked bilge pipes in the second half of last year allowed Nathan Jones to stand head and shoulders above everyone again. Let's not forget we were on board first when he was awarded the 2007 edition of the Allen Jakovich Medal and he richly deserved his fourth last year. Admittedly I went off him for a couple of years when Moloney was fit and firing but while he was never 'bad' by any means he's come better than good in the last three seasons. Signing a contract to effectively stay with us forever - or at least until he's on the other side of his prime - despite having a win/loss record like the Washington Generals further solidifies his spot as the 21st century's greatest MFC figure so far.

So given that there should be absolutely no surprises about who starts favourite for the big one, but while I will remind you that votes are handed out with absolute integrity and no attempts at setting up grandstand finishes I feel like somebody might get him this year. Updated markets will be provided before Round 1 to allow you to have an informed conversation with your bookie or chosen sports gambling provider.

Allen Jakovich Medal for Player of the Year

$3.50 - Nathan Jones
$5 - Bernie Vince
$6 - Dom Tyson
$9 - Lynden Dunn
$12 - Jack Viney, Jack Watts
$15 - Daniel Cross, Jeremy Howe
$ 18 - Neville Jetta, Heritier Lumumba
$28 - Chris Dawes
$35 - Jack Grimes, Jesse Hogan
$38 - Jeff Garlett, Dean Kent, Christian Salem
$40 - Tom McDonald
$44 - Colin Garland, Cameron Pedersen
$50 - Rohan Bail
$ 60 - Angus Brayshaw, Jimmy Toumpas
$75 - Matt Jones, Viv Michie, Ben Newton
$80 - Mark Jamar, Jay Kennedy-Harris, Billy Stretch
$90 - Alex Neal-Bullen, Aidan Riley, Dean Terlich
$100 - Max Gawn, Jordie McKenzie
$125 - Jack Fitzpatrick, Sam Frost, Oscar McDonald
$150 - Jake Spencer
$ 200 - Jack Trengove
$750 - James Harmes, Jayden Hunt
$1000 - Christian Petracca, Aaron Vandenberg
$1500 - Mitchell White
$2000 - Max King

Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year
$3.50 - Lynden Dunn
$ 6 - Heritier Lumumba
$8.50 - Neville Jetta
$10 - Tom McDonald
$12 - Jack Grimes
$15 - Colin Garland
$20 - Jeremy Howe
$22 - Dean Terlich
$25 - Oscar McDonald
$ 30 - Sam Frost, Cameron Pedersen
$40 - Jack Watts
$80 - ANY OTHER PLAYER
$200 - NO PLAYER ELIGIBLE

Jeff Hilton Rising Star Medal
All players with zero games are eligible regardless of time spent on the list. Nobody who played senior games in 2014 remained eligible by debuting in the last four weeks of the season.

$4.50 - Jesse Hogan
$ 9 - Angus Brayshaw
$17 - Billy Stretch
$18 - Alex Neal-Bullen
$38 - Oscar McDonald
$110 - Jayden Hunt
$ 125 - James Harmes
$150 - Aaron Vandenberg
$200 - Christian Petracca, Mitchell White
$250 - NO PLAYER ELIGIBLE
$350 - Max King

Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year
Thrown into disarray the year Fitzpatrick won it for his forward performances. As usual the loose criteria will be adapted by the awards committee as the season progresses.

$3 - Mark Jamar
$ 8 - Max Gawn
$20 - Jack Fitzpatrick
$22 - Jake Spencer
$ 50 - Cameron Pedersen
$100 - Max King, ANY OTHER PLAYER