In honour/big fat rip off of the American obsession with doing power rankings for frivolous topics we've decided to do the same on a monthly basis. Every month, even in the off-season, applying the same formula for importance that may not actually exist as seen in the pre-season preview.
The only difference is that one was based on 'overall' importance, and this one is a rolling mark of their current importance. Are lightly injured players who would walk straight back into the side more important than space fillers who are there while we wait for them to return? Probably.
You will undoubtedly disagree with the findings, and rightly so. Obviously Bartram outranks Sylvia at the moment, because he's played every game whereas Sylvia has played one and a half - but Sylvia still outranks Magner because he's capable of devastating feats. Max Gawn outranks two rookies who are injured for a shorter amount of time because he's got a bigger profile.
The May ratings include the matches played so far this month, but from the start of June onwards the cut-off date will be the last day of the month - and if they go off their nut in a game on the first it won't count.
Pre-season rankings in brackets
May 2012
(11) 1. Mitch Clark
(10) 2. Nathan Jones
(1) 3. James Frawley
(19) 4. Jeremy Howe
(7) 5. Colin Garland
(9) 6. Jordie McKenzie
(3) 7. Mark Jamar
(4) 8. Jack Trengove
(5) 9. Brent Moloney
(16) 10. Jared Rivers
(6) 11. Jack Grimes
(25) 12. Clint Bartram
(8) 13. Jack Watts
(30) 14. Tom McDonald
(26) 15. Matthew Bate
(23) 16. Cale Morton
(2) 17. Colin Sylvia
(16) 18. Aaron Davey
(13) 19. Brad Green
(33) 20. James Magner
(24) 21. Lynden Dunn
(20) 22. Rohan Bail
(14) 23. Luke Tapscott
(32) 24. James Sellar
(12) 25. Stefan Martin
(22) 26. Ricky Petterd
(31) 27. Joel Macdonald
(28) 28. Jamie Bennell
(15) 29. Liam Jurrah
(21) 30. Sam Blease
(18) 31. Jordan Gysberts
(37) 32. Jack Fitzpatrick
(36) 33. James Strauss
(27) 34. Daniel Nicholson
(38) 35. Tom Couch
(41) 36. Josh Tynan
(44) 37. Troy Davis
(43) 38. Jake Spencer
(29) 39. Neville Jetta
(42) 40. Rory Taggert
(34) 41. Lucas Cook
(43) 42. Jai Sheahan
(39) 43. Kelvin Lawrence
(46) 44. Max Gawn
(35) 45. Michael Evans
(45) 46. Leigh Williams
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Saturday, 5 May 2012
I'm a country member...
... actually I'm not, and to be entirely honest spent the whole day on the couch (no sign of Gerard Healy thankfully) after chickening out of going to Kardinia Park. I was a slowly burning chicken, it was on the way to Geelong last year that I thought to myself that I wouldn't be bothered for at least one year - and that's before the result made returning to the scene of the crime an even less attractive proposition.
I'm still not sure how I managed to stay the full four quarters that day, but the work colleague who randomly ran into me at the train station that day likes to occassionally come around and point out that I was as white as a sheet. My only memory of the post-match is the guy who had a giant inflatable finger on the street opposite the station waving it around and aptly yelling "down! down!"
So why then did I wake up on Saturday morning and briefly decide that I was going to make a surprise appearance at this year's game? It was probably due to being well aware that there was actually fat chance of getting a ticket to their tip of a ground at such short notice due to the reconstruction works. That's what I'm telling myself anyway in an attempt to remove some of the shame and self-loathing at willingly missing a full four quarters of a Victorian game for the first time in years.
It's the first time since 2002 that I've willingly missed a game in this state when I had nothing else to do - before the 2007 season I moved to a non-shiftwork job just to be able to go to every single match, and hasn't that proved to be a sensible move? How much more horror can one fan endure?
It's a good thing that tickets are at a premium due to one end of the ground not existing, because no doubt if I'd thought that I could walk straight in I'd have been in my car at 10am sharp, off to relive all the key moments of 186 live and in person with 20,000 premiership-fed yokels, high on the most ridiculous home winning record in history.
Stuff that, I'm not intending on making a habit of staying away from games no matter how bad it gets but even the 143 point turnaround and extremely brief moments where I thought we might actually get close wasn't worth being cold, wet and crammed shoulder to shoulder with a tractor mechanic from Colac. Maybe next year. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where we're 'too big' to play there? That will help. Any danger we might see Collingwood sent down the highway at some point? No, because everyone will lose a fortune and bugger the fans of clubs who don't have a billion fans.
What I will say for watching on TV was that as long as you clear everybody else out and spend the day inside wearing tracksuit pants and a 2005 era fleecy MFC zip-up jumper you can get a lot done. Rather than standing around on a terrace eating rancid hot dogs at $5 a crack I did my washing at quarter time, vacuumed Demonblog Towers thoroughly during the half-time break and even paused halfway through the third quarter to remove a cake from the oven. None of this domestic goddess work would have been possible if I'd been shivering on a godforsaken slab of concrete 100km away. The two minutes lost during the pause for a cake/oven interface was made up in fast forwarding through endless replays after Geelong goals.
We did relatively well today, and there were even some brief moments of magic from stoppages god help us all, but let's not kid ourselves that Geelong were in anything more than second gear. First we copped the GWS treatment of having Selwood going of 'injured'rested, then they spent the first ten minutes dominating the play around the ground only to ruin it with half-arsed shots at goal.
Eventually they started kicking goals and the rest of the match was just dinky little tricks, fiddly kicks and substituting one of their best players during the third quarter just because while keeping us at a comfortable arms length like an adult cruelly dangling somebody just higher than how high a kid can leap.
Still, you can only play against the team that turns up and just because this year they weren't intent on humping us like a sheepdog it shouldn't detract from an 'improved' performance compared to some of the shite dished out so far this year. There are still some gigantic 0-11 sized question marks over this team but I think broadly we're going in the right direction. Did I say that last week? Or has it been once a week for years. Oh yes, we've been down this road before, so brace for disappointment, shambles and disgrace.
One man I'll not hear a word against during this barren run is one Mitch Clark. What an animal. It's cruel irony that should the next five weeks go as expected, and should he play in each match, that he'll be 0-10 and the owner of an even worse loss/loss record than Jake Spencer (0-8). That'll leave him just six short of the all-time 0-16 record for futility held by some poor bastard called Mal Owens. Surely if can't happen, if we hit Round 18 (including the bye and the game he missed) and he hasn't played in a victory the club will get shut down before he can.
The irony is especially cruel because he's been immense, answering almost every question that was hanging over him when he came to the club. Imagine what our forward line would look like if we hadn't landed him before Jurrah and Green suffered their various misfortunes? Good god we'd be kicking three pity goals a week. Not that we did too badly without him last week but try relying on the Rohan Bail Crumb Club every match and see how far you get.
He cost a fortune and I'm willing to say that considering what he's surrounded by, and where the money would have gone otherwise (a Nigerian bank account probably) he's worth every cent of it so far. Considering that the Stefan Martin Experience has disappeared off the face of the earth and they've finally put the Webjet logo in a white box so it doesn't look shit on the jumper I can see myself going out and getting a #11 in the very near future. Now watch him do nothing for the rest of the year, I've finished a lot of careers with support in my time so let's not hope he's another.
Still, one man does not a decent side make and there's not a lot he could do as we were smashed like a guitar in the first few minutes, saved only by their terrible kicking for goal. What he could do was set up the first goal with the best tap back into play since Petterd (remember him?) to Bate against Richmond in 2010. Then he kicked one of his own and we all collectively swooned as we were left in the ridiculous scenario of being within a goal.
It was very much, as they say, against the run of play. At one point early in the quarter when the ball hadn't even been across half-way a stat flashed up that the "time in forward half" was 98/2 Geelong. Somebody please get the tape out and tell me where the 2% came from - was there a secondary bounce 20cm to the left of your screen? Otherwise it was just typical Channel 7 style making it all up horseshit.
All well and good to stick with them for the first few minutes, but realistically they had spent that whole time battering us and not taking advantage so nobody could have been surprised if they'd run away with it from there. But we stayed respectable, separated only by the obscene lack of run off half back and an amazing ability to concede goals immediately out of the centre after kicking one. When Clark was down there we actually looked, whisper it quietly, dangerous at times. Mainly just because of him though, nobody else was doing much. Certainly not James Sellar who is unfortunately about as good a forward option at the moment as Jamie Shanahan.
Five points down at quarter time was practically living in a glory era compared to what we'd been through down there recently. It was more like that Round 3, 2008 match where everybody expected us to get pulverised and we kicked the first three than 186 when everyone expected us to just get beaten comfortably and we were pulverised. At least you never know (other than the end result) what you're going to get at Kardinia Park.
It couldn't last, and it didn't last - five minutes into the second quarter the prospect of a hefty beating still loomed large. Remember the West Coast game? We were competitive (CLICHE) in the first quarter there as well and still would up coming home with our biggest ever interstate loss. Luckily after the first goal they did the same thing as the first quarter and missed everything they went for, eventually allowing Clark - that magnificent beast - to crumb another one for his third. Have we had a crumber this good since classic era Davey? Problem is he's usually crumbing from his own contests because nobody else can get the bloody ball to hit the deck before it's swept away to the other end of the ground in tidal wave fashion - and when you're relying on guys that size to bring the forward pressure then it's no wonder the ball doesn't stay down there for more than five seconds if he doesn't get it.
Just when you thought we were some semblance of a chance of at least making it interesting we suffered the traditional anti-MFC rorts at the hands of the umpires. First Bartel played up non-existant contact to rob a free kick and goal then Podsiadly got one right on half-time that was so bizarre and confusing that even he didn't appeal for it. The only good thing about it was that it was against Clark who was completely innocent AND demonstrating his ability to play total football from one end to another like a god damned MONSTER.
Shit decisions one and all but at least they didn't pay the one where Morton toe-poked it into the Geelong forward line for a 'mark' which clearly didn't hit the ground as old mate tried to mark it. Though they more than made up for it with the other two pox frees though.
Speaking of Morton I'm suffering a tolerate/not quite hate relationship (about five levels down from love/hate) with him at the moment, it looks like when he's in the clear and can kick it that it usually goes to the right place but when there's any sort of pressure on or he has to handball in traffic it ends in tragedy. We'd might as well keep playing him against the good sides and hope that he can get up some confidence but I can see a knock-down, third round draft pick swap at the end of the year after which he will undoubtedly win a premiership elsewhere. Can we send him to St Kilda or Footscray to ensure 100% that this can't happen?
Getting to half-time relatively unscathed was ridiculous enough, but when Howe kicked the second goal of the third quarter and we were within two straight kicks (CLICHE) it crossed into another dimension entirely. Of course there was never any question that we were going to win it, never before has a side been 11 points behind yet so far away from victory - and just to underline it after that second goal the ball went straight out of the centre in near record time and they kicked a goal. Momentum duly shifted, possession count dried up to almost nil and they boot five to end the quarter. Game over, but barring epic disaster in the last quarter we were at least set to keep it under ten goals.
And god help us all we actually did, despite putting in another rubbish scoring final quarter to score just 1.5. Admittedly there were a couple of unlucky posters in that though, but by now the Geelong players were sleepwalking their way to the siren and the most casual rendition of the theme song in history so it's not like the heat was well and truly on but at least we stopped them from kicking away.
43 points is the closest we've got at Kardinia Park since that R3, 2008 match so interpret that however you like. Surely last year's model would have beaten us more handily, but at least it wasn't towards the end of the season - other than our internal debacles the proverbial 'message' to the rest of the competition is what put us on the path for that epic beatdown.
All in all it was about as good as we could have hoped for. The gulf in class is still ridiculous, and despite the cavalcade of wacky results involving 'top' teams this year I still fail to see how we can win before the GWS game. Even Gold Coast looked good against Freo so any guarantee we had of pocketing four points against them is very much in doubt. It might be better for us if GWS beat Gold Coast next week, because if they run into us 0-11 as well they'll sense a chance and play out of their skins. And may I be the first to say if we're put to the sword by Tom freaking $cully I don't think I'll be able to mentally cope.
These are worrying times that we're living in, but I still have a sense of serenity about it all. I wouldn't call it a firm belief that things will get better, because as history has shown that's no guarantee, but more that no matter what happens this year the sun will still rise and we'll get another shot in 2013. Going 0-22 would be the ultimate humiliation but at least we're not relegated to the Diamond Valley League. You can't do that for too long or you'll end up as Fitzroy Mk. 2 but I reckon we've got a good five years in us before all the old supporters start to drop dead and aren't being replaced by kids - and if we haven't earned some measure of success or developed a superstar by then we probably deserve to pull the shutters down or relocate to Port Moresby.
Still, I reserve the right to act like the 2007 Port Adelaide game and punch the picture of Matthew Elliot in the Ponsford Stand stepwell if we don't beat GWS.
2012 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Mitch Clark
4 - Nathan Jones
3 - James Frawley
2 - Jeremy Howe
1 - Jordie McKenzie
Strugged to fill the last spot. Apologies to Grimes, Garland, McDonald, Jamar (for taps only) and Bartram only because they all could have snuck in for one.
Leaderboard
It seems appropriate at this point to point out that Brock McLean holds the record for the highest score in this competition (yes, that Brock McLean) with 47 in 2006 - and he had two extra matches to do it in. If he keeps going like this, and the pool of quality weekly performers remains paper thin, Jones could have that and the golden half century to follow.
Either that or he could drop off the face of the earth in true Melbourne fashion and not score another vote for the rest of the year. After 51 straight games there's nothing more likely to cause him to suffer a six week injury than leading this award, and I apologise in advance for the broken hand/finger/toe/heart that will inevitably follow in the next few weeks.
22 - Nathan Jones
11 - Jeremy Howe
10 - James Magner (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
9 - Mitch Clark
7 - Matthew Bate
6 - Jordie McKenzie
4 - Jack Trengove
3 - Stefan Martin, Jack Watts, Jared Rivers (CO-LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), James Frawley (CO-LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
2 - Brent Moloney, Tom McDonald
MFC Facebook Comment of the Week
'Internet issues' in Geelong stopped them from doing quarter-by-quarter posts, and that's a big win for fans of this segment because it compacted all the nuttery into one thread. Sadly, though a forensic trawl of the page at 11.05pm reveals that there's nothing special - no David Main Man Wicks, no sign of that guy who wrote the massive complaint letter on a sponsorship announcement, nobody floating a properly insane theory.
Winner by default is the guy who 'humorously' claimed we were 23 years into "Barassi's five year plan" but didn't do the maths and realise that would make it 2004. Good year, could have won the flag in an open field if we hadn't committed hari kari in the last month. Not good enough for me to go to the trouble of taking a screenshot and blanking out his name but the video above is only really relevant this week so I'm pressing on anyway just to use it.
Other than that it's just people text-fellating Mitch Clark (rightly so), calling for Sellar to be put in a boat and cast towards New Zealand (you have a point) and more spelling errors on player names than you can possible imagine. Who are Maloney, Pettard, Trengrove, Clarke and Jarrah? Good thing Brock McClean isn't around anymore. Is it that much to ask for that people might get the players right even if they spelling everything else heinously. Obviously it is.
Commentary Corner
I'd like to pay some measure of apology to Mr. Dwayne Russell, because until today I had you all alone atop the Mt. Olympus of awful commentators but I was clearly wrong. What in the proverbial name of dutch buggery is going on with the Channel 7 b-team? To everyone who cried openly about Kelli Underwood besmirching the allegedly glorious name of footy commentary I give you this duo.
If it doesn't already t make your skin crawl that they call it "Saturday Arvo Footy" then you've got to put up with epic smug git Hamish McLachlan (just the type of guy to Google himself, so hi) running through the same briefing sheet of 'interesting facts' 50 times during the match. Did you know Mitch Brown kicked nine for the Geelong reserves in Bendigo last week? Well you do now. A fine stat, and congratulations to Mitch on his big haul, but once will do us just fine.
Also stay tuned for the halftime show where we talk to Tom Lonergan about his missing kidney and look at the Melbourne VFL players. How could you ignore a request like that when McLachlan flogged it with us six times a quarter? Very easily as it turned out, the moment I saw him casually wandering the Kardinia Park turf with Lonergan I started hoovering and came back just in time for the teams running out for the third quarter.
Then there's the fact that neither McLachlan or the other guy had no idea who half our players were and variously called all of Jamar, Howe and Sellar 'Mitch Clark' (even sometimes Mitch Clark himself). Even Geelong's Mitch Brown got it at one point, but surprisingly he didn't credit Clark with the high rotation nine goals in Bendigo tidbit. They did however call his fourth goal as if it was he who contested for the ball on the goal line AND charged in from 20m to crumb it - totally ignoring the fact that the replay clearly showed Howe in the contest. I know Mitch is the new housewives' favourite but don't just call his name when the ball goes towards our goal just because you think he might be somewhere in the vicinity.
While there's plenty to be said for watching at home the commentary horrors are enough to discourage it. At least when you're at the game live the call is complimentary (just like Matthew Bate) to what you're watching unfold right in front of you, having to watch on TV with these gibbons waffling on is like being trapped in a German U-Boat under the Atlantic Ocean.
The third wheel was Mick Malthouse. He just spent four quarter slagging us off for being shite, but that's exactly what we do as well so good on him. Fourth wheel was Tom Harley who I quite like but is wasted being the boundary rider (now known as 'field commentator' for god's sake) and being expected to chip in with some banter here and there.
I suppose you could work some scam to sync up the radio but it's more fun complaining about it. Not that the radio is up to much either, last week they were claiming a ball had been "smashed into the stands" when it was clearly, and obviously to all, knocked limply into the fence. And there's certain radio callers who can't tell indigenous players apart, back when we had more than one playing.
I'm sure if he could take a minute from editing his own Wikipedia page and retweeting any old crap people ask him to Hamish (or "Hammer" if you're a fan of blokey commentary box circle jerk action) would write in and say "if you think it's so easy I'd like to see you do it". And well he might because if it didn't involve MFC players there'd be no idea and no interest, but the point is not that some random nutbag off the internet would be shite at it - it's that there are so few highly paid professional broadcasters who can go four quarters without making at least ten terrific clangers. Mainly because "highly paid professional broadcaster" is the arsiest job you can ever find yourself falling into. Maybe they should have a TAFE course in sporting commentary?
Still, I'll give it a go if you give me Melbourne as one of the teams and a month to commit the other side to memory so I don't accidentally identify Trent Dennis-Lane as Aung San Suu Kyi.
Next Week
Hawthorn will batter us, there's really no doubt about that. And the good news is the whole country gets to watch it live on Friday night. They're hardly flying at the moment, but neither are Geelong so if we can put in a respectable performance and continue to improve then I'll be happy.
I've given up trying to predict what they're going to do at the selection table. You'd think Watts would be a sure in and Sellar a sure out, but it's hardly a straight swap and we all know from the Petterd Debacle that once you're out you may never be seen again. Given that Casey play one more game next week before two weeks off (bye + state game = farce competition) I wouldn't be surprised if the message to Watts included another week in the twos. Hopefully for his sake Neeld doesn't see the footage of him yucking it up in the stands having the time of his life while we were getting thrashed.
Dunn wasn't terrible when he came on, but he wasn't much good either. Kicks a cracking set shot but he's got to get it first, and unless he's suddenly going to become a Clark-esque contested mark specialist I think we're just plodding along by picking him. Not writing him off forever but it's time for some crop rotation.
I've seen people trying to drop Sylvia, which seems odd to me. He wasn't particularly good but it was his first four quarters in two months so give him a few more weeks to get himself back into the groove before giving him the Watts treatment. Maybe he should have played four quarters in the Reserves last week instead of a half with the seniors, but now that he's in we've got to stick with him for a while at least, he's too important at his (admittedly fleeting) best to mess around with.
Tom Couch was best on ground for Casey, and he's got to be rewarded for form eventually. They might give Magner a week off after being physically beaten up all season. Fitzpatrick kicked four (not sure if serious), as did Watts, and I've got no idea what that says about the quality of the Geelong VFL side but I'd rather see him down there next week than Sellar.
So, fat chance there'll be five changes but if there are:
IN: Fitzpatrick, Watts, Petterd, Couch, Bennell
OUT: Sellar, Dunn, Tapscott, Bail, Magner
I'd rather keep Bail, but somebody's going to have to go out for my weekly Free Ricky Petterd segment so bad luck Rohan. The SME also unlikely to come straight back, especially if they're keen to give Fitzpatrick another run. One more shot for Bennell due to being in the Casey bests two weeks a row and then I'm out permanently and if he's no good this time I'll never call for his inclusion ever again.
We won't be seeing Jordan Gysberts for a while, victim of a broken jaw in the VFL match. Between persistent back injuries in his first year, a broken wrist late last year, crocked ankle pre-season and now this I'm officially adding him to the list of players with substantial black clouds hanging over their heads.
Then there was Jack Viney who by all accounts copped a cracker of a cheap-shot from David Wojcinski and went down with a broken jaw of his own. Would be good if we could rack up a few triple premiership players who can spent the twilight of their years sniping kids in 10.40am matches.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to the great iconic numbers of MFC history I'm confident 43 will still be best known for Guy Rigoni's contribution. Unlike 186 which will deservedly never be forgotten.
I'm still not sure how I managed to stay the full four quarters that day, but the work colleague who randomly ran into me at the train station that day likes to occassionally come around and point out that I was as white as a sheet. My only memory of the post-match is the guy who had a giant inflatable finger on the street opposite the station waving it around and aptly yelling "down! down!"
So why then did I wake up on Saturday morning and briefly decide that I was going to make a surprise appearance at this year's game? It was probably due to being well aware that there was actually fat chance of getting a ticket to their tip of a ground at such short notice due to the reconstruction works. That's what I'm telling myself anyway in an attempt to remove some of the shame and self-loathing at willingly missing a full four quarters of a Victorian game for the first time in years.
It's the first time since 2002 that I've willingly missed a game in this state when I had nothing else to do - before the 2007 season I moved to a non-shiftwork job just to be able to go to every single match, and hasn't that proved to be a sensible move? How much more horror can one fan endure?
It's a good thing that tickets are at a premium due to one end of the ground not existing, because no doubt if I'd thought that I could walk straight in I'd have been in my car at 10am sharp, off to relive all the key moments of 186 live and in person with 20,000 premiership-fed yokels, high on the most ridiculous home winning record in history.
Stuff that, I'm not intending on making a habit of staying away from games no matter how bad it gets but even the 143 point turnaround and extremely brief moments where I thought we might actually get close wasn't worth being cold, wet and crammed shoulder to shoulder with a tractor mechanic from Colac. Maybe next year. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where we're 'too big' to play there? That will help. Any danger we might see Collingwood sent down the highway at some point? No, because everyone will lose a fortune and bugger the fans of clubs who don't have a billion fans.
What I will say for watching on TV was that as long as you clear everybody else out and spend the day inside wearing tracksuit pants and a 2005 era fleecy MFC zip-up jumper you can get a lot done. Rather than standing around on a terrace eating rancid hot dogs at $5 a crack I did my washing at quarter time, vacuumed Demonblog Towers thoroughly during the half-time break and even paused halfway through the third quarter to remove a cake from the oven. None of this domestic goddess work would have been possible if I'd been shivering on a godforsaken slab of concrete 100km away. The two minutes lost during the pause for a cake/oven interface was made up in fast forwarding through endless replays after Geelong goals.
We did relatively well today, and there were even some brief moments of magic from stoppages god help us all, but let's not kid ourselves that Geelong were in anything more than second gear. First we copped the GWS treatment of having Selwood going of 'injured'
Eventually they started kicking goals and the rest of the match was just dinky little tricks, fiddly kicks and substituting one of their best players during the third quarter just because while keeping us at a comfortable arms length like an adult cruelly dangling somebody just higher than how high a kid can leap.
Still, you can only play against the team that turns up and just because this year they weren't intent on humping us like a sheepdog it shouldn't detract from an 'improved' performance compared to some of the shite dished out so far this year. There are still some gigantic 0-11 sized question marks over this team but I think broadly we're going in the right direction. Did I say that last week? Or has it been once a week for years. Oh yes, we've been down this road before, so brace for disappointment, shambles and disgrace.
One man I'll not hear a word against during this barren run is one Mitch Clark. What an animal. It's cruel irony that should the next five weeks go as expected, and should he play in each match, that he'll be 0-10 and the owner of an even worse loss/loss record than Jake Spencer (0-8). That'll leave him just six short of the all-time 0-16 record for futility held by some poor bastard called Mal Owens. Surely if can't happen, if we hit Round 18 (including the bye and the game he missed) and he hasn't played in a victory the club will get shut down before he can.
The irony is especially cruel because he's been immense, answering almost every question that was hanging over him when he came to the club. Imagine what our forward line would look like if we hadn't landed him before Jurrah and Green suffered their various misfortunes? Good god we'd be kicking three pity goals a week. Not that we did too badly without him last week but try relying on the Rohan Bail Crumb Club every match and see how far you get.
He cost a fortune and I'm willing to say that considering what he's surrounded by, and where the money would have gone otherwise (a Nigerian bank account probably) he's worth every cent of it so far. Considering that the Stefan Martin Experience has disappeared off the face of the earth and they've finally put the Webjet logo in a white box so it doesn't look shit on the jumper I can see myself going out and getting a #11 in the very near future. Now watch him do nothing for the rest of the year, I've finished a lot of careers with support in my time so let's not hope he's another.
Still, one man does not a decent side make and there's not a lot he could do as we were smashed like a guitar in the first few minutes, saved only by their terrible kicking for goal. What he could do was set up the first goal with the best tap back into play since Petterd (remember him?) to Bate against Richmond in 2010. Then he kicked one of his own and we all collectively swooned as we were left in the ridiculous scenario of being within a goal.
It was very much, as they say, against the run of play. At one point early in the quarter when the ball hadn't even been across half-way a stat flashed up that the "time in forward half" was 98/2 Geelong. Somebody please get the tape out and tell me where the 2% came from - was there a secondary bounce 20cm to the left of your screen? Otherwise it was just typical Channel 7 style making it all up horseshit.
All well and good to stick with them for the first few minutes, but realistically they had spent that whole time battering us and not taking advantage so nobody could have been surprised if they'd run away with it from there. But we stayed respectable, separated only by the obscene lack of run off half back and an amazing ability to concede goals immediately out of the centre after kicking one. When Clark was down there we actually looked, whisper it quietly, dangerous at times. Mainly just because of him though, nobody else was doing much. Certainly not James Sellar who is unfortunately about as good a forward option at the moment as Jamie Shanahan.
Five points down at quarter time was practically living in a glory era compared to what we'd been through down there recently. It was more like that Round 3, 2008 match where everybody expected us to get pulverised and we kicked the first three than 186 when everyone expected us to just get beaten comfortably and we were pulverised. At least you never know (other than the end result) what you're going to get at Kardinia Park.
It couldn't last, and it didn't last - five minutes into the second quarter the prospect of a hefty beating still loomed large. Remember the West Coast game? We were competitive (CLICHE) in the first quarter there as well and still would up coming home with our biggest ever interstate loss. Luckily after the first goal they did the same thing as the first quarter and missed everything they went for, eventually allowing Clark - that magnificent beast - to crumb another one for his third. Have we had a crumber this good since classic era Davey? Problem is he's usually crumbing from his own contests because nobody else can get the bloody ball to hit the deck before it's swept away to the other end of the ground in tidal wave fashion - and when you're relying on guys that size to bring the forward pressure then it's no wonder the ball doesn't stay down there for more than five seconds if he doesn't get it.
Just when you thought we were some semblance of a chance of at least making it interesting we suffered the traditional anti-MFC rorts at the hands of the umpires. First Bartel played up non-existant contact to rob a free kick and goal then Podsiadly got one right on half-time that was so bizarre and confusing that even he didn't appeal for it. The only good thing about it was that it was against Clark who was completely innocent AND demonstrating his ability to play total football from one end to another like a god damned MONSTER.
Shit decisions one and all but at least they didn't pay the one where Morton toe-poked it into the Geelong forward line for a 'mark' which clearly didn't hit the ground as old mate tried to mark it. Though they more than made up for it with the other two pox frees though.
Speaking of Morton I'm suffering a tolerate/not quite hate relationship (about five levels down from love/hate) with him at the moment, it looks like when he's in the clear and can kick it that it usually goes to the right place but when there's any sort of pressure on or he has to handball in traffic it ends in tragedy. We'd might as well keep playing him against the good sides and hope that he can get up some confidence but I can see a knock-down, third round draft pick swap at the end of the year after which he will undoubtedly win a premiership elsewhere. Can we send him to St Kilda or Footscray to ensure 100% that this can't happen?
Getting to half-time relatively unscathed was ridiculous enough, but when Howe kicked the second goal of the third quarter and we were within two straight kicks (CLICHE) it crossed into another dimension entirely. Of course there was never any question that we were going to win it, never before has a side been 11 points behind yet so far away from victory - and just to underline it after that second goal the ball went straight out of the centre in near record time and they kicked a goal. Momentum duly shifted, possession count dried up to almost nil and they boot five to end the quarter. Game over, but barring epic disaster in the last quarter we were at least set to keep it under ten goals.
And god help us all we actually did, despite putting in another rubbish scoring final quarter to score just 1.5. Admittedly there were a couple of unlucky posters in that though, but by now the Geelong players were sleepwalking their way to the siren and the most casual rendition of the theme song in history so it's not like the heat was well and truly on but at least we stopped them from kicking away.
43 points is the closest we've got at Kardinia Park since that R3, 2008 match so interpret that however you like. Surely last year's model would have beaten us more handily, but at least it wasn't towards the end of the season - other than our internal debacles the proverbial 'message' to the rest of the competition is what put us on the path for that epic beatdown.
All in all it was about as good as we could have hoped for. The gulf in class is still ridiculous, and despite the cavalcade of wacky results involving 'top' teams this year I still fail to see how we can win before the GWS game. Even Gold Coast looked good against Freo so any guarantee we had of pocketing four points against them is very much in doubt. It might be better for us if GWS beat Gold Coast next week, because if they run into us 0-11 as well they'll sense a chance and play out of their skins. And may I be the first to say if we're put to the sword by Tom freaking $cully I don't think I'll be able to mentally cope.
These are worrying times that we're living in, but I still have a sense of serenity about it all. I wouldn't call it a firm belief that things will get better, because as history has shown that's no guarantee, but more that no matter what happens this year the sun will still rise and we'll get another shot in 2013. Going 0-22 would be the ultimate humiliation but at least we're not relegated to the Diamond Valley League. You can't do that for too long or you'll end up as Fitzroy Mk. 2 but I reckon we've got a good five years in us before all the old supporters start to drop dead and aren't being replaced by kids - and if we haven't earned some measure of success or developed a superstar by then we probably deserve to pull the shutters down or relocate to Port Moresby.
Still, I reserve the right to act like the 2007 Port Adelaide game and punch the picture of Matthew Elliot in the Ponsford Stand stepwell if we don't beat GWS.
2012 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Mitch Clark
4 - Nathan Jones
3 - James Frawley
2 - Jeremy Howe
1 - Jordie McKenzie
Strugged to fill the last spot. Apologies to Grimes, Garland, McDonald, Jamar (for taps only) and Bartram only because they all could have snuck in for one.
Leaderboard
It seems appropriate at this point to point out that Brock McLean holds the record for the highest score in this competition (yes, that Brock McLean) with 47 in 2006 - and he had two extra matches to do it in. If he keeps going like this, and the pool of quality weekly performers remains paper thin, Jones could have that and the golden half century to follow.
Either that or he could drop off the face of the earth in true Melbourne fashion and not score another vote for the rest of the year. After 51 straight games there's nothing more likely to cause him to suffer a six week injury than leading this award, and I apologise in advance for the broken hand/finger/toe/heart that will inevitably follow in the next few weeks.
22 - Nathan Jones
11 - Jeremy Howe
10 - James Magner (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
9 - Mitch Clark
7 - Matthew Bate
6 - Jordie McKenzie
4 - Jack Trengove
3 - Stefan Martin, Jack Watts, Jared Rivers (CO-LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), James Frawley (CO-LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
2 - Brent Moloney, Tom McDonald
MFC Facebook Comment of the Week
'Internet issues' in Geelong stopped them from doing quarter-by-quarter posts, and that's a big win for fans of this segment because it compacted all the nuttery into one thread. Sadly, though a forensic trawl of the page at 11.05pm reveals that there's nothing special - no David Main Man Wicks, no sign of that guy who wrote the massive complaint letter on a sponsorship announcement, nobody floating a properly insane theory.
Winner by default is the guy who 'humorously' claimed we were 23 years into "Barassi's five year plan" but didn't do the maths and realise that would make it 2004. Good year, could have won the flag in an open field if we hadn't committed hari kari in the last month. Not good enough for me to go to the trouble of taking a screenshot and blanking out his name but the video above is only really relevant this week so I'm pressing on anyway just to use it.
Other than that it's just people text-fellating Mitch Clark (rightly so), calling for Sellar to be put in a boat and cast towards New Zealand (you have a point) and more spelling errors on player names than you can possible imagine. Who are Maloney, Pettard, Trengrove, Clarke and Jarrah? Good thing Brock McClean isn't around anymore. Is it that much to ask for that people might get the players right even if they spelling everything else heinously. Obviously it is.
Commentary Corner
I'd like to pay some measure of apology to Mr. Dwayne Russell, because until today I had you all alone atop the Mt. Olympus of awful commentators but I was clearly wrong. What in the proverbial name of dutch buggery is going on with the Channel 7 b-team? To everyone who cried openly about Kelli Underwood besmirching the allegedly glorious name of footy commentary I give you this duo.
If it doesn't already t make your skin crawl that they call it "Saturday Arvo Footy" then you've got to put up with epic smug git Hamish McLachlan (just the type of guy to Google himself, so hi) running through the same briefing sheet of 'interesting facts' 50 times during the match. Did you know Mitch Brown kicked nine for the Geelong reserves in Bendigo last week? Well you do now. A fine stat, and congratulations to Mitch on his big haul, but once will do us just fine.
Also stay tuned for the halftime show where we talk to Tom Lonergan about his missing kidney and look at the Melbourne VFL players. How could you ignore a request like that when McLachlan flogged it with us six times a quarter? Very easily as it turned out, the moment I saw him casually wandering the Kardinia Park turf with Lonergan I started hoovering and came back just in time for the teams running out for the third quarter.
Then there's the fact that neither McLachlan or the other guy had no idea who half our players were and variously called all of Jamar, Howe and Sellar 'Mitch Clark' (even sometimes Mitch Clark himself). Even Geelong's Mitch Brown got it at one point, but surprisingly he didn't credit Clark with the high rotation nine goals in Bendigo tidbit. They did however call his fourth goal as if it was he who contested for the ball on the goal line AND charged in from 20m to crumb it - totally ignoring the fact that the replay clearly showed Howe in the contest. I know Mitch is the new housewives' favourite but don't just call his name when the ball goes towards our goal just because you think he might be somewhere in the vicinity.
While there's plenty to be said for watching at home the commentary horrors are enough to discourage it. At least when you're at the game live the call is complimentary (just like Matthew Bate) to what you're watching unfold right in front of you, having to watch on TV with these gibbons waffling on is like being trapped in a German U-Boat under the Atlantic Ocean.
The third wheel was Mick Malthouse. He just spent four quarter slagging us off for being shite, but that's exactly what we do as well so good on him. Fourth wheel was Tom Harley who I quite like but is wasted being the boundary rider (now known as 'field commentator' for god's sake) and being expected to chip in with some banter here and there.
I suppose you could work some scam to sync up the radio but it's more fun complaining about it. Not that the radio is up to much either, last week they were claiming a ball had been "smashed into the stands" when it was clearly, and obviously to all, knocked limply into the fence. And there's certain radio callers who can't tell indigenous players apart, back when we had more than one playing.
I'm sure if he could take a minute from editing his own Wikipedia page and retweeting any old crap people ask him to Hamish (or "Hammer" if you're a fan of blokey commentary box circle jerk action) would write in and say "if you think it's so easy I'd like to see you do it". And well he might because if it didn't involve MFC players there'd be no idea and no interest, but the point is not that some random nutbag off the internet would be shite at it - it's that there are so few highly paid professional broadcasters who can go four quarters without making at least ten terrific clangers. Mainly because "highly paid professional broadcaster" is the arsiest job you can ever find yourself falling into. Maybe they should have a TAFE course in sporting commentary?
Still, I'll give it a go if you give me Melbourne as one of the teams and a month to commit the other side to memory so I don't accidentally identify Trent Dennis-Lane as Aung San Suu Kyi.
Next Week
Hawthorn will batter us, there's really no doubt about that. And the good news is the whole country gets to watch it live on Friday night. They're hardly flying at the moment, but neither are Geelong so if we can put in a respectable performance and continue to improve then I'll be happy.
I've given up trying to predict what they're going to do at the selection table. You'd think Watts would be a sure in and Sellar a sure out, but it's hardly a straight swap and we all know from the Petterd Debacle that once you're out you may never be seen again. Given that Casey play one more game next week before two weeks off (bye + state game = farce competition) I wouldn't be surprised if the message to Watts included another week in the twos. Hopefully for his sake Neeld doesn't see the footage of him yucking it up in the stands having the time of his life while we were getting thrashed.
Dunn wasn't terrible when he came on, but he wasn't much good either. Kicks a cracking set shot but he's got to get it first, and unless he's suddenly going to become a Clark-esque contested mark specialist I think we're just plodding along by picking him. Not writing him off forever but it's time for some crop rotation.
I've seen people trying to drop Sylvia, which seems odd to me. He wasn't particularly good but it was his first four quarters in two months so give him a few more weeks to get himself back into the groove before giving him the Watts treatment. Maybe he should have played four quarters in the Reserves last week instead of a half with the seniors, but now that he's in we've got to stick with him for a while at least, he's too important at his (admittedly fleeting) best to mess around with.
Tom Couch was best on ground for Casey, and he's got to be rewarded for form eventually. They might give Magner a week off after being physically beaten up all season. Fitzpatrick kicked four (not sure if serious), as did Watts, and I've got no idea what that says about the quality of the Geelong VFL side but I'd rather see him down there next week than Sellar.
So, fat chance there'll be five changes but if there are:
IN: Fitzpatrick, Watts, Petterd, Couch, Bennell
OUT: Sellar, Dunn, Tapscott, Bail, Magner
I'd rather keep Bail, but somebody's going to have to go out for my weekly Free Ricky Petterd segment so bad luck Rohan. The SME also unlikely to come straight back, especially if they're keen to give Fitzpatrick another run. One more shot for Bennell due to being in the Casey bests two weeks a row and then I'm out permanently and if he's no good this time I'll never call for his inclusion ever again.
We won't be seeing Jordan Gysberts for a while, victim of a broken jaw in the VFL match. Between persistent back injuries in his first year, a broken wrist late last year, crocked ankle pre-season and now this I'm officially adding him to the list of players with substantial black clouds hanging over their heads.
Then there was Jack Viney who by all accounts copped a cracker of a cheap-shot from David Wojcinski and went down with a broken jaw of his own. Would be good if we could rack up a few triple premiership players who can spent the twilight of their years sniping kids in 10.40am matches.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to the great iconic numbers of MFC history I'm confident 43 will still be best known for Guy Rigoni's contribution. Unlike 186 which will deservedly never be forgotten.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
The tide hastens for no man
The epic shambles that is New Blogger is rearing its ugly head again. Any bizarre design/font quirks in the following are entirely their fault.
As Eric Clapton once said, presumably in the midst of one of his epic benders, it's in the way that you use it. Then he spun around a couple of times and collapsed to the floor a'la Matthew Newton. Allegedly.
Chances are that he was talking about a woman or a guitar but it was 1986, so maybe he was referring to the Melbourne Football Club and their award winning finals drought born of wilful and malicious heinous use of the ball. You know that year we managed the spectacular feat of being tonked by over a hundred points three times in just two months. But in a dramatic, un-MFC like twist the story has a happy ending a year later when we make the finals (then there's the regulation tragic ending, but a happy ending first).
We've got until Round 9 to rack up the two more fiascos required to match the dirty deeds of the 1986 squad, and about a year and half to recover it a'la '87. Even after tonight's game I know which one I'd be offering better odds on if I were Jamie Rogers from TAB Sportsbet.
God knows what depths the 80's version of Demonblog would have sunk to after that eight week period of death and destruction. Thankfully for one I was five years old, and secondly anybody half interested in providing their views about footy online would have had to use one of those ridiculous WarGames style 300baud modems plugged into a rotary dialing phone to post on a BBS. In short, nobody was talking footy online so god knows how those of you who survived that era did it without intensive psychotheraphy and experimental medications (both legal and otherwise), because if I didn't have this outlet to come on and let it all out I'd be up all night howling obscenities at the moon.
Thinking about what happened 26 years ago and trying to draw a parallel between that team and today's is the first sign of madness but that's the position I find myself in these days. What else am I supposed to do, sit around all week pondering the post 2006 era? It's got to the point where I could sit down confidentally on Thursday and write an accurate (as accurate as you get on here anyway) summation of our shambolic performance and simply plug in the votes whilst trudging grimly down Brunton Avenue. But where's the fun in that? And I will admit that most of my waking hours are still dedicated to considering the ups and downs of the post-Daniher era. Melbourne FC owes me hours upon hours of psychological consultations.
At least we were treated to something different this week, the presumptive poleaxing replaced with a grinding loss where we were still a chance 15 minutes into the last quarter. Cancel that post about leaping off the top deck of the Olympic Stand and replace it with one with platitudes galore about honourable losses. Actually, cancel that post as well because honourable losses can get stuffed. We did better than expected but that's no consolation in the grand scheme of being 0-5 and above just two teams full of kids and men press-ganged from the SANFL to try and keep their clubs afloat until the draft picks pay off. We are still looking at a 16th place finish this year, and even though that's less shameful than it was last time we finished there I still don't want it - and I don't care what benefits we can get from ending up there.
It didn't hurt us that the conditions were absolute rubbish because there's nothing like dragging a better side down to your level. I remember when we were good and it happened to us all the time. Unfortunately more often than not it happened when the conditions were absolutely perfect. We're hardly wet weather specialists in the Mark McGough mould but at least it slowed St Kilda down a bit tonight. Still, when you go into the last quarter having battled back to being just three points behind and then fail to score in a fourth term for the first time since Brian Stynes' last game then you deserve exactly what you get - zero points.
Forget 'honour' for a second (we are not samurais) and let me do some serious whinging. With all due respect to children who may be reading who does Ricky Petterd have to pork to get a game around here? Ok, so he wasn't in the best for Casey two weeks ago (pre-VFL bye) but who was in a team that got tonked by 70 points? He wasn't much chop against the Eagles either, in a team that got tonked by 108 points, but you would have thought that maybe in a week where Mitch Clark is recuperating from almost breaking his neck that it might have been a good time to take a chance on playing another forward with some aerial ability. Nah.
There's this belief that he and Dunn can't be picked in the same side, which is fine if you have Clark there. And Green. And Jurrah. But we didn't have Clark, Green or Jurrah - and Dunn is not a week in, week out goalkicking option. I'm pleased they didn't sacrifice Jeremy Howe's ability to be one of the few who can take a decent mark around the ground to permanently play him forward, but there's a reason why for the first time in god knows how long a substantial amount of our scoring came from CRUMB. But it's no good swinging wildly from one to the other, we need both.
Sellar did nothing up front, and whatever Dunn did it was probably some defensive masterstroke that I'll get panned for not noticing. Not much else on offer until he finally took a mark, kicked a goal and was immediately subbed. Obviously they'd already filed the paperwork to get rid of him before the mark/goal, because unless there's something I missed his only offensive contribution was his facial hair.
Explain to me then how Petterd's not worthy of a game? Give me the answer I want to hear and I won't bore you with my theories on Martin vs Sellar - this week. Consider the following comments in the context of my overall support for Team Neeld and willingness to suspend disbelief and go along with their plans for a couple of years but by christ some of their selections shit me to tears.
I don't want to hear about how we couldn't pick Petterd or Stef Martin because the VFL had a bye last week in the same week that Sylvia comes back after not playing a game for six weeks. It's a bollocks excuse. Also the presence of Joel Macdonald still confuses me - clearly we're not playing for a premiership this season (oh really?), and there's no chance he'll be there next year so how about a decent run for Tapscott?
Not that any journos have the slightest interest in the Dees but wouldn't you like somebody to ask these questions? "So, Mark many fans would have expected Ricky Petterd to play more than one game so far this season. Any reason he didn't get a run?" Instead the leadup to the game is dominated by a fictional Watts vs Riewoldt matchup which was as likely to occur as Sugar Ray Robinson vs Esme Watson. If any footy journos are reading I'll be happy to sneak you some cheat sheets that you use to ask questions at press conferences as if you actually know who plays for us.
At the risk of winding up like a pointless, single issue political party I reserve the right to spend significant amounts of space on here on the Justice For Ricky campaign, even if it ends with me having an ASIO file. You can have your Australian Sex Party, I'll be drawing my own square on the ballot paper and writing FREE RICKY PETTERD. In blood.
When it was announced that Frawley had injured himself and was going to be withdrawn there was a moment of hope amongst Petterd fanciers that the great man could win a recall from the emergencies. He didn't, and if he goes out and does his knee in the VFL tomorrow I'll chuck a boulder through the window of the Demon Shop.
Given about five hours to digest the news that our only good player was out before they announced that Tapscott was going to be his replacement, there was plenty of time to wonder how many digits our losing margin was going to include but also to ponder a classic, internet generated rumour that Mitch Clark was going to do a Hulk Hogan style crowd-pleasing entrance despite not even being named in the emergencies. Pre-match I said why waste money on the fine, save him for the Kardinia Park abortion instead. Once we got close I started to wish they'd frivolously wasted Opel's money and picked him.
Not that I know if he's even remotely fit. He might be in Zurich seeing the same team of doctors who did the revolutionary spinal fusion surgery on Sylvia which allowed him to appear tonight. He might also have done nothing when the rains came, but at least he would have gone around being angry at everyone and damaging inanimate objects.
Without Frawley and Clark you could have been forgiven for expecting that it was going to end in tragedy, but this is a St Kilda team who will be lucky to fall into the eight and who had plenty of good players down on their luck. Naturally the likes of Goddard, Gilbert etc.. decided to turn up when the match was in the balance, but in every aspect other than scoring in the fourth quarter it was easily our best performance of the season. Not a difficult podium to end up on.
How much of it was improvement, and how much of it was down to the weather? Well the good news is we looked like a proper league side even before it started pelting down sideways. If we'd gotten our spanking in Geelong out of the way in Round 1 and were scheduled to play Brisbane next week you'd be far more confident of beating them now than you were last Sunday night. But we didn't win, and now the toughest campaign since the Siege of Leningrad leaves 0-11 as a distinct possibility.
Still, at least we managed to hold some good players. Jordie McKenzie's performance on Brendan Goddard was probably my highlight of the season so far. Not since Ben Holland spent the whole day holding Anthony Rocca by the arm in 2007 have any of our players done such a cynical and successful job of following an opposition player around, committing illegal acts against his person and (mostly) getting away with it. Absolutely thrashed him, and the only time Goddard got anywhere near it was when he rorted the umpire into paying a free against him and then kicked it straight into Jordie's smother anyway.
You could understand that matchup working, but far more troubling on paper was Tom McDonald vs Riewoldt. Happily, other than a couple of dinky kicks and one occassion where he completely lost his opponent, Tom Mc was solid. I was going to come on here and say that everything was fine except when he was actually disposing of the ball but it turns out he had a team leading 89% disposal efficiency, so there you go. Not sure if he's really first choice when Frawley is fit again BUT considering other than last week's rotten performance he's been pretty good this year he could free up Chip to do... something else. God knows what. Where does this leave Demonblog's Own Troy Davis? Is he destined to take the Andre Gianfagna route of being seen in one pre-season campaign before disappearing into the VFL? Surely once the unofficial tank is rolled out later this year everyone half fit is going to get a game. Maybe even Lucas Cook if you're lucky.
Also straight from the shock result file was Morton's best performance since at least 2010. I saw him lay tackles, I saw him going for a hard ball, I witnessed in person him putting his body on the line. Ok so his disposal wasn't exactly top shelf but at least it's a step forward and you've got to be happy with that at least. Not if you're the first guy on talkback radio tonight who did that cliched Melbourne supporter call and whinged about how terrible Morton was. Obviously the bloke couldn't get through last week, because it was well unfair to complain about him tonight. He'll probably put in a landfill performance next week, but then again so will everybody so if you're going to do some classic Finey's Final Siren work at least come up with an original angle.
There were a lot of things to love about tonight. It's just such a shame that it ended so limply and we eventually waved the white flag without much of a fight after more than matching them most of the night. I loved Matthew Bate's first quarter, especially getting rid of his opponent in the square for the second goal. I loved winning the tackle count for once. I loved the fact that Sylvia has had a decent run (though it took them long enough to get him on) and will start next week, but what I loved most of all was Clint Bartram's goal in the third quarter.
It's not the goal itself that was most loveable, though it was nice that he got one in his 100th game and all that, it was the celebrations afterwards. I'll have to see a replay but I'm fairly sure that after he slotted it Jeremy Howe went about 20cm from being knocked out cold by his swinging fist pump celebration. He ducked his head in just as Clint was swinging the fist, and thankfully for our sake but unfortunately for blooper tape compilations around the world Jeremy didn't quite nuzzle in far enough and we were spared the most comical injury in sporting history.
It helped us that there were about 2000 bounces because of the weather, but Jamar's domination of the bounces was also something to love. Sometimes the taps even went to our players, and on more than one occassion Moloney reignited the late, great Psychic Friends Connection and found himself perfectly at the drop of the ball. His performance fell just one short of the most hitouts in a match of the modern era - losing to Will Minson of all people. After being decidedly average throughout the first month of the year it was a welcome return to form.
We won the clearances too on the back of Jamar's domination, and other than one or two occassions where the Saints went straight out of the middle and had scoring shots it was a vast improvement on everything else served up so far this season. Now to work on moving the ball around the rest of the ground and coming out of defence confidently. There were a few nice moments tonight, just like there were last week, but there were also still some shambolic scenes - including hasty, failed play-ons. At least they went inside occassionally this week instead of going down the boundary line every single time no matter what.
What was decidedly unloveable was the fact that with Riewoldt fairly well held we were being put to the sword to the tune of three goals by Beau Wilkes. This was a man who had one goal in 24 matches before tonight, looks like he was dragged out of a pub and put in a footy jumper and who is named Beau yet somehow tonight was a Gary Ablett Sr-esque world beating aerialist. Odds are that he will never kick another goal again let alone three, but why not save your best performance for when you play against us, it's the Australian way. Thankfully even Scott Watters knew not to push his luck too far and subbed him in order to bring on the poor man's Cale Morton, Dean Polo who might have done something but it wasn't taking big grabs and kicking goals.
Despite throwing away the early two goal lead it was a most encouraging opening term. Had the Saints not fluked one from a speculative ball-thrown-at-boot + bugger of a bounce, and one from a free right at the end we'd have been in an even better position. Jones played an absolutely immense quarter and got two goals to cap it off. We were so competitive that Dean Bailey would have blown an O Ring about it if he'd still been around. Nobody had a great deal of interest in going near Nick Dal Santo to be fair, but the rest of them were being well stitched up. All that stopped us from going in with a decent lead was luck, shit umpiring and a lack of class.
Ok, but we've played good first quarters before then delivered a steaming pile of sewerage straight after - so why should tonight have been any different? Surprisingly most of the second term was legitimately fun - it almost reminded me of the reason I used to enjoy watching footy, until the goose on the radio reminded me that we haven't beaten them since the 2006 final and Melbourne Supporter Depression Syndrome kicked in again.
Howe robbed Jones out of a goal assist by missing a sitter but it was another brilliant set-up to give him the shot in the first place. Watts got the comedy goal after the fresh air handball by the Saints defence, then suddenly Rohan Bail decided he'd crumb like a maniac and kicked two to put us ten points in front. Couldn't last, didn't last but like last week's third quarter it at least gave the crowd something to get briefly excited about.
Normal service appeared to be on the verge of resuming when they got the first goal 30 seconds into the third quarter, and we spent the next ten minutes on the ropes trying desperately not to get blown out of the game. Beau Wilkes mania briefly swept the MCG before he was subbed, but after he was (and I'm not suggesting it had anything to do with him going off) we turned the tables on them and kept it in our forward line for the rest of the quarter. Dunn and Bartram got the goals, we were back within a kick and people were bursting out into applause all over the ground despite the fact that we actually lost the quarter by a point. Desperate times call for desperate measures..
Congratulations during the third quarter to James Magner who has now passed Jared Rivers and Brent Moloney on the list of MOST INJURED MFC PLAYERS. He's got Petterd and Grimes in his sights now. First he "suffered an injury from a clash with Leigh Montagna" (i.e was practically eye gouged, accidentally or not) then he did his ankle. He returned after being pumped full of china white in the change rooms, but it won't be long until he'll be hobbling off again. Which is good, because clearly the reason he's being ripped to pieces every week is because he's always violently struggling to win the ball - and while we could do with some classy midfielders amongst all the grunt at least you know the grunters will always have a pop.
Also I think we were supposed to congratulate Steven Milne for doing something, but I couldn't hear what it was over the thousands of people abusing him for being an utterly shit bloke. Would love a clone in our team, but one not forever tainted by a high profile criminal investigation. Tonight the closest we had was Rohan Bail, and as much as I'd like to apologise to Rohan for trying to drop him a fortnight ago if he's our crumbing option then we're buggered for years to come.
After all that wasted applause at three-quarter time the last quarter was painful. Davey could have put us back in front but kicked it straight up in the air, and the only other times we went forward the ball was kicked to packs and evacuated hastily straight down the other end.
Defensively we held up well under siege, even Joel Mac appearing surprisingly useful at times, but if we weren't going to score eventually they would and after a couple of misses finally kicked what would ultimately be the sealer via Lenny Hayes taking the piss out of our entire team and walking around them for the goal. If we'd had any chance of scoring we could have still pinched it from there, but it wasn't to be - and what should have been remembered as a decent performance against an ok side is instead a missed opportunity and a statistical anomaly on the road to six weeks of poleaxings.
Rules Committee Corner
Dropping the ball does not exist anymore, and to get pinched for incorrect disposal you've practically got to stand in front of one of the umpires and spike the ball into the turf like an NFL player.
Also, ruck free kicks. Nobody knows what's going on, and surely nobody gives a shit what happens when the ruckmen are duelling unless one of them is manhandled completely out of the contest and thrown skidding towards the boundary line fence.
Finally the video review system covered itself in glory tonight. Two blatantly obvious decisions where we were forced to wait because the goal umpire and field umpire couldn't do what goal umpires and field umpires have been doing for 100+ years and make a decision. Proof at last that they've been guessing all that time, but they must have been guessing right the vast majority of the time, because other than a handful of debacles and that absolute howler in the '09 Grand Final it's not like the TV era has been a non-stop cavalcade of goal umpire mistakes.
Luckily the two they had to adjudicate on tonight were so blatantly obvious there was no question of the replay, like the one in the Gold Coast vs North game where they couldn't for the life of them tell if the ball had hit the post - and no bloody wonder either considering the only technology they've got at their fingertips is a camera. I'm sure they'll eventually get to snickometers, hot spots and all that rubbish in goalposts but it's no surprise the technology is crap considering the league decided to introduce the rule 15 minutes before the season started.
2012 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Nathan Jones
4 - Jordie McKenzie
3 - Mark Jamar
2 - Matthew Bate
1 - Tom McDonald
Apologies to (in order) Rivers, Grimes, Moloney, Morton, Magner, Howe, Bail and Garland. Some others not bad, but not getting votes.
Leaderboard
Every possible chance of a runaway victory here. Good luck catching Jones if he keeps going like he is at the moment, especially over the next few weeks when effort and struggle in defeat will .
Also congratulations to Jamar for all but sewing up his third Ruckman of the Year award after losing to Stef Martin (remember him?) last season.
18 - Nathan Jones
10 - James Magner (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
9 - Jeremy Howe
7 - Matthew Bate
5 - Jordie McKenzie
4 - Mitch Clark, Jack Trengove
3 - Stefan Martin, Jack Watts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
2 - Brent Moloney, Tom McDonald
MFC Facebook Comment of the Week
Hard to actually get to the comments from our fans in the midst of a bunch of St Kilda supporters sooking that Milne was booed. Even when I did it was hard to find quality amongst all the positivity about how we're back to being the next big thing.
But what I did enjoy was this one, a classic case of it being somebody else's fault when you can't stay away from a computer long enough to properly enforce a media ban or are too cheap to shell out for Foxtel.
Also considering they've been doing quarter-by-quarter updates every week for a year maybe you should have considered that before opening up Facebook to do some loling and poking you plonker.
Stat My Bitch Up
It's unlikely that you need, or indeed want, any sort of breakdown of our performances since that fateful night when Nick Smith was reluctantly welcomed back into the fold and Freo put us out of the finals for the last time but bad luck here's one anyway. From that point on we have gone 28-2-85. In their last five years Fitzroy were 27-0-81, so even if you remove our five losses from this year we're officially just one win and two draws better than them over that period. From 1991 to 1995 Sydney were 23-2-83 so at least we're better than them, but this is the company we're keeping at the moment.
To continue the theme you'll be pleased to know that before this round we were only the equal second worst side of the century/millenium/yes I included 2000 even though it's technically not correct, I'll do the pedantry around here thanks.
Blogger hates tables as much as it hates not putting random paragraph breaks in your posts so I just copied and pasted from Excel and this came out. That'll do. It's games/wins/draws/losses/win percentage - and what it shows is that before this round we were only the equal second worst team in that timeframe. We've already gone outright second thanks to Carlton's win on Friday night so thank god for Richmond, stay just the way you are. I'll be keeping an eye on this list and there will be a massive piss on when we officially go bottom sometime next year.
Crowd Watch
When the Frawley news broke you could almost feel about 5000 falling off the gate as people decide that they'd rather spend a Saturday night inside than going into the cold to become depressed over sports. Not that the club were admitting that he was out until they absolutely had to - we're not in a position where we can thumb our nose at gate receipts and there was audible shock from the people around me when the announcement came up on the screen.
This is the future for clubs that are stuffed but have to play night games in terrible conditions. Away crowds the last two weeks have been absolutely disgraceful so you can't tell me that there aren't a shedload of people opting to take the live TV option instead of going. I know that's the reason I don't feel the need to subject myself to a trip to Kardinia Park next week, and that if it weren't live I'd probably be reluctantly going. The big games will still get big crowds, but when depression sets in - especially at the end of the year - there's going to be some pretty heinous crowds for dead rubber matches. Forget closing level 3 at Docklands, they might be shutting Level 1.
At least those of us who did turn up got to see a decent performance in person. Not that you'd please a couple of the lone gunman style nutbags giving it their all in the Redlegs area. I thought paying extra to sit in a section full of Melbourne fans (except for the guy behind me who'd smuggled in a woman obviously barracking for St Kilda, possibly due to the MCG attendants showing scant interest in who goes in) would mean a drop off in insanity but as long as these two turn up every home game I could be onto a winner.
I'm not sure which one was which, because they were basically the same guy with the same voice. The angry, mid 50's gent who stuck with the club through a dark childhood and after 40 years of having their emotions played with they're about to snap. Both looked the same, like a frustrated office worker who probably used to come with his children but now they refuse to because he's far too embarassing, screaming things like "FORCHRISTSAKEWATTSGETINFRONTWHATDOYOUWANTTODOJESUSCHRIST" and "AWWBALLLHOWDIDEGETRIDOFITUMPIRE" far louder than anyone really needs to considering that neither the players or umpires can hear you. They're both very keen to lay into the usual whipping boys, and you know that at least one of them is probably a regular talkback radio caller. Sadly neither had a helium tinge to the voice, and nobody was screaming out for Leigh Williams to get a game so I can confirm that neither was SEN Hall of Famer Chris from Camberwell.
At least they were there until the final siren, which is more than can be said for the guy sitting in front of me who packed up and left after the Lenny Hayes goal. Ten minutes to play, less than two goals down, rubbish crowd, 10pm on a Saturday night - what traffic were you trying to beat, and where else did you have to be? I saw a couple of people from the cheer squad go as well, so you can decide for yourself how badly we're going when even the most over the top zealots can't be bothered hanging around. If they'd waited another two minutes for the next goal then they could have slunk out respectably. Alternatively they could have STAYED UNTIL THE BLOODY END LIKE REAL MEN. Ahem.
Draft Watch
No, it's not another in-depth analysis of how shit our drafting has been. You know the story. So how about a change of pace from the usual Cameron/Prendergast/Bailey/Faceless Men bashing and onto a non-self generated Farce of the Week, this time provided by 'popular' Herald Sun journalist Mark Stevens.
As Eric Clapton once said, presumably in the midst of one of his epic benders, it's in the way that you use it. Then he spun around a couple of times and collapsed to the floor a'la Matthew Newton. Allegedly.
Chances are that he was talking about a woman or a guitar but it was 1986, so maybe he was referring to the Melbourne Football Club and their award winning finals drought born of wilful and malicious heinous use of the ball. You know that year we managed the spectacular feat of being tonked by over a hundred points three times in just two months. But in a dramatic, un-MFC like twist the story has a happy ending a year later when we make the finals (then there's the regulation tragic ending, but a happy ending first).
We've got until Round 9 to rack up the two more fiascos required to match the dirty deeds of the 1986 squad, and about a year and half to recover it a'la '87. Even after tonight's game I know which one I'd be offering better odds on if I were Jamie Rogers from TAB Sportsbet.
God knows what depths the 80's version of Demonblog would have sunk to after that eight week period of death and destruction. Thankfully for one I was five years old, and secondly anybody half interested in providing their views about footy online would have had to use one of those ridiculous WarGames style 300baud modems plugged into a rotary dialing phone to post on a BBS. In short, nobody was talking footy online so god knows how those of you who survived that era did it without intensive psychotheraphy and experimental medications (both legal and otherwise), because if I didn't have this outlet to come on and let it all out I'd be up all night howling obscenities at the moon.
Thinking about what happened 26 years ago and trying to draw a parallel between that team and today's is the first sign of madness but that's the position I find myself in these days. What else am I supposed to do, sit around all week pondering the post 2006 era? It's got to the point where I could sit down confidentally on Thursday and write an accurate (as accurate as you get on here anyway) summation of our shambolic performance and simply plug in the votes whilst trudging grimly down Brunton Avenue. But where's the fun in that? And I will admit that most of my waking hours are still dedicated to considering the ups and downs of the post-Daniher era. Melbourne FC owes me hours upon hours of psychological consultations.
At least we were treated to something different this week, the presumptive poleaxing replaced with a grinding loss where we were still a chance 15 minutes into the last quarter. Cancel that post about leaping off the top deck of the Olympic Stand and replace it with one with platitudes galore about honourable losses. Actually, cancel that post as well because honourable losses can get stuffed. We did better than expected but that's no consolation in the grand scheme of being 0-5 and above just two teams full of kids and men press-ganged from the SANFL to try and keep their clubs afloat until the draft picks pay off. We are still looking at a 16th place finish this year, and even though that's less shameful than it was last time we finished there I still don't want it - and I don't care what benefits we can get from ending up there.
It didn't hurt us that the conditions were absolute rubbish because there's nothing like dragging a better side down to your level. I remember when we were good and it happened to us all the time. Unfortunately more often than not it happened when the conditions were absolutely perfect. We're hardly wet weather specialists in the Mark McGough mould but at least it slowed St Kilda down a bit tonight. Still, when you go into the last quarter having battled back to being just three points behind and then fail to score in a fourth term for the first time since Brian Stynes' last game then you deserve exactly what you get - zero points.
Forget 'honour' for a second (we are not samurais) and let me do some serious whinging. With all due respect to children who may be reading who does Ricky Petterd have to pork to get a game around here? Ok, so he wasn't in the best for Casey two weeks ago (pre-VFL bye) but who was in a team that got tonked by 70 points? He wasn't much chop against the Eagles either, in a team that got tonked by 108 points, but you would have thought that maybe in a week where Mitch Clark is recuperating from almost breaking his neck that it might have been a good time to take a chance on playing another forward with some aerial ability. Nah.
There's this belief that he and Dunn can't be picked in the same side, which is fine if you have Clark there. And Green. And Jurrah. But we didn't have Clark, Green or Jurrah - and Dunn is not a week in, week out goalkicking option. I'm pleased they didn't sacrifice Jeremy Howe's ability to be one of the few who can take a decent mark around the ground to permanently play him forward, but there's a reason why for the first time in god knows how long a substantial amount of our scoring came from CRUMB. But it's no good swinging wildly from one to the other, we need both.
Sellar did nothing up front, and whatever Dunn did it was probably some defensive masterstroke that I'll get panned for not noticing. Not much else on offer until he finally took a mark, kicked a goal and was immediately subbed. Obviously they'd already filed the paperwork to get rid of him before the mark/goal, because unless there's something I missed his only offensive contribution was his facial hair.
Explain to me then how Petterd's not worthy of a game? Give me the answer I want to hear and I won't bore you with my theories on Martin vs Sellar - this week. Consider the following comments in the context of my overall support for Team Neeld and willingness to suspend disbelief and go along with their plans for a couple of years but by christ some of their selections shit me to tears.
I don't want to hear about how we couldn't pick Petterd or Stef Martin because the VFL had a bye last week in the same week that Sylvia comes back after not playing a game for six weeks. It's a bollocks excuse. Also the presence of Joel Macdonald still confuses me - clearly we're not playing for a premiership this season (oh really?), and there's no chance he'll be there next year so how about a decent run for Tapscott?
Not that any journos have the slightest interest in the Dees but wouldn't you like somebody to ask these questions? "So, Mark many fans would have expected Ricky Petterd to play more than one game so far this season. Any reason he didn't get a run?" Instead the leadup to the game is dominated by a fictional Watts vs Riewoldt matchup which was as likely to occur as Sugar Ray Robinson vs Esme Watson. If any footy journos are reading I'll be happy to sneak you some cheat sheets that you use to ask questions at press conferences as if you actually know who plays for us.
At the risk of winding up like a pointless, single issue political party I reserve the right to spend significant amounts of space on here on the Justice For Ricky campaign, even if it ends with me having an ASIO file. You can have your Australian Sex Party, I'll be drawing my own square on the ballot paper and writing FREE RICKY PETTERD. In blood.
When it was announced that Frawley had injured himself and was going to be withdrawn there was a moment of hope amongst Petterd fanciers that the great man could win a recall from the emergencies. He didn't, and if he goes out and does his knee in the VFL tomorrow I'll chuck a boulder through the window of the Demon Shop.
Given about five hours to digest the news that our only good player was out before they announced that Tapscott was going to be his replacement, there was plenty of time to wonder how many digits our losing margin was going to include but also to ponder a classic, internet generated rumour that Mitch Clark was going to do a Hulk Hogan style crowd-pleasing entrance despite not even being named in the emergencies. Pre-match I said why waste money on the fine, save him for the Kardinia Park abortion instead. Once we got close I started to wish they'd frivolously wasted Opel's money and picked him.
Not that I know if he's even remotely fit. He might be in Zurich seeing the same team of doctors who did the revolutionary spinal fusion surgery on Sylvia which allowed him to appear tonight. He might also have done nothing when the rains came, but at least he would have gone around being angry at everyone and damaging inanimate objects.
Without Frawley and Clark you could have been forgiven for expecting that it was going to end in tragedy, but this is a St Kilda team who will be lucky to fall into the eight and who had plenty of good players down on their luck. Naturally the likes of Goddard, Gilbert etc.. decided to turn up when the match was in the balance, but in every aspect other than scoring in the fourth quarter it was easily our best performance of the season. Not a difficult podium to end up on.
How much of it was improvement, and how much of it was down to the weather? Well the good news is we looked like a proper league side even before it started pelting down sideways. If we'd gotten our spanking in Geelong out of the way in Round 1 and were scheduled to play Brisbane next week you'd be far more confident of beating them now than you were last Sunday night. But we didn't win, and now the toughest campaign since the Siege of Leningrad leaves 0-11 as a distinct possibility.
Still, at least we managed to hold some good players. Jordie McKenzie's performance on Brendan Goddard was probably my highlight of the season so far. Not since Ben Holland spent the whole day holding Anthony Rocca by the arm in 2007 have any of our players done such a cynical and successful job of following an opposition player around, committing illegal acts against his person and (mostly) getting away with it. Absolutely thrashed him, and the only time Goddard got anywhere near it was when he rorted the umpire into paying a free against him and then kicked it straight into Jordie's smother anyway.
You could understand that matchup working, but far more troubling on paper was Tom McDonald vs Riewoldt. Happily, other than a couple of dinky kicks and one occassion where he completely lost his opponent, Tom Mc was solid. I was going to come on here and say that everything was fine except when he was actually disposing of the ball but it turns out he had a team leading 89% disposal efficiency, so there you go. Not sure if he's really first choice when Frawley is fit again BUT considering other than last week's rotten performance he's been pretty good this year he could free up Chip to do... something else. God knows what. Where does this leave Demonblog's Own Troy Davis? Is he destined to take the Andre Gianfagna route of being seen in one pre-season campaign before disappearing into the VFL? Surely once the unofficial tank is rolled out later this year everyone half fit is going to get a game. Maybe even Lucas Cook if you're lucky.
Also straight from the shock result file was Morton's best performance since at least 2010. I saw him lay tackles, I saw him going for a hard ball, I witnessed in person him putting his body on the line. Ok so his disposal wasn't exactly top shelf but at least it's a step forward and you've got to be happy with that at least. Not if you're the first guy on talkback radio tonight who did that cliched Melbourne supporter call and whinged about how terrible Morton was. Obviously the bloke couldn't get through last week, because it was well unfair to complain about him tonight. He'll probably put in a landfill performance next week, but then again so will everybody so if you're going to do some classic Finey's Final Siren work at least come up with an original angle.
There were a lot of things to love about tonight. It's just such a shame that it ended so limply and we eventually waved the white flag without much of a fight after more than matching them most of the night. I loved Matthew Bate's first quarter, especially getting rid of his opponent in the square for the second goal. I loved winning the tackle count for once. I loved the fact that Sylvia has had a decent run (though it took them long enough to get him on) and will start next week, but what I loved most of all was Clint Bartram's goal in the third quarter.
It's not the goal itself that was most loveable, though it was nice that he got one in his 100th game and all that, it was the celebrations afterwards. I'll have to see a replay but I'm fairly sure that after he slotted it Jeremy Howe went about 20cm from being knocked out cold by his swinging fist pump celebration. He ducked his head in just as Clint was swinging the fist, and thankfully for our sake but unfortunately for blooper tape compilations around the world Jeremy didn't quite nuzzle in far enough and we were spared the most comical injury in sporting history.
It helped us that there were about 2000 bounces because of the weather, but Jamar's domination of the bounces was also something to love. Sometimes the taps even went to our players, and on more than one occassion Moloney reignited the late, great Psychic Friends Connection and found himself perfectly at the drop of the ball. His performance fell just one short of the most hitouts in a match of the modern era - losing to Will Minson of all people. After being decidedly average throughout the first month of the year it was a welcome return to form.
We won the clearances too on the back of Jamar's domination, and other than one or two occassions where the Saints went straight out of the middle and had scoring shots it was a vast improvement on everything else served up so far this season. Now to work on moving the ball around the rest of the ground and coming out of defence confidently. There were a few nice moments tonight, just like there were last week, but there were also still some shambolic scenes - including hasty, failed play-ons. At least they went inside occassionally this week instead of going down the boundary line every single time no matter what.
What was decidedly unloveable was the fact that with Riewoldt fairly well held we were being put to the sword to the tune of three goals by Beau Wilkes. This was a man who had one goal in 24 matches before tonight, looks like he was dragged out of a pub and put in a footy jumper and who is named Beau yet somehow tonight was a Gary Ablett Sr-esque world beating aerialist. Odds are that he will never kick another goal again let alone three, but why not save your best performance for when you play against us, it's the Australian way. Thankfully even Scott Watters knew not to push his luck too far and subbed him in order to bring on the poor man's Cale Morton, Dean Polo who might have done something but it wasn't taking big grabs and kicking goals.
Despite throwing away the early two goal lead it was a most encouraging opening term. Had the Saints not fluked one from a speculative ball-thrown-at-boot + bugger of a bounce, and one from a free right at the end we'd have been in an even better position. Jones played an absolutely immense quarter and got two goals to cap it off. We were so competitive that Dean Bailey would have blown an O Ring about it if he'd still been around. Nobody had a great deal of interest in going near Nick Dal Santo to be fair, but the rest of them were being well stitched up. All that stopped us from going in with a decent lead was luck, shit umpiring and a lack of class.
Ok, but we've played good first quarters before then delivered a steaming pile of sewerage straight after - so why should tonight have been any different? Surprisingly most of the second term was legitimately fun - it almost reminded me of the reason I used to enjoy watching footy, until the goose on the radio reminded me that we haven't beaten them since the 2006 final and Melbourne Supporter Depression Syndrome kicked in again.
Howe robbed Jones out of a goal assist by missing a sitter but it was another brilliant set-up to give him the shot in the first place. Watts got the comedy goal after the fresh air handball by the Saints defence, then suddenly Rohan Bail decided he'd crumb like a maniac and kicked two to put us ten points in front. Couldn't last, didn't last but like last week's third quarter it at least gave the crowd something to get briefly excited about.
Normal service appeared to be on the verge of resuming when they got the first goal 30 seconds into the third quarter, and we spent the next ten minutes on the ropes trying desperately not to get blown out of the game. Beau Wilkes mania briefly swept the MCG before he was subbed, but after he was (and I'm not suggesting it had anything to do with him going off) we turned the tables on them and kept it in our forward line for the rest of the quarter. Dunn and Bartram got the goals, we were back within a kick and people were bursting out into applause all over the ground despite the fact that we actually lost the quarter by a point. Desperate times call for desperate measures..
Congratulations during the third quarter to James Magner who has now passed Jared Rivers and Brent Moloney on the list of MOST INJURED MFC PLAYERS. He's got Petterd and Grimes in his sights now. First he "suffered an injury from a clash with Leigh Montagna" (i.e was practically eye gouged, accidentally or not) then he did his ankle. He returned after being pumped full of china white in the change rooms, but it won't be long until he'll be hobbling off again. Which is good, because clearly the reason he's being ripped to pieces every week is because he's always violently struggling to win the ball - and while we could do with some classy midfielders amongst all the grunt at least you know the grunters will always have a pop.
Also I think we were supposed to congratulate Steven Milne for doing something, but I couldn't hear what it was over the thousands of people abusing him for being an utterly shit bloke. Would love a clone in our team, but one not forever tainted by a high profile criminal investigation. Tonight the closest we had was Rohan Bail, and as much as I'd like to apologise to Rohan for trying to drop him a fortnight ago if he's our crumbing option then we're buggered for years to come.
After all that wasted applause at three-quarter time the last quarter was painful. Davey could have put us back in front but kicked it straight up in the air, and the only other times we went forward the ball was kicked to packs and evacuated hastily straight down the other end.
Defensively we held up well under siege, even Joel Mac appearing surprisingly useful at times, but if we weren't going to score eventually they would and after a couple of misses finally kicked what would ultimately be the sealer via Lenny Hayes taking the piss out of our entire team and walking around them for the goal. If we'd had any chance of scoring we could have still pinched it from there, but it wasn't to be - and what should have been remembered as a decent performance against an ok side is instead a missed opportunity and a statistical anomaly on the road to six weeks of poleaxings.
Rules Committee Corner
Dropping the ball does not exist anymore, and to get pinched for incorrect disposal you've practically got to stand in front of one of the umpires and spike the ball into the turf like an NFL player.
Also, ruck free kicks. Nobody knows what's going on, and surely nobody gives a shit what happens when the ruckmen are duelling unless one of them is manhandled completely out of the contest and thrown skidding towards the boundary line fence.
Finally the video review system covered itself in glory tonight. Two blatantly obvious decisions where we were forced to wait because the goal umpire and field umpire couldn't do what goal umpires and field umpires have been doing for 100+ years and make a decision. Proof at last that they've been guessing all that time, but they must have been guessing right the vast majority of the time, because other than a handful of debacles and that absolute howler in the '09 Grand Final it's not like the TV era has been a non-stop cavalcade of goal umpire mistakes.
Luckily the two they had to adjudicate on tonight were so blatantly obvious there was no question of the replay, like the one in the Gold Coast vs North game where they couldn't for the life of them tell if the ball had hit the post - and no bloody wonder either considering the only technology they've got at their fingertips is a camera. I'm sure they'll eventually get to snickometers, hot spots and all that rubbish in goalposts but it's no surprise the technology is crap considering the league decided to introduce the rule 15 minutes before the season started.
2012 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Nathan Jones
4 - Jordie McKenzie
3 - Mark Jamar
2 - Matthew Bate
1 - Tom McDonald
Apologies to (in order) Rivers, Grimes, Moloney, Morton, Magner, Howe, Bail and Garland. Some others not bad, but not getting votes.
Leaderboard
Every possible chance of a runaway victory here. Good luck catching Jones if he keeps going like he is at the moment, especially over the next few weeks when effort and struggle in defeat will .
Also congratulations to Jamar for all but sewing up his third Ruckman of the Year award after losing to Stef Martin (remember him?) last season.
18 - Nathan Jones
10 - James Magner (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
9 - Jeremy Howe
7 - Matthew Bate
5 - Jordie McKenzie
4 - Mitch Clark, Jack Trengove
3 - Stefan Martin, Jack Watts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
2 - Brent Moloney, Tom McDonald
MFC Facebook Comment of the Week
Hard to actually get to the comments from our fans in the midst of a bunch of St Kilda supporters sooking that Milne was booed. Even when I did it was hard to find quality amongst all the positivity about how we're back to being the next big thing.
But what I did enjoy was this one, a classic case of it being somebody else's fault when you can't stay away from a computer long enough to properly enforce a media ban or are too cheap to shell out for Foxtel.
Also considering they've been doing quarter-by-quarter updates every week for a year maybe you should have considered that before opening up Facebook to do some loling and poking you plonker.
Stat My Bitch Up
It's unlikely that you need, or indeed want, any sort of breakdown of our performances since that fateful night when Nick Smith was reluctantly welcomed back into the fold and Freo put us out of the finals for the last time but bad luck here's one anyway. From that point on we have gone 28-2-85. In their last five years Fitzroy were 27-0-81, so even if you remove our five losses from this year we're officially just one win and two draws better than them over that period. From 1991 to 1995 Sydney were 23-2-83 so at least we're better than them, but this is the company we're keeping at the moment.
To continue the theme you'll be pleased to know that before this round we were only the equal second worst side of the century/millenium/yes I included 2000 even though it's technically not correct, I'll do the pedantry around here thanks.
Blogger hates tables as much as it hates not putting random paragraph breaks in your posts so I just copied and pasted from Excel and this came out. That'll do. It's games/wins/draws/losses/win percentage - and what it shows is that before this round we were only the equal second worst team in that timeframe. We've already gone outright second thanks to Carlton's win on Friday night so thank god for Richmond, stay just the way you are. I'll be keeping an eye on this list and there will be a massive piss on when we officially go bottom sometime next year.
| Geelong | 289 | 185 | 3 | 101 | 64.01 |
| Collingwood | 290 | 165 | 2 | 123 | 56.89 |
| Sydney | 287 | 158 | 4 | 125 | 55.05 |
| Adelaide | 283 | 153 | 0 | 130 | 54.06 |
| Brisbane L | 285 | 151 | 4 | 130 | 52.98 |
| Port | 284 | 148 | 2 | 134 | 52.11 |
| Hawthorn | 282 | 145 | 1 | 136 | 51.41 |
| St Kilda | 285 | 146 | 6 | 133 | 51.22 |
| Essendon | 282 | 144 | 4 | 134 | 51.06 |
| WCE | 283 | 140 | 3 | 140 | 49.46 |
| North | 277 | 134 | 3 | 140 | 48.37 |
| Footscray | 280 | 130 | 4 | 146 | 46.42 |
| Fremantle | 274 | 119 | 0 | 155 | 43.43 |
| Carlton | 277 | 112 | 3 | 162 | 40.43 |
| Melbourne | 277 | 112 | 3 | 162 | 40.43 |
| Richmond | 271 | 100 | 4 | 167 | 36.9 |
Crowd Watch
When the Frawley news broke you could almost feel about 5000 falling off the gate as people decide that they'd rather spend a Saturday night inside than going into the cold to become depressed over sports. Not that the club were admitting that he was out until they absolutely had to - we're not in a position where we can thumb our nose at gate receipts and there was audible shock from the people around me when the announcement came up on the screen.
This is the future for clubs that are stuffed but have to play night games in terrible conditions. Away crowds the last two weeks have been absolutely disgraceful so you can't tell me that there aren't a shedload of people opting to take the live TV option instead of going. I know that's the reason I don't feel the need to subject myself to a trip to Kardinia Park next week, and that if it weren't live I'd probably be reluctantly going. The big games will still get big crowds, but when depression sets in - especially at the end of the year - there's going to be some pretty heinous crowds for dead rubber matches. Forget closing level 3 at Docklands, they might be shutting Level 1.
At least those of us who did turn up got to see a decent performance in person. Not that you'd please a couple of the lone gunman style nutbags giving it their all in the Redlegs area. I thought paying extra to sit in a section full of Melbourne fans (except for the guy behind me who'd smuggled in a woman obviously barracking for St Kilda, possibly due to the MCG attendants showing scant interest in who goes in) would mean a drop off in insanity but as long as these two turn up every home game I could be onto a winner.
I'm not sure which one was which, because they were basically the same guy with the same voice. The angry, mid 50's gent who stuck with the club through a dark childhood and after 40 years of having their emotions played with they're about to snap. Both looked the same, like a frustrated office worker who probably used to come with his children but now they refuse to because he's far too embarassing, screaming things like "FORCHRISTSAKEWATTSGETINFRONTWHATDOYOUWANTTODOJESUSCHRIST" and "AWWBALLLHOWDIDEGETRIDOFITUMPIRE" far louder than anyone really needs to considering that neither the players or umpires can hear you. They're both very keen to lay into the usual whipping boys, and you know that at least one of them is probably a regular talkback radio caller. Sadly neither had a helium tinge to the voice, and nobody was screaming out for Leigh Williams to get a game so I can confirm that neither was SEN Hall of Famer Chris from Camberwell.
At least they were there until the final siren, which is more than can be said for the guy sitting in front of me who packed up and left after the Lenny Hayes goal. Ten minutes to play, less than two goals down, rubbish crowd, 10pm on a Saturday night - what traffic were you trying to beat, and where else did you have to be? I saw a couple of people from the cheer squad go as well, so you can decide for yourself how badly we're going when even the most over the top zealots can't be bothered hanging around. If they'd waited another two minutes for the next goal then they could have slunk out respectably. Alternatively they could have STAYED UNTIL THE BLOODY END LIKE REAL MEN. Ahem.
Draft Watch
No, it's not another in-depth analysis of how shit our drafting has been. You know the story. So how about a change of pace from the usual Cameron/Prendergast/Bailey/Faceless Men bashing and onto a non-self generated Farce of the Week, this time provided by 'popular' Herald Sun journalist Mark Stevens.
Usually any article penned by Stevens can be dismissed as slop before you even know what the subject is, but I was thrilled to use the Herald Sun paywall Google rort to read his bit about GWS rolling us into using Pick 3 on the new J. Viney (who we all pray will be better looking than the first J. Viney).
Well, not really rorting us - more using the rules exactly as they were intended. Which is more than you can say for us when we were playing Matthew Warnock at full forward and praying desperately that Jordan McMahon would shank his kick out of the full.
I suspect everyone's across this by now, but effectively the fact that we've blown our load early on Jack instead of playing it cool means that everyone on the planet knows we're going to draft him no matter what so we'll be forced to spend our extremely high first round pick on him regardless of whether he's a top five or top twenty prospect.
Unless of course GWS or Gold Coast (should they be 17th and 18th, which is hardly certain at the moment) offer pick 1 or 2 just to stooge us and we decide that one of the top two prospects is better value. Then they can have him against his will and we'll get on with ruining the career of a different talented youngster. Extra value in the angle that it'll be Todd reading the names out on the night.
It won't be whoever finishes last that is the problem, because it's universally acknowledged that he's good but not that good so why take the chance on missing out on the best player. Shitbox Team #2, however, could make it interesting. Unless that's us, then we can get him for a second rounder and use the other three picks.
Still, even if we don't rate him as being worth a #3 pick we might as well pick him if one of the other two bids. He can't be that far off, and our record of deciding who is and isn't worth using a premium pick on is absolute rubbish anyway so just take a chance. If we pick him for no other reason let it erase the stain on our history that is Chris Johnson being the best father/son selection we've had since the introduction of the draft.
The best thing about this is that thankfully it means there's really no reason for us to tank our way to a higher pick for once. Unless of course we can engineer a way to finish second last use a 2nd round selection on Viney OR GWS bid on him, allowing us to ditch family values and take the real #1 instead.
Us finishing second last is realistic, GWS taking the chance on losing the (alleged) best player in the land just for the chance to screw us less so. Unless $cully has a breakdown from us abusing him and exercises the clause in his contract which says he gets to run the club however he sees fit.
So if, hopefully, the ol' tank is out of the question then. If we're going to take him with whatever pick we get first then so much the better if we finish as far off the bottom as is humanely possible. At least if he ends up being a pick 7, 8 or 9 (fat chance on the last one) he'll be immune from the usual gnashing of teeth and wailing about who out of the top five we should have picked instead of him when they're all winning Brownlows (four way tie?) and he's curled up in the foetal position crying on the half-back flank.
Next Week
Disaster looms large. Here's to the Cats somehow ingesting enormous quantities of rancid meat for breakfast and spending the entire match with a case of the squirts. Could get us within six goals if we're lucky. Maybe they'll have "heavy legs" (CLICHE) after playing in even more soaked conditions than us?
Casey won by a point, but it doesn't seem anybody is really banging the door down. Bennell was apparently BOG but I'll be fine thanks. Stef Martin is still out injured and even appearing amongst the alleged best probably won't help Petterd. Given that the only two that I'm really keen on aren't on the agenda for whatever reason the only other ones I want back are are Frawley and Clark so I'm not even going to bother calling for changes in this case. At least then I can't be disappointed. Maybe time to give Jack Fitz a bash in favour of Sellar for a couple of weeks? Surely by the time we're over it then Martin will be ready to return. Would prefer Blease and Bennell play a few good games in a row before we pick them again.
Either way if you're going the pleasure is all yours, I'll be at home throwing things at the television and making threats against Dwayne Russell that make the Sam Lonergan case look like child's play.
For those of you on '86 watch (that's 1986, not 186) it'll take two of three losses by over a hundred in the next three to achieve similar levels of stink. Geelong might be teetering on the brink of falling back into the midcard again (or about to win a flag, who can tell with that lot) but could still tonk us with their eyes shut, and Hawthorn a week after is an even scarier prospect - but at least tonight showed that there's something about us lurking deep inside. Fingers crossed that one or all of Sydney, Essendon or Collingwood fall apart in the next few weeks and we can get at least one victory up before the bye and the $cully bonanza.
Last team to start 0-11? None other than the Keren Ugle powered Fremantle Dockers as referenced on this very page last week. Welcome to your historical farce connection.
Final thoughts
Three of four Rising Star nominees before this week have come in matches against us. Surely the Saints missed an opportunity for rare positive publicity by not playing a malnourished Biafran orphan in the back pocket.
Well, not really rorting us - more using the rules exactly as they were intended. Which is more than you can say for us when we were playing Matthew Warnock at full forward and praying desperately that Jordan McMahon would shank his kick out of the full.
I suspect everyone's across this by now, but effectively the fact that we've blown our load early on Jack instead of playing it cool means that everyone on the planet knows we're going to draft him no matter what so we'll be forced to spend our extremely high first round pick on him regardless of whether he's a top five or top twenty prospect.
Unless of course GWS or Gold Coast (should they be 17th and 18th, which is hardly certain at the moment) offer pick 1 or 2 just to stooge us and we decide that one of the top two prospects is better value. Then they can have him against his will and we'll get on with ruining the career of a different talented youngster. Extra value in the angle that it'll be Todd reading the names out on the night.
It won't be whoever finishes last that is the problem, because it's universally acknowledged that he's good but not that good so why take the chance on missing out on the best player. Shitbox Team #2, however, could make it interesting. Unless that's us, then we can get him for a second rounder and use the other three picks.
Still, even if we don't rate him as being worth a #3 pick we might as well pick him if one of the other two bids. He can't be that far off, and our record of deciding who is and isn't worth using a premium pick on is absolute rubbish anyway so just take a chance. If we pick him for no other reason let it erase the stain on our history that is Chris Johnson being the best father/son selection we've had since the introduction of the draft.
The best thing about this is that thankfully it means there's really no reason for us to tank our way to a higher pick for once. Unless of course we can engineer a way to finish second last use a 2nd round selection on Viney OR GWS bid on him, allowing us to ditch family values and take the real #1 instead.
Us finishing second last is realistic, GWS taking the chance on losing the (alleged) best player in the land just for the chance to screw us less so. Unless $cully has a breakdown from us abusing him and exercises the clause in his contract which says he gets to run the club however he sees fit.
So if, hopefully, the ol' tank is out of the question then. If we're going to take him with whatever pick we get first then so much the better if we finish as far off the bottom as is humanely possible. At least if he ends up being a pick 7, 8 or 9 (fat chance on the last one) he'll be immune from the usual gnashing of teeth and wailing about who out of the top five we should have picked instead of him when they're all winning Brownlows (four way tie?) and he's curled up in the foetal position crying on the half-back flank.
Next Week
Disaster looms large. Here's to the Cats somehow ingesting enormous quantities of rancid meat for breakfast and spending the entire match with a case of the squirts. Could get us within six goals if we're lucky. Maybe they'll have "heavy legs" (CLICHE) after playing in even more soaked conditions than us?
Casey won by a point, but it doesn't seem anybody is really banging the door down. Bennell was apparently BOG but I'll be fine thanks. Stef Martin is still out injured and even appearing amongst the alleged best probably won't help Petterd. Given that the only two that I'm really keen on aren't on the agenda for whatever reason the only other ones I want back are are Frawley and Clark so I'm not even going to bother calling for changes in this case. At least then I can't be disappointed. Maybe time to give Jack Fitz a bash in favour of Sellar for a couple of weeks? Surely by the time we're over it then Martin will be ready to return. Would prefer Blease and Bennell play a few good games in a row before we pick them again.
Either way if you're going the pleasure is all yours, I'll be at home throwing things at the television and making threats against Dwayne Russell that make the Sam Lonergan case look like child's play.
For those of you on '86 watch (that's 1986, not 186) it'll take two of three losses by over a hundred in the next three to achieve similar levels of stink. Geelong might be teetering on the brink of falling back into the midcard again (or about to win a flag, who can tell with that lot) but could still tonk us with their eyes shut, and Hawthorn a week after is an even scarier prospect - but at least tonight showed that there's something about us lurking deep inside. Fingers crossed that one or all of Sydney, Essendon or Collingwood fall apart in the next few weeks and we can get at least one victory up before the bye and the $cully bonanza.
Last team to start 0-11? None other than the Keren Ugle powered Fremantle Dockers as referenced on this very page last week. Welcome to your historical farce connection.
Final thoughts
Three of four Rising Star nominees before this week have come in matches against us. Surely the Saints missed an opportunity for rare positive publicity by not playing a malnourished Biafran orphan in the back pocket.
Sunday, 22 April 2012
Rock Bottom Redux
NOTE: Apologies for any bizarre formatting in this post. Blogger has switched to a new interface which randomly changes font sizes and includes mystery line breaks where they're not wanted. I'll take 'credit' for foul typing, shocking punctuation and paragraphs that randomly end in the middle of a sentence but everything is their fault. Switched back to old Blogger interface so from next week all the farce is home grown other than the fact that it's all changed to some hideous font that I can't get rid of.
And now, a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister...
Aren't you glad you waited the entire weekend for that? At least if it had been against somebody you could be absolutely 100% certain we were going to lose to then you could have spent the last two days preparing for our inevitable demise. Maybe you correctly assumed that we were going to be reheated, homebrand slop and didn't bother leaving the house. Sadly I was roped in to the dream that in the desperate race of the Melbourne and Footscray football clubs to ruin the game of football we'd take advantage of the fact that they had no forwards or defenders and scab a much needed four points before its too late.
Of course we didn't, but it's not we were blown away in a classic game of footy. As far as dignified spectacles the match ranked somewhere between the expedition of Burke & Wills and the Battle of Iwo Jima. We're no good, they're no good, nobody's any good and the quality of the match reflected it. Unfortunately they're about four goals less vile than we are at the moment and good luck to them for that.
If it's any consolation we got a lot closer to the Dogs than we did last time. Everyone should remember that night well, it was when we were violently tipped out of the Next Big Thing bus onto the Fiasco Highway where carcass still lies, splattered just that little bit more each passing week.
You may now either bite down on your carefully secreted cyanide pill or tear open the DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS envelope because if we couldn't win today we never will. In the short term against a decent team at least - the prospect of a free four points from Gold Coast is looking shaky, and even a double over GWS isn't guaranteed anymore. Today I was in a house that randomly displayed the 1995 Fitzroy team photo - even they won two games.
How I loathe these Sunday graveyard shift games. It's not just because we've been utter garbage ever since they started, it's because usually by the time we've been beaten up and I get home to whichever suburb I'm living in that season (and it's been one each for every year of the dark era) there's usually no time to lower my stress levels by indulging in a sport of good old fashioned keyboard mashing.
Somebody's Russian grandmother once said the secret to a successful marriage is to never go to bed angry. Same goes for football teams. If I had to wait until tomorrow morning to alt-tab furiously on my work computer trying to make it look like I'm doing something important than I'd have wasted a night lying awake pondering the mysteries of sporting life anyway. At least now I can press publish and get on with my life. Until every man and their dog wants to review the match in person tomorrow. Maybe it's time to take all the MFC propaganda off my desk and move to another office where nobody knows me.
Had I not paid for the privilege of showing up every week I wouldn't bother any more, I'm officially disheartened. It's not just the horrible run we've got coming our way, it's five years of seeing us get a kicking week after week. I'd rank the way I'm feeling now alongside 186 and when we went 0-9 in '07. At least one of those times we won the next week, and both were cloaked in the feint hope of ransacking the draft and rebuilding. Now I've lost confidence that we can even get that right. Better to trade this year's picks for magic beans and Jarrad Oakley-Nicholls rather than ruining more careers.
Tell me where it starts getting better in the short term. The gameplan might be mastered eventually but it's not going to happen overnight, and even then can you really, honestly, deep in your heart say that you've got confidence in the current group to be a top 8 side? You can't swap more than a few every year so set your clock for about 2015 at this rate. Until then we're going to have to keep enjoying players who wouldn't get a game in any other club unless it's as Warnock-esque filler at GWS or Gold Coast. Somehow we've only lost 3000 members from last year, god knows how many are going to do a runner before next season.
I'm starting to see how even neutrals might be starting to take a sick fascination in our club. People seem drawn to epic tales of farce and disaster. Just look at all the coverage the Titanic's getting at the moment, everyone loves a shambles and secretly a lot of us take an interest in losers and less than heroic failures.
Even as we were turning a Grand Final appearance into a mid-table waste of a season during 2001 I was enjoying a sneaky affair with the Fremantle Dockers and their epic quest to go a whole year without a win. Are James Sellar, Lynden Dunn and Joel Macdonald this year's Robert Hadrill, Keren Ugle and Daniel Metropolis? The way it's going they might be. The difference is that when it's somebody else's club you can laugh heartily and feel conflicted when they finally go 1-17 by storming back from five goals down at half time to beat Hawthorn. Freo even managed a second win, and this is in the days before the AFL provided a pair of easybeat sides for everyone bar Port Adelaide, Richmond and presumably us can score free wins off.
Sadly the disaster tourists don't contribute anything (god knows I gave nothing to Freo that year apart from support to their theme song), and unless you can really get yourself onto the verge of extinction a'la North Melbourne nobody's handing over hard cash out of pity so if we don't have some sort of late season glimmer of hope they're going to have a hard time coming up with a membership slogan that isn't just "Aww, come on".
Suddenly we've become the club people pat on the head and wish well. Nobody's taking an interest in us due to the champagne football on offer and the swashbuckling, end to end footy where we rack up a guaranteed 20 goals a week. Maybe 20 goals a fortnight if you're lucky. No, people are tuning in to see how bad it can get and what sort of comedy capers we're going to deliver. It's like when somebody collapses on the street and everyone stands around going "ooh, isn't this terrible. What shall we do?" all the while doing everything they can not to take photos, or tweet a shot of some giblets on the footpath.
Even your mate and mine Jeff Kennett has managed to weigh in during the week. We've been there before, the last time we were unexpectedly free falling to our death he tried to get us to move to the Gold Coast. Then the greatly respected and loved Jim Stynes came along and he shut up for a few years. Now Jim's gone and Jeff feels free to pipe up again. This time it was a proposed merger with the Roos, and just like Jason Akermanis he got exactly what he wanted when we all spazzed out and abused him, giving him much sought after talk of the town status for a few days before he's forgotten again. Surely nothing to do with the fact that the Roos are horning into his team's racket in Tasmania?
Surely by now he's managed to alienate every single person who actually liked him during the 90's (including yours truly). Shut schools, sell the power stations, do whatever you like pal but be buggered if I'll take important footy advice from the bloke who stuffed up an unloseable election and eventually landed us with John Brumby as Premier. Was also keen on the Melbourne Hawks. Dear sir, take your brown and gold jacket, roll it up and stuff it down your gob. We can stuff this up without your help.
Jeff's waffle aside it wasn't that bad a week. Sure we're rock bottom of the Laughing Stock League for another record breaking span but we gained one new sponsor during the week and then another on match day. Sadly off-field activities and doing a piece of cracking business was about as far as heartfelt tributes to Jimbo went, because when the game started they were few and far between.
You could argue that it was an emotional day and etc.. etc.. etc.. but bollocks to that. I'll accept that after round one but no more. By now it's every man and their dog playing for his survival like they're on the desk of the Costa Concordia and it's about to tip sideways. There's a lot of players who know they're in the Neeld gun-sights at the end of the season and are trying to avoid playing for Aberfeldie or Doutta Stars next year.
Not that we didn't have our chances mind you, and really if it had been against Sydney or Carlton it'd have been an honourable defeat (and that's as good as we can get at the moment) but it wasn't. It was a limp loss against a side in our division who continually opened the door for his to take advantage and got away with the fact that we are collectively too spaz to do so.
Missing all those shots in the first quarter was the killer. We could have built up a decent lead (of course if one had gone through then the game would have been different and yadda, yadda, this isn't a screening of Sliding Doors) but Howe, Clark, Trengove and Watts should all have kicked goals from relatively easy shots. You could forgive Mitch his first one where he was so far on the boundary line he had to throw a plastic seat out of the way, and Trengove deserved to miss because he received it from a bullshit free kick but do you care how they come at the moment? It seems like such a long time ago that we put in those free scoring performances against Adelaide and Fremantle. The banner today said WHATEVER IT TAKES, and if that means proper cheating (not just staging for free kicks) then I'm into it.
It really was criminal that we were so close at half time. Said it all about the opposition that we'd fumbled and bumbled around, kicking to nobody in particular and were still half a chance thanks to Bate kicking a goal on the siren. In a throwback to his NAB Cup form he was easily our best today, but if we're relying on him to be the best every week it's going to be an ugly ride. He can play a role but it's got to be complimentary, and for all the hard work of Jones and Moloney who turned up in force during the second half we still can't move the ball around to save ourselves. Clearances weren't even that bad today, it was more of a problem when we had to get the ball from one end to the other.
With all the times that our chain of possessions amounted to one it's no wonder that we were smashed in the disposal count again. Having the ball a million times doesn't mean much if you just dink it around and go nowhere but even that's sometimes preferable to lobbing it forward to nobody or killing your teammate in a contest. If you take out the disposals where we switched it from one side to... slightly further along the same side.. then it's probably even more of a discrepancy. At least they were a bit more free to go into the middle today.
Apologies to the half decent Rohan Bail for writing him off last week, and god forbid Cale Morton could actually hit a target and attack the ball he might have had a good game, but is there even the slightest chance that Aaron Davey's going to be there in Round 1 2013? Like I said last week there's probably no point ditching him now because who's going replace him but surely he can't show up next year and take his huge paycheck with a straight face. Ok so there was one cracking tackle and some classic era crumb, but other than that he's a shadow of his best.
After two good games in a row poor old Tom McDonald put in an absolute stinker. If they had to bring in Joel Macdonald, and god help us all if that's the best they can do at the selection tables, then it might have been worth trying Tom up forward this week. We can't just rely on Clark every week, Lucas Cook doesn't exist and Jurrah's not coming back any time soon so they've got to find another option somewhere. And he did kick three in a VFL game before he was recalled so why not at least try it for five minutes? If the ball comes down there and he flails at it before kicking out on the full from 10 metres out then fair enough but you never know. Instead he was left down there looking silly in his fifth game while Tapscott sat on the bench wearing the stupid bloody green vest.
With so many doing absolutely bugger all (Sellar? Dunn?) I don't know why we didn't do the sub late in the third quarter when the Bulldogs got back on top after our ever so brief period of dominance. By the time Clark TKO'ed himself out of the match they were already back on top we were stuffed and by having to take out Clark we had to leave in about five players who didn't deserve to be out there.
Speaking of Clark I love his aggression at the ball, and his throwing of the plastic seats, but he really had nobody to blame for almost permanently wrecking himself with that ludicrous attempt at a mark. Still, as long as he's not seriously injured that's exactly what we want him to do. As overly ambitious as it was, and I was closer to marking it in the Southern Stand, at least he's having a crack in the air - and other than Jeremy Howe and Rivers today there's not a great deal of other players on our team who you can say that about.
Loved the way he waved off the stretcher and walked from the ground too. His OTT paycheck could have seen him blamed for all our problems but he's rapidly turned into one of the biggest fan favourites around - and not just for his starring performance in the Ultratune ad.
It showed how crucial he's become, and how much we don't know what we're doing, that when the game was on the line in the last quarter and he wasn't there they kept bombing it forward hoping for the best with nobody there to do anything about it. If he doesn't play next week then surely they're going to have to put Howe down there instead. Without Jurrah and Green as options there's really nobody else who can kick goals. Watts and Petterd perhaps, but with the the level of respect he's being shown Ricky probably won't even get an invite.
I do know that if Petterd isn't preferred to Dunn for this week's game then the man with the stupid mo might slip to the same level of popularity with 'the fans' as Morton. Anyone see that shambles where he fell to the ground clutching his face like he'd been punched in the face then climbed up completely unscathed when the umpire sensibly ignored his shithouse acting? Ok we're lacking a hardman, but he's not it. Every day of the week I'd rather have Petterd down there putting proper pressure on and kicking goals than Dunn attempting to be a gangster when nobody takes him seriously. Good last week as a sub when it was a junkfest but if he's not going to do it over four quarters then go to Casey, have a shave and get back to me. Of course I seem to swing from one extreme to another with him every week so even if he does play against the Saints I'll probably come out of it going "aww, he's not that bad". I am vowing to never support him again no matter what until he loses the mo. Please remind me of this if I get sucked in again.
Given our record in third quarters this year I was all ready to kick the chair in front of me to death if we'd put in the same sort of effort tonight as we did against Brisbane or Richmond. Luckily nobody was sitting in it, and I admit it did get a bit of a nudge during the last quarter, but surprisingly for about fifteen minutes during the third term there was no destruction of inanimate objects required.
I will admit that when the Bulldogs kicked the first goal of the first quarter I may have yelled out an audible obscenity. Maybe everyone else around me was as well, but I had headphones firmly in to avoid having to listen to people, and considering that the reserved seat section were enraptured by the trumpet player I'm not sure there's any hope of radicalising them. Then, in one of those great moments where you feel like you're going to be proven wrong in a good way we spent the next quarter of an hour playing like an honest to god real AFL team. It was temporarily ace.
The Dogs were on the run, the fans were going as off their tit as Melbourne fans do these days and the margin came back to a point. Shame we couldn't take proper advantage and at least get in front before reverting to type and delivering a string of circus music worthy moments. First was Watts, once again ok without doing anything special, dropping a mark and gifting them a goal then every target actually hit for the previous few minutes was counterbalanced by one completely missed in the next few before the umpires joined in the Great Moscow Circus-esque atmosphere by somehow not paying the most obvious dropping of the ball decision in history and gifting them goal. Would have been nice if Frawley had just rushed it through in the first place mind you, but it doesn't excuse the fact that old mate picked the ball up and dropped it cold in the tackle and the plonkers in charge waved play-on.
The goals from Watts and the umpire (Jordan Bannister, who is about to become the next Ray Chamberlain as the umpire everybody refers to by name because he's the only umpire whose name they know) put us right back where we started from before our purple patch. Then just when you were celebrating that we'd broken even in a third quarter and thought we were still half a chance in the last we came out and copped the first two goals of the quarter. And off went half the fans in my section. Don't know why people would take their kids home when things start getting ugly, stop protecting them from the harsh failures of real life and force them to watch the full four quarters of this rubbish. After a few years of that they'll have survival instincts honed so finely that they'd survive a plane crash in the Andes.
Admittedly the moment the Bulldogs kicked the second goal of the last quarter I lost interest, feeling that if watched too intently from there I'd say something that would cause my membership to be revoked. There were also children present, but the little bastard sitting three seats to the right of me deserved to have his life ruined by a string of obscenity because he spent half the day tipping the seat down just to hear the noise when it sprung back.
So, not wanting to trip the anti-social behaviour hotline I started doing Monday's work on my phone and missed Davey kicking the 2005 era snap out of his arse. Glad he did it, still didn't mean he had a good game. What it does show is that even though he's almost finished he's still got more natural flair moments in his wrecked body than most of our fit players put together.
A goal by the people's favourite Morton goal made the prospect of a ridiculous comeback at least feasible but that's where it ended. Footscray went right back into their shell after he got it and allowed us to 'attack' relentlessly up to the point where 'attacking' involves having actual scoring shots on goal. We got a couple of points but nobody looked even remotely threatening. Surely if we'd got a goal closer they'd have decided to start playing proper football again and we'd still have lost. Either way it would have been nice to test them.
As the chief whipping boy Morton is going to cop it again this week but that goal he kicked was actual honest to goodness quality. Let's give up the fantasy that he's going to be a top quality midfielder and give him a go as a forward. Obviously he's not to win body on body contests because he weighs as much as a supermodel but he's at least nimble on foot. We could do with some pace around the forward line at the moment, even if it's from a guy who looks scared shitless and hasn't played a good game in years.
So ok, we were relatively close in the end and we were moderately rorted by the umpires but it's still not an excuse. For god's sake show me something next week, it's getting hard to drag myself out of the house for this stuff. I've heard all about being patient, and really for me this is patient, and I tipped us to come 13th so it's not exactly a surprise but we've been here before - the first thing I want to confirm is that we're not going to go winless or win one match. Easy to say "oh, of course we won't" but you don't know that for sure. Nobody does. At least get the single victory on the board then even if we suffer the greatest injury crisis known to man we'll be no worse than the 1981 variety MFC failures.
2012 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Matthew Bate
4 - Nathan Jones
3 - Jared Rivers
2 - Brent Moloney
1 - Jordie McKenzie
Very minor apologies to Jamar, Frawley, Bail, Howe and Watts. Dunn was defensively good on Murphy in the second half but I refuse to apologise to him because he was shite in every other aspect of the game and has silly facial hair.
Leaderboard
By the end of this year this could be the most discredited award since Milli Vanilli won at the Grammys, but as Hunter S Thompson said "in a generation of swine the one eyed pig is king" so somebody's got to go in the history books as the winner. At least the current leader, and possible first two time winner, can't be accused of not having a go every week.
Also is there any danger Magner might be challenged for the rookie award? Maybe Lucas Cook will make a late run? More chance of world peace.
13 - Nathan Jones
10 - James Magner (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
9 - Jeremy Howe
5 - Matthew Bate
4 - Mitch Clark, Jack Trengove
3 - Stefan Martin, Jack Watts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
2 - Brent Moloney
1 - Tom McDonald, Jordie McKenzie
Facebook Comment of the Week
Feature cancelled. The nutbags are all correct.
Crowd Watch
Nice of 1500 Bulldogs fans to turn up. Has there ever been a more muted victory celebration at the MCG? Mind you, good luck getting a substantial amount of our 'fans' that turned up to come back again. I've never seen so many five year old membership scarves and Reject Shop variety scarves that read MELBOURNE in a too-narrow font outside of Queen's Birthday. Good luck seeing any of that glory hunting swill for the next five years.
Good week to open the famous Prayer Rooms. Did anybody get abducted into one of them and violenty forced to your knees in order to pray to a random deity? Didn't think so, but if you listened to some of the people whining about it during the week you'd think that by converting Utility Closet 27B into a room where whatever denomination can go and do whatever it is that gets them through the day that society was about to crumble and Genghis Khan was going to ride down Brunton Avenue beheading the Police Operational Commander.
Personally I couldn't give a rats. Nobody started a picket line when they opened prayer rooms at the airport so why should anybody care if they have one at the MCG? I'm moderately offended by having to stand up for drunkards to go to the bar every five minutes but whatever, you deal with it. Or in the case of the prayer room scenario you'll probably never even know it's there
If you need any further proof that it's not all that bad an idea, other than the fact that you never have to go near the place if you don't want to, is that our Jeff was decrying it in the same breath that he was trying to rope us into a shotgun marriage with North.
Speaking of religious experiences I might be ye of no faith but I can imagine what hell would be like and it consists of Daryl Braithwaite doing endless renditions of Horses. For the first time in the history of a 'legacy' act I think I heard somebody yell "play something off your new album". Unfortunately for us the new album is probably Daryl: Live at the Burvale and consists of 12 live performances of Horses. But, you know, good on him for showing up a tribute and playing for (presumably) free. He was playing for free wasn't he?
I'm more in favour of Old Mate The Chocolate Cake who is at least a confirmed Melbourne tragic. Not that, to be entirely honest, I'd have any idea who My Friend The Chocolate Cake were if he wasn't a confirmed Melbourne tragic but that's a matter for another day – at least he wasn’t singing Horses. I'd rather see Monte Video and the Cassettes "Rock the 'G" than suffer another round of Horses.
The Stynes fiesta was nice but I've got to admit that after a month I'm all tributed out. Even though it was mostly video packages that we've all seen fifty times in the last four weeks with a bonus guard of honour (featuring Travis Johnstone still rocking the Bumfights beard) it was good for closure. Not sure why it should have any affect on the players, and it certainly didn't in a good way.
St Kilda is undoubtedly our last chance to score a win against a side even remotely close to our division before the run that will end with some of our fans finally tipped over the edge, perched from a belltower opening fire on innocent civilians. First its 186 Pt. 2, then Hawthorn (smashed), Sydney (bored to death, then smashed), Carlton (smashed), Essendon (no longer in our league) and Collingwood (perhaps not smashed but fat chance we'll win). 0-11 every possible chance going into the bye. Something to look forward to there. And you can imagine what happens when we enter the match against GWS with that hanging over our head. Disaster looms large on the horizon.
Plenty of spots available for our last half winnable game for six weeks so it's shame then that with the exception of a handful of Kelvin Lawrence-esque delistment fodder who played Casey reserves everyone not involved today was sitting on their arse due to the shitbox VFL having a bye. Blease and Tynan maybe? That's about as deep as our depth goes until Sylvia's spine is fused together or Jurrah is freed on a legal technicality.
Apparently Sylvia is actually fit and ready to go but they forced him to serve his suspension in a week where he was available. Great news for discipline fans, not much good for our footy side. I'll assume that he's going to be rushed back in then. Forget fitness, even if he has to come out with a walking frame he's a better option than some of our list.
So, on that note I'll opt for;
IN: Couch, Petterd, Martin, Grimes, Sylvia
OUT: Macdonald, Davey, Dunn, Sellar, McDonald
McDonald unlucky because he's been good the last two weeks but he's had his fair run now, time to give somebody else a go. How's Demonblog's own Troy Davis going? If the VFL ever restarts we might find out.
Morton survives because there's nobody to replace him and I refuse to consider the possibility of Bennell returning. I suppose if Clark doesn't come up from piledriving himself in epic fashion then Sellar will have to be in for another week. We've got three games out of him now, surely that's what's expected out of a mid 50's draft pick, the experiment is no longer required - bring back the Experience and let's forget it ever happened in the first place.
All well and good to play Fantasy Selection Committee but there's no chance Davey will get dropped in real life is there? Mind you I said that the first time, and about Green and they both got the boot so you never know. I just think that the two goals will cover up everything else. We're going to get belted aren't we?
Final thoughts
Remember, it's all $cully's fault. You're another week closer to your chance to take it out on him, even if it's rapidly proving to be the smartest decision that anybody's ever made.
And now, a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister...
Aren't you glad you waited the entire weekend for that? At least if it had been against somebody you could be absolutely 100% certain we were going to lose to then you could have spent the last two days preparing for our inevitable demise. Maybe you correctly assumed that we were going to be reheated, homebrand slop and didn't bother leaving the house. Sadly I was roped in to the dream that in the desperate race of the Melbourne and Footscray football clubs to ruin the game of football we'd take advantage of the fact that they had no forwards or defenders and scab a much needed four points before its too late.
Of course we didn't, but it's not we were blown away in a classic game of footy. As far as dignified spectacles the match ranked somewhere between the expedition of Burke & Wills and the Battle of Iwo Jima. We're no good, they're no good, nobody's any good and the quality of the match reflected it. Unfortunately they're about four goals less vile than we are at the moment and good luck to them for that.
If it's any consolation we got a lot closer to the Dogs than we did last time. Everyone should remember that night well, it was when we were violently tipped out of the Next Big Thing bus onto the Fiasco Highway where carcass still lies, splattered just that little bit more each passing week.
You may now either bite down on your carefully secreted cyanide pill or tear open the DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS envelope because if we couldn't win today we never will. In the short term against a decent team at least - the prospect of a free four points from Gold Coast is looking shaky, and even a double over GWS isn't guaranteed anymore. Today I was in a house that randomly displayed the 1995 Fitzroy team photo - even they won two games.
How I loathe these Sunday graveyard shift games. It's not just because we've been utter garbage ever since they started, it's because usually by the time we've been beaten up and I get home to whichever suburb I'm living in that season (and it's been one each for every year of the dark era) there's usually no time to lower my stress levels by indulging in a sport of good old fashioned keyboard mashing.
Somebody's Russian grandmother once said the secret to a successful marriage is to never go to bed angry. Same goes for football teams. If I had to wait until tomorrow morning to alt-tab furiously on my work computer trying to make it look like I'm doing something important than I'd have wasted a night lying awake pondering the mysteries of sporting life anyway. At least now I can press publish and get on with my life. Until every man and their dog wants to review the match in person tomorrow. Maybe it's time to take all the MFC propaganda off my desk and move to another office where nobody knows me.
Had I not paid for the privilege of showing up every week I wouldn't bother any more, I'm officially disheartened. It's not just the horrible run we've got coming our way, it's five years of seeing us get a kicking week after week. I'd rank the way I'm feeling now alongside 186 and when we went 0-9 in '07. At least one of those times we won the next week, and both were cloaked in the feint hope of ransacking the draft and rebuilding. Now I've lost confidence that we can even get that right. Better to trade this year's picks for magic beans and Jarrad Oakley-Nicholls rather than ruining more careers.
Tell me where it starts getting better in the short term. The gameplan might be mastered eventually but it's not going to happen overnight, and even then can you really, honestly, deep in your heart say that you've got confidence in the current group to be a top 8 side? You can't swap more than a few every year so set your clock for about 2015 at this rate. Until then we're going to have to keep enjoying players who wouldn't get a game in any other club unless it's as Warnock-esque filler at GWS or Gold Coast. Somehow we've only lost 3000 members from last year, god knows how many are going to do a runner before next season.
I'm starting to see how even neutrals might be starting to take a sick fascination in our club. People seem drawn to epic tales of farce and disaster. Just look at all the coverage the Titanic's getting at the moment, everyone loves a shambles and secretly a lot of us take an interest in losers and less than heroic failures.
Even as we were turning a Grand Final appearance into a mid-table waste of a season during 2001 I was enjoying a sneaky affair with the Fremantle Dockers and their epic quest to go a whole year without a win. Are James Sellar, Lynden Dunn and Joel Macdonald this year's Robert Hadrill, Keren Ugle and Daniel Metropolis? The way it's going they might be. The difference is that when it's somebody else's club you can laugh heartily and feel conflicted when they finally go 1-17 by storming back from five goals down at half time to beat Hawthorn. Freo even managed a second win, and this is in the days before the AFL provided a pair of easybeat sides for everyone bar Port Adelaide, Richmond and presumably us can score free wins off.
Sadly the disaster tourists don't contribute anything (god knows I gave nothing to Freo that year apart from support to their theme song), and unless you can really get yourself onto the verge of extinction a'la North Melbourne nobody's handing over hard cash out of pity so if we don't have some sort of late season glimmer of hope they're going to have a hard time coming up with a membership slogan that isn't just "Aww, come on".
Suddenly we've become the club people pat on the head and wish well. Nobody's taking an interest in us due to the champagne football on offer and the swashbuckling, end to end footy where we rack up a guaranteed 20 goals a week. Maybe 20 goals a fortnight if you're lucky. No, people are tuning in to see how bad it can get and what sort of comedy capers we're going to deliver. It's like when somebody collapses on the street and everyone stands around going "ooh, isn't this terrible. What shall we do?" all the while doing everything they can not to take photos, or tweet a shot of some giblets on the footpath.
Even your mate and mine Jeff Kennett has managed to weigh in during the week. We've been there before, the last time we were unexpectedly free falling to our death he tried to get us to move to the Gold Coast. Then the greatly respected and loved Jim Stynes came along and he shut up for a few years. Now Jim's gone and Jeff feels free to pipe up again. This time it was a proposed merger with the Roos, and just like Jason Akermanis he got exactly what he wanted when we all spazzed out and abused him, giving him much sought after talk of the town status for a few days before he's forgotten again. Surely nothing to do with the fact that the Roos are horning into his team's racket in Tasmania?
Surely by now he's managed to alienate every single person who actually liked him during the 90's (including yours truly). Shut schools, sell the power stations, do whatever you like pal but be buggered if I'll take important footy advice from the bloke who stuffed up an unloseable election and eventually landed us with John Brumby as Premier. Was also keen on the Melbourne Hawks. Dear sir, take your brown and gold jacket, roll it up and stuff it down your gob. We can stuff this up without your help.
Jeff's waffle aside it wasn't that bad a week. Sure we're rock bottom of the Laughing Stock League for another record breaking span but we gained one new sponsor during the week and then another on match day. Sadly off-field activities and doing a piece of cracking business was about as far as heartfelt tributes to Jimbo went, because when the game started they were few and far between.
You could argue that it was an emotional day and etc.. etc.. etc.. but bollocks to that. I'll accept that after round one but no more. By now it's every man and their dog playing for his survival like they're on the desk of the Costa Concordia and it's about to tip sideways. There's a lot of players who know they're in the Neeld gun-sights at the end of the season and are trying to avoid playing for Aberfeldie or Doutta Stars next year.
Not that we didn't have our chances mind you, and really if it had been against Sydney or Carlton it'd have been an honourable defeat (and that's as good as we can get at the moment) but it wasn't. It was a limp loss against a side in our division who continually opened the door for his to take advantage and got away with the fact that we are collectively too spaz to do so.
Missing all those shots in the first quarter was the killer. We could have built up a decent lead (of course if one had gone through then the game would have been different and yadda, yadda, this isn't a screening of Sliding Doors) but Howe, Clark, Trengove and Watts should all have kicked goals from relatively easy shots. You could forgive Mitch his first one where he was so far on the boundary line he had to throw a plastic seat out of the way, and Trengove deserved to miss because he received it from a bullshit free kick but do you care how they come at the moment? It seems like such a long time ago that we put in those free scoring performances against Adelaide and Fremantle. The banner today said WHATEVER IT TAKES, and if that means proper cheating (not just staging for free kicks) then I'm into it.
It really was criminal that we were so close at half time. Said it all about the opposition that we'd fumbled and bumbled around, kicking to nobody in particular and were still half a chance thanks to Bate kicking a goal on the siren. In a throwback to his NAB Cup form he was easily our best today, but if we're relying on him to be the best every week it's going to be an ugly ride. He can play a role but it's got to be complimentary, and for all the hard work of Jones and Moloney who turned up in force during the second half we still can't move the ball around to save ourselves. Clearances weren't even that bad today, it was more of a problem when we had to get the ball from one end to the other.
With all the times that our chain of possessions amounted to one it's no wonder that we were smashed in the disposal count again. Having the ball a million times doesn't mean much if you just dink it around and go nowhere but even that's sometimes preferable to lobbing it forward to nobody or killing your teammate in a contest. If you take out the disposals where we switched it from one side to... slightly further along the same side.. then it's probably even more of a discrepancy. At least they were a bit more free to go into the middle today.
Apologies to the half decent Rohan Bail for writing him off last week, and god forbid Cale Morton could actually hit a target and attack the ball he might have had a good game, but is there even the slightest chance that Aaron Davey's going to be there in Round 1 2013? Like I said last week there's probably no point ditching him now because who's going replace him but surely he can't show up next year and take his huge paycheck with a straight face. Ok so there was one cracking tackle and some classic era crumb, but other than that he's a shadow of his best.
After two good games in a row poor old Tom McDonald put in an absolute stinker. If they had to bring in Joel Macdonald, and god help us all if that's the best they can do at the selection tables, then it might have been worth trying Tom up forward this week. We can't just rely on Clark every week, Lucas Cook doesn't exist and Jurrah's not coming back any time soon so they've got to find another option somewhere. And he did kick three in a VFL game before he was recalled so why not at least try it for five minutes? If the ball comes down there and he flails at it before kicking out on the full from 10 metres out then fair enough but you never know. Instead he was left down there looking silly in his fifth game while Tapscott sat on the bench wearing the stupid bloody green vest.
With so many doing absolutely bugger all (Sellar? Dunn?) I don't know why we didn't do the sub late in the third quarter when the Bulldogs got back on top after our ever so brief period of dominance. By the time Clark TKO'ed himself out of the match they were already back on top we were stuffed and by having to take out Clark we had to leave in about five players who didn't deserve to be out there.
Speaking of Clark I love his aggression at the ball, and his throwing of the plastic seats, but he really had nobody to blame for almost permanently wrecking himself with that ludicrous attempt at a mark. Still, as long as he's not seriously injured that's exactly what we want him to do. As overly ambitious as it was, and I was closer to marking it in the Southern Stand, at least he's having a crack in the air - and other than Jeremy Howe and Rivers today there's not a great deal of other players on our team who you can say that about.
Loved the way he waved off the stretcher and walked from the ground too. His OTT paycheck could have seen him blamed for all our problems but he's rapidly turned into one of the biggest fan favourites around - and not just for his starring performance in the Ultratune ad.
It showed how crucial he's become, and how much we don't know what we're doing, that when the game was on the line in the last quarter and he wasn't there they kept bombing it forward hoping for the best with nobody there to do anything about it. If he doesn't play next week then surely they're going to have to put Howe down there instead. Without Jurrah and Green as options there's really nobody else who can kick goals. Watts and Petterd perhaps, but with the the level of respect he's being shown Ricky probably won't even get an invite.
I do know that if Petterd isn't preferred to Dunn for this week's game then the man with the stupid mo might slip to the same level of popularity with 'the fans' as Morton. Anyone see that shambles where he fell to the ground clutching his face like he'd been punched in the face then climbed up completely unscathed when the umpire sensibly ignored his shithouse acting? Ok we're lacking a hardman, but he's not it. Every day of the week I'd rather have Petterd down there putting proper pressure on and kicking goals than Dunn attempting to be a gangster when nobody takes him seriously. Good last week as a sub when it was a junkfest but if he's not going to do it over four quarters then go to Casey, have a shave and get back to me. Of course I seem to swing from one extreme to another with him every week so even if he does play against the Saints I'll probably come out of it going "aww, he's not that bad". I am vowing to never support him again no matter what until he loses the mo. Please remind me of this if I get sucked in again.
Given our record in third quarters this year I was all ready to kick the chair in front of me to death if we'd put in the same sort of effort tonight as we did against Brisbane or Richmond. Luckily nobody was sitting in it, and I admit it did get a bit of a nudge during the last quarter, but surprisingly for about fifteen minutes during the third term there was no destruction of inanimate objects required.
I will admit that when the Bulldogs kicked the first goal of the first quarter I may have yelled out an audible obscenity. Maybe everyone else around me was as well, but I had headphones firmly in to avoid having to listen to people, and considering that the reserved seat section were enraptured by the trumpet player I'm not sure there's any hope of radicalising them. Then, in one of those great moments where you feel like you're going to be proven wrong in a good way we spent the next quarter of an hour playing like an honest to god real AFL team. It was temporarily ace.
The Dogs were on the run, the fans were going as off their tit as Melbourne fans do these days and the margin came back to a point. Shame we couldn't take proper advantage and at least get in front before reverting to type and delivering a string of circus music worthy moments. First was Watts, once again ok without doing anything special, dropping a mark and gifting them a goal then every target actually hit for the previous few minutes was counterbalanced by one completely missed in the next few before the umpires joined in the Great Moscow Circus-esque atmosphere by somehow not paying the most obvious dropping of the ball decision in history and gifting them goal. Would have been nice if Frawley had just rushed it through in the first place mind you, but it doesn't excuse the fact that old mate picked the ball up and dropped it cold in the tackle and the plonkers in charge waved play-on.
The goals from Watts and the umpire (Jordan Bannister, who is about to become the next Ray Chamberlain as the umpire everybody refers to by name because he's the only umpire whose name they know) put us right back where we started from before our purple patch. Then just when you were celebrating that we'd broken even in a third quarter and thought we were still half a chance in the last we came out and copped the first two goals of the quarter. And off went half the fans in my section. Don't know why people would take their kids home when things start getting ugly, stop protecting them from the harsh failures of real life and force them to watch the full four quarters of this rubbish. After a few years of that they'll have survival instincts honed so finely that they'd survive a plane crash in the Andes.
Admittedly the moment the Bulldogs kicked the second goal of the last quarter I lost interest, feeling that if watched too intently from there I'd say something that would cause my membership to be revoked. There were also children present, but the little bastard sitting three seats to the right of me deserved to have his life ruined by a string of obscenity because he spent half the day tipping the seat down just to hear the noise when it sprung back.
So, not wanting to trip the anti-social behaviour hotline I started doing Monday's work on my phone and missed Davey kicking the 2005 era snap out of his arse. Glad he did it, still didn't mean he had a good game. What it does show is that even though he's almost finished he's still got more natural flair moments in his wrecked body than most of our fit players put together.
A goal by the people's favourite Morton goal made the prospect of a ridiculous comeback at least feasible but that's where it ended. Footscray went right back into their shell after he got it and allowed us to 'attack' relentlessly up to the point where 'attacking' involves having actual scoring shots on goal. We got a couple of points but nobody looked even remotely threatening. Surely if we'd got a goal closer they'd have decided to start playing proper football again and we'd still have lost. Either way it would have been nice to test them.
As the chief whipping boy Morton is going to cop it again this week but that goal he kicked was actual honest to goodness quality. Let's give up the fantasy that he's going to be a top quality midfielder and give him a go as a forward. Obviously he's not to win body on body contests because he weighs as much as a supermodel but he's at least nimble on foot. We could do with some pace around the forward line at the moment, even if it's from a guy who looks scared shitless and hasn't played a good game in years.
So ok, we were relatively close in the end and we were moderately rorted by the umpires but it's still not an excuse. For god's sake show me something next week, it's getting hard to drag myself out of the house for this stuff. I've heard all about being patient, and really for me this is patient, and I tipped us to come 13th so it's not exactly a surprise but we've been here before - the first thing I want to confirm is that we're not going to go winless or win one match. Easy to say "oh, of course we won't" but you don't know that for sure. Nobody does. At least get the single victory on the board then even if we suffer the greatest injury crisis known to man we'll be no worse than the 1981 variety MFC failures.
2012 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Matthew Bate
4 - Nathan Jones
3 - Jared Rivers
2 - Brent Moloney
1 - Jordie McKenzie
Very minor apologies to Jamar, Frawley, Bail, Howe and Watts. Dunn was defensively good on Murphy in the second half but I refuse to apologise to him because he was shite in every other aspect of the game and has silly facial hair.
Leaderboard
By the end of this year this could be the most discredited award since Milli Vanilli won at the Grammys, but as Hunter S Thompson said "in a generation of swine the one eyed pig is king" so somebody's got to go in the history books as the winner. At least the current leader, and possible first two time winner, can't be accused of not having a go every week.
Also is there any danger Magner might be challenged for the rookie award? Maybe Lucas Cook will make a late run? More chance of world peace.
13 - Nathan Jones
10 - James Magner (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
9 - Jeremy Howe
5 - Matthew Bate
4 - Mitch Clark, Jack Trengove
3 - Stefan Martin, Jack Watts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
2 - Brent Moloney
1 - Tom McDonald, Jordie McKenzie
Facebook Comment of the Week
Feature cancelled. The nutbags are all correct.
Crowd Watch
Nice of 1500 Bulldogs fans to turn up. Has there ever been a more muted victory celebration at the MCG? Mind you, good luck getting a substantial amount of our 'fans' that turned up to come back again. I've never seen so many five year old membership scarves and Reject Shop variety scarves that read MELBOURNE in a too-narrow font outside of Queen's Birthday. Good luck seeing any of that glory hunting swill for the next five years.
Good week to open the famous Prayer Rooms. Did anybody get abducted into one of them and violenty forced to your knees in order to pray to a random deity? Didn't think so, but if you listened to some of the people whining about it during the week you'd think that by converting Utility Closet 27B into a room where whatever denomination can go and do whatever it is that gets them through the day that society was about to crumble and Genghis Khan was going to ride down Brunton Avenue beheading the Police Operational Commander.
Personally I couldn't give a rats. Nobody started a picket line when they opened prayer rooms at the airport so why should anybody care if they have one at the MCG? I'm moderately offended by having to stand up for drunkards to go to the bar every five minutes but whatever, you deal with it. Or in the case of the prayer room scenario you'll probably never even know it's there
If you need any further proof that it's not all that bad an idea, other than the fact that you never have to go near the place if you don't want to, is that our Jeff was decrying it in the same breath that he was trying to rope us into a shotgun marriage with North.
Speaking of religious experiences I might be ye of no faith but I can imagine what hell would be like and it consists of Daryl Braithwaite doing endless renditions of Horses. For the first time in the history of a 'legacy' act I think I heard somebody yell "play something off your new album". Unfortunately for us the new album is probably Daryl: Live at the Burvale and consists of 12 live performances of Horses. But, you know, good on him for showing up a tribute and playing for (presumably) free. He was playing for free wasn't he?
I'm more in favour of Old Mate The Chocolate Cake who is at least a confirmed Melbourne tragic. Not that, to be entirely honest, I'd have any idea who My Friend The Chocolate Cake were if he wasn't a confirmed Melbourne tragic but that's a matter for another day – at least he wasn’t singing Horses. I'd rather see Monte Video and the Cassettes "Rock the 'G" than suffer another round of Horses.
The Stynes fiesta was nice but I've got to admit that after a month I'm all tributed out. Even though it was mostly video packages that we've all seen fifty times in the last four weeks with a bonus guard of honour (featuring Travis Johnstone still rocking the Bumfights beard) it was good for closure. Not sure why it should have any affect on the players, and it certainly didn't in a good way.
St Kilda is undoubtedly our last chance to score a win against a side even remotely close to our division before the run that will end with some of our fans finally tipped over the edge, perched from a belltower opening fire on innocent civilians. First its 186 Pt. 2, then Hawthorn (smashed), Sydney (bored to death, then smashed), Carlton (smashed), Essendon (no longer in our league) and Collingwood (perhaps not smashed but fat chance we'll win). 0-11 every possible chance going into the bye. Something to look forward to there. And you can imagine what happens when we enter the match against GWS with that hanging over our head. Disaster looms large on the horizon.
Plenty of spots available for our last half winnable game for six weeks so it's shame then that with the exception of a handful of Kelvin Lawrence-esque delistment fodder who played Casey reserves everyone not involved today was sitting on their arse due to the shitbox VFL having a bye. Blease and Tynan maybe? That's about as deep as our depth goes until Sylvia's spine is fused together or Jurrah is freed on a legal technicality.
Apparently Sylvia is actually fit and ready to go but they forced him to serve his suspension in a week where he was available. Great news for discipline fans, not much good for our footy side. I'll assume that he's going to be rushed back in then. Forget fitness, even if he has to come out with a walking frame he's a better option than some of our list.
So, on that note I'll opt for;
IN: Couch, Petterd, Martin, Grimes, Sylvia
OUT: Macdonald, Davey, Dunn, Sellar, McDonald
McDonald unlucky because he's been good the last two weeks but he's had his fair run now, time to give somebody else a go. How's Demonblog's own Troy Davis going? If the VFL ever restarts we might find out.
Morton survives because there's nobody to replace him and I refuse to consider the possibility of Bennell returning. I suppose if Clark doesn't come up from piledriving himself in epic fashion then Sellar will have to be in for another week. We've got three games out of him now, surely that's what's expected out of a mid 50's draft pick, the experiment is no longer required - bring back the Experience and let's forget it ever happened in the first place.
All well and good to play Fantasy Selection Committee but there's no chance Davey will get dropped in real life is there? Mind you I said that the first time, and about Green and they both got the boot so you never know. I just think that the two goals will cover up everything else. We're going to get belted aren't we?
Final thoughts
Remember, it's all $cully's fault. You're another week closer to your chance to take it out on him, even if it's rapidly proving to be the smartest decision that anybody's ever made.
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