The Great Shark Hunt

Even before they thrashed us in the 2000 Grand Final I had a deep hatred of Essendon. It's never quite reached the same level of enmity that I've got with St Kilda, or latterly the Visy Blues and J**d but it's been there, seething deep inside of me ever since the day they came back from 46 points down in the last quarter to beat us in 1992. Then there was Kevin Sheedy, who I was always felt was up to something dubious. By the time Michael Long cheap-shotted Troy Simmonds on that one long day in September just under a decade ago relations were already strained to breaking point and that just finalised it. Victories over them have been few and far between. We got a cheap win in 2006, the last time they were at rock bottom, they got Scott Lucas stealing Daniher’s last match in the final ten seconds and a bunch of other wins.

So, what better time to plunge their club into football hell than on the day they celebrate the tenth anniversary of that premiership triumph? Just when the media started to get depressed that they wouldn't have a coaching roundabout to encourage this season Mark Williams' lightning fast demise has provided the blood in the water and the sharks are about to be released on Matthew Knights. For the last three years Bombers fans have been skitzo about him anyway, swinging wildly from love to hate via loathing and lust on a weekly basis. Now the pressure of not only losing to us, but of dropping to 13th on the ladder – only above Port and Richmond on percentage is about to cause talkback radio and internet forums everywhere to explode in a shower of sparks. No point listening to SEN tomorrow because all you'll hear is idiots ringing up crying about how their side gets monstrous plums again. Given the way they provided absolutely nothing to the finals last year I refuse to accept any theory that invokes finishing 8th in 2009 as a triumph. I'll bet that by 9am tomorrow Kevin Sheedy will have been everywhere giving his theories on why the side is so shit despite the fact that if he'd realised that he'd lost the plot and quit a couple of years earlier they might not be in this position right now.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people really, unless of course I achieve my dream of seeing St Kilda driven into the sea by force. But thank god this isn't Bomberblog and we don't have to waste our time on other crisis clubs when we've got enough problems of our own. Except tonight we don't have any problems. Forget the generally insipid last two months of football and forget that we started the day every possible chance of finishing last again, because the world is instantly brighter and more beautiful after a win.

Finally in the sixth year of writing this crap I finally scored some sort of backhander with passes to the change rooms for before and after the match. Not from the club I may add, because I'm sure that if they knew about this site and went back for a look through the archives they'd not only ban me for life for being a negative, spiteful bastard but also launch thirteen different legal actions. They'd also recommend that I go back to school and learn to spell at a minimum grade three level, but that's beside the point.

The action pre-match is pretty much as you'd expect it to be. Seen the footage on TV of players warming up? Then you've seen it all. The only difference is that this time you can feasibly disgrace yourself by sticking your hand through the fence and grabbing a player on the arse. I spent my time in there trying to forge a psychic connection with Jack Watts to tell him that I'd had a tenner on him kicking the first goal @ 17-1 so would he be kind enough to oblige. Had absolutely no success so I'm seriously considering taking a class in Psychic Connection and Mindreading from Jamar-Moloney University in the off-season.

Maric was there as the "just in case" emergency and I think I even saw him smile at one point. Unprecedented, but fans of Emo Maric will be pleased to know that just seconds later he was back to leaning against the wall with hands in pockets looking like he was thinking about machine gunning his high school maths teacher.

Obviously we were celebrating our part in the 2000 Grand Final debacle because there was a cavalcade of ex-players in the rooms. Robbo, White (he of the least interesting Twitter account in the world), Ingerson, Brown, Nicho, Matthew Collins (underrated), Leoncelli, Powell and Anthony McDonald were present and apparently Febey, Neitz, Yze and Simmonds were all hanging around as well. No Ben Beams? You'd think he'd be dining out on the day he played in a Grand Final and got as many touches as Leon Davis. For a minute I got excited about all the old school players being around and started to dream about Philthy walking through the door. I have no concern that he didn't play for us for another four years, he should have been there just so I could go to pieces and embarrass myself in front of him.

Finding himself just four quarters of rubbish football from 15th on the ladder and a potential media frenzy of his own, Bailey stood back during the warmups and watched the magic unfold in front of him. My personal highlight was Scott West cracking full pelt kicks at Jones and Moloney who were catching them a metre and a half away. Once he'd bored of trying to snap their fingers off Westy picked up a device which looked like a cross between a Spanish Inquisition era torture implement and something you'd use to clean your pool and made them do close quarters marking practice. Then when the boxing gloves came out guess which two players were first in to beat the living bejesus out of the poor bastard holding the gloves on the other side? I'd still love for us to find a Ballantyne/Baker style arsehole player that people will hate, but at least you can be sure that we've got some legit nutcases in the side.

Bailey's major coaching masterstroke of the pre-match rev up was to make sure that the only words any of the assembled crowd could hear were "fuck", "fucking" and various other derivatives of that popular Anglo-Saxon term. You get what you deserve taking your kids into a footy locker room in the first place, but that was magnificent. Get the young un’s swearing early I say. Oh how I remember the golden day when during a family session of the Wheel Of Fortune board game I answered a four letter word starting with "C" with the new word I'd heard in the playground and duly copped a backhander.

Oh, and nobody made me sign confidentiality agreements before walking in so I can exclusively reveal that Clint Bartram totally has a tramp stamp.

So being in the rooms pre-match was all well and good for something new, and god knows it only took me 20 years to get in there, but there was no way I was going back if we didn't win, that's strictly for people who had a hand in the birth of a player or are currently having sexual relations with them. Same thing at some clubs. In the event of a win though, it's all hands on deck for the wild scenes and an opportunity not to be missed. The problem has been that for the last few years the only sides we've beaten at the MCG, or anywhere really for that matter, have either been from interstate or are called Richmond. The last time we beat the Bombers Philthy, Pickett and Chris "where are they now?" Johnson were playing for us, Courtney Johns was 'starring' for the Bombers and Chris Heffernan was in his second spell with them post-mediocre career with us.

They might be rubbish again now, but they're that special breed of rubbish where you can't tell from one week to another what side is going to turn up. They're as likely to beat a top four side one week and lose to Tooleybuc the next so who knew what was going to happen coming off a thumping by the Crows in Adelaide (been there done that) and a week of rumour about unrest between players and coaches. It certainly looked dicey for us when they kicked the first goal after Rivers stuffed up in the backline (Another week, another lost first goalkicker bet. There's no justice that the only time I've ever gotten it right was on Will Minson at a Footscray/Hawthorn game). Became even dicier when Riv took a mark just inside defensive 50 on the Olympic Stand side and kicked it out on the full so spectacularly that the ball must have only travelled inside the field of play for about half a metre before going over the line. Thank god he recovered to play a half decent game because it was the sort of horror start that can kill somebody. Warnock was pox against Adelaide but it's not like he isn't a chance to come back if Riv completely loses it.

Sylvia, back from losing half his leg to frostbite or whatever it was, got our first after five minutes once we'd steadied the ship a bit and Green got another thirty seconds later as a gift from the bumbling fools in the Bombers defence. So we’d already beaten our average first quarter score this year. On the defensive side Dunn was prominent early putting the big tag on George Oscar Bluth Watson II. Not only was Watson getting absolutely nothing himself but Dunn was carving it up around the ground. When I saw the move at the opening bounce my heart sank a bit because after two relatively successful weeks in the forward line the last thing I wanted for Dunn was for him to be thrown around the ground filling gaps again, which is pretty much what derailed his career in the first place. Luckily for one of the few times in the last couple of years a Bailey first quarter innovation came off without costing us six goals in the process. The tide is turning.

We already had two goals on the board when Jamar missed one with his first kick of the day (stay tuned because that becomes relevant later), but Green got a second and Trengove added another on either side of some Bomber idiot kicking one before the Great 50m Penalty Spree of 2010 began. And what a spree it was, almost certainly unprecedented in AFL history. Teams have probably received more in a match, but it's unlikely that any of them have ever pocketed five goals from the first five of a game. Essendon fans will wail and bemoan the over the top umpiring that caused the 50's, and in some cases they might have been right but don't hold your breath waiting for me to give any sympathy after some of the rorts we've been on the end of this year.

We copped a couple of dodgy ones today too (Ryder kneeing Jamar in the ruck contest and slapping him about the chops and still getting a free? The rubbish free to the non-nifty Essendon variety Jetta at the end of the second? Not our fault they couldn't convert from them), but there's no way either of the first two weren't there. Dunn took a mark and got pushed over, which brought him to within kicking range. He topped off a near BOG first term with the goal - thank god he's finally started to kick straight - and Trengove's goal from the 50 against non-Nifty equally justified. They might have been stiff on a couple after that, but let's face it once you've copped two goals from 50's in the first 35 minutes of a game you're going to have an epic persecution complex that makes anything look like evidence of a massive conspiracy against you. I still remember Matthew Lloyd going over in the square after Nicholson breathed on him in '03 for the free and double goal so cram it with walnuts Bombers fans, you reap what you sow.

Before we could even get to the second quarter, and the true birth of the Windy Hill Complex Theory, there was a goal at the end which was beautifully executed that it nearly caused me to crack one through the covers. With the clock having ticked over 32 minutes Bruce and Jones involved themselves in a bit of one-two handballing beauty running inside 50 for Bruce to eventually finish it off. It's usually our destiny to be stitched up in that scenario by the siren going just before somebody drops it on their boot. When the ball went through there was 8 seconds left, so I suppose we had some breathing space but a little too close to comfort for me. Still, great finish by Bruce who had an excellent game after a few shockers this year. The cavalcade of people waving him goodbye when the "Bruce to Gold Coast" rumours came out this week was well over the top, but not without some justification on the strength of his performances this year. Wouldn't be the end of my life, or even a major irritation, if he did go but today showed that there's life in him yet.

Underrated in the build-up to that goal was the flying, diagonal shepherd from Jordie McKenzie to allow Bruce through in the first place. Another solid performance from J.Mac 2.0 with seven tackles. He's an absolute solid gold certainty for an upgrade to the senior list next season and another winner that we've picked off the rookie list. Only problem is that if all these rookies keep playing well and we're forced to do the Newton/Meesen style banishment off the senior list move too many more times we'll never get a real live pick in the rookie draft again.

So, six goals in the first quarter and, forget allowing them to kick three, it was easily the best we've looked in a first term since running riot against Richmond, and even then it took us 15 minutes to get interested and start banging them home at a million miles an hour. What odds can I get from Sportsbet that by the time he finishes coaching us Bailey can break even on total scores in the first ten minutes of games? With 365 odd points to catch up on I'd spit at anything under 100-1.

God help us we even came out for the second quarter with purpose. THE JURRAHCANE took a mark, after nervously botching a couple in the first term, stuffed the kick from the pocket royally but shortly after Trengove got his (allegedly) rort assisted goal the great man ran onto one inside 50 and with no Essendon player within the same timezone sprinted into the open goal to send the crowd wild. His general field play was rusty but that's to be expected from a guy who has only played a couple of games in four months. The most important thing was that the touch of class that we remember so well from the second half of last year was still so obviously there. If he can avoid being crippled in regional South Australia during next year's pre-season and play a whole year this guy might absolutely tear the roof off the competition next year. Absolute freak.

Green got his third from another 50 (oh dear) before missing two gettable kicks in two minutes. Never mind the misses Green is absolutely carving it up at the moment. I've been going back over old posts in anticipation for Demonblog: The Book (are you a publisher? If so I promise to come up with a better name for it if you agree to publish it) and it's almost embarrassing how much I slaughtered him for being soft in 2006. It wasn't until halfway through 2007 that he (because obviously it wasn't me who was wrong) fired up and started the journey that must surely end with him becoming the next captain of the club. In the space of a year he went from a pretty boy who never lived up to his early promise barely holding a spot in a good team to a rock solid leader who you can rely on forward, middle or back. He is total football. We have a saying in my family, and so simple that I should have written it on a bedsheet and held it up to win the $250 voucher at half-time "Thank God for Brad Green". I don't even believe in god and I'm thanking him for the guy, how much more of an endorsement do you want? When he jumped across half of the Essendon backline and came up with the mark that was very nearly a religious experience for me.

So, call the engraver and get ready to stick his name next to 2011 CAPTAIN then? You won't hear me complain, but I can't dismiss Moloney so easily. No surprises that Green and Beamer were the most vocal amongst the players during the "shout slogans" portion of the warmup. Let's assume that my preferred scenario comes off and that McDonald goes around again but hands over the captaincy a'la Lyon in '98, I'm starting to sell out and feel like the co-captain scenario that I've hated all my life isn’t such a bad idea. Good thing Brisbane took it to a ridiculous degree and had four captains a few years back to make having two look a little less ridiculous. I just can't split the two at the moment, Moloney is a lifelong MFC fan who absolutely bleeds red and blue, and I'll never forget Green turning back a move to Collingwood which would probably have ended up with him becoming a superstar of the competition to stay and slog it out with the slops just as we hit rock bottom. So that's it, you can take Gillard/Abbott and the Federal Election and piss off, I'm voting Green/Moloney '11.

Last goal of the quarter came off another 50, this time to Bennell and I thought their fans might have gone absolutely spaz at this point but they were either stunned or secretly celebrating the fact that our five goal lead was going to cause Knights to get the arse. Just as I started to wonder if the umpires were ever going to start the inevitable square-up dodgy free kicks to the Bombers, Jetta got his cheap free against Moloney inside 50. Not as Nifty stuffed it up and god help up us we were 32 points in front at the long break. I'd like to say that only Melbourne could stuff up a game from that position but Port Adelaide proved that theory to be false on Friday night. The only difference was that they were playing with a howling wind and post-sacking emotion, whereas we were just playing fucking good football. Essendon were rancid going inside 50, and even when they did they missed gettable shots. After a shaky start the backline was playing well and rebounding confidently, Garland especially looked good after living on the edge in the first few minutes. Meanwhile in the middle Jamar was collecting another pair of scalps, Inglorious Basterds style, by slaughtering Ryder and Bellchambers (great name, not so great ruckman).

More importantly than his growing scalp collection The Russian went into the long break on world record pace for his kicks PB with five by half-time. He only needed two more to top that glorious day out at Etihad when he had six kicks for five goals and we lost by ten goals (don't worry readers of the future, apparently we didn't want to win). The moment the ball hit his boot for the 7th time balloons were set to fall from the roof, fireworks would go off and everybody in the stadium would get a free copy of the new Kylie single. He only had one kick in the third term to equal the record, but stay tuned because big things - and free CD's - are on the way in the fourth.

The reason he only got one kick in the third term was because Essendon spent the first ten minutes beating the shit out of us. They got the first goal within the first minute, which wasn't such a concern and then another one a minute later - which made me start to sweat a bit. The third in five minutes, cutting the margin to under three goals sent me into panic. They had more opportunities after that but thankfully for us botched them - it could have gone really, really wrong if they'd got four in a row and gotten to within ten points. Thankfully our karma pushed further into the red when Watts stuffed up a kick on the run but got one of the worst frees you'll ever see in your life for an alleged push that was nothing worse than a guy lunging to tackle and blowing air on his opponent's back as he missed. Jack, in the midst of another creditable performance, slotted the good old fashioned steadier and that was pretty much the end of Bomber resistance.

During the third Essendon finally started to get a few dodgy frees and didn't the fans love it. Not content with trying to get a 50m penalty of their own every single time one of their players took a mark they proceeded to bronx cheer every free that the Bombers got. You only get one bronx cheer, after that you're a twat. Same goes for calling for everything to be deliberate for the rest of the game after your side gets pinged for one. For all the square-ups in the world they couldn't get closer than 13 or 14 points, and by the time Green marked and converted a clutch kick for his 5th after the three-quarter time siren we'd only lost five points off our lead during the quarter. Have I ever told you how much I love that guy? Most of the time when a guy is running in to kick at goal and the siren goes off he either shanks the kick out of surprise or stops, goes back and stuffs it up. Not our Brad. Having missed two easier shots in the second he went back and thumped it through. Genius.

Now, just under five goals up going into the last quarter the two big questions were how far Demons (and on the b-side "Surely even we can't stuff this up" by the Melbourne Football Club All-Stars), and can Jamar get his 7th to trigger the mass giveaways and street parades. The question of whether we'd stuff it up was answered in the first 15 seconds of the quarter when Watts took a big hit to allow Sylvia to pick up and kick the first goal. We weren’t out of the woods yet, but it was getting closed. We messed up another couple of chances to really put the game away, Jurrah with a rusty shot on goal and Trengove hitting the post, before Bruce got his second to finish it off for good. Now, the Jamar question. The people sitting in front of us thought I was completely insane when he got a free and I loudly groaned at the handball to the player running past, but after a brief scare when Michael Hurley treated him like a taxi driver but somebody didn't give away a free, the 14 minute mark was when the great man had his great moment. A free kick from a ruck contest followed by yet another 50 and his seventh kick of the day was duly slammed home for a goal, sparking wild celebrations both at the ground and in Moscow.




Though some revellers took things too far and disgraced themselves;


On the Continental Tyres stat sheet that marks the second time that he has topped his career kicks PB with a goal. The people sitting in front of me found my utter glee at him topping the PB rather amusing. Sadly my childlike enthusiasm for this epic moment wasn’t being played for laughs, it was for witnessing history god damn it. Forget the moon landings (which weren’t faked by the US government) and the 2000 Grand Final (which was), people should take note of what they were doing this afternoon because it will come up in trivia contests for years to come.

Obviously sensing the prospect of even bigger celebrations in the future The Russian Record Holder was then benched for the rest of the quarter. From there on, with the great man taking his bows on the bench, it was pure and simple junktime slop for everybody. Great news for the 15 or so Essendon players who would have been looking over their shoulder wondering what godforsaken ground they’d be lucky to avoid visiting with the reserves next week. Finally given some space GOB Watson helped himself to a bunch of cheap touches and they got the margin all the way back to 19 points. No harm done other than to the idiots who had a double with Melbourne 25-48 as one of the legs. Thank god the Bulldogs touched up Carlton by significantly more than I had them to or there would have been bitterness. The rudest moment was when Davey took the mark and kicked the set shot - I've watched one half of the Davey family long enough to know that they're a toss of the coin from set shots at the best of times. Now was not the time to start getting it right. Rude. Still, the TAB can have small amounts of my money any time they like as long as the reason I lose is because the team wins. Shame we had to let them back into at the end, but the cue was jammed firmly in the rack fifteen minutes into the term so enjoy it for what it was, a rare moment of sheer indifference with the four points locked away.

Like an idiot I took too long to get to the rooms post-game and missed most of the action (although from the video on the website it didn't look like anybody was in there when they sung the song anyway). Cue heaps of standing around watching shirtless men do stretches. I did enjoy seeing Miller and Danny Hughes on their phones knowing 100% that they were posting to Twitter, then checking minutes later to find out that was exactly what they were doing. I was equally excited to discover that not only has former cult figure contender John Meesen got into the Twitter, but that his username is The Meesiah. Damn straight, can’t we send him to Europe and get that foot right? We want Meesen Magic at the MCG and we want it now.

Advertising Standards Tribunal Watch
Forget the sexist drivel that is "The Brut Code" and their rubbish TV ads, how's that Bet 24/7 one that they play at games where old mate gets offered a happy ending by the masseuse? Good luck explaining that to your kids if they ask what it means. As we discovered earlier in the day the only place for children to be exposed to filthy language and depraved concepts is in a football club change room.

Even more offensive is that the character in the ad was from a TV show which was on for ten minutes before being axed due to a staggering lack of interest from the viewing public. Yet somehow somebody in an advertising agency thought the concept was so amusing that they handed money over to use the character in an ad. Tremendous stupidity and I hope both the advertising agency and the betting company both go down the tubes for it.

Coaches Corner
After Richmond completed their six week transformation from "utter slop" to "half decent" (won't last) on Saturday night I had a sick fantasy that if we'd lost today the start of Bailey's press conference would go a little like this.

Reporter: "So Dean, Brad Scott and Damien Hardwick seem to be going pretty well in their first season as coach. What's wrong with you?"
*Bailey leaps the desk and strangles the reporter to death with a microphone cable*

Might still have happened I suppose, but homicide thankfully not required due to the win, which is bad news for those who believe that a few journos getting strangled might raise the quality of football reporting.

2010 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Brad Green
4 - Mark Jamar
3 - Colin Sylvia
2 - Lynden Dunn
1 - Cameron Bruce

Apologies to Trengove, Frawley, Moloney, Cheney, Garland, Bartram, Bate (second half), McKenzie and Macdonald.

Leaderboard

Green out to a near unassailable lead in the Jakovich, and we pay out on Frawley in the Seecamp next week unless another defender gets at least four votes. Interesting none of the top five have ever lifted a Jakovich before, with defending champion Davey a massive 20 votes off the lead with seven games to go.

33 - Brad Green
23 - James McDonald, Mark Jamar (WINNER: Strawbs O'Dwyer Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
19 - James Frawley (Leader: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
14 - Matthew Bate
13 - Aaron Davey
12 - Jack Grimes
11 - Jack Trengove (Leader: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
10 - Brent Moloney, Colin Sylvia
8 - Jordan Gysberts
7 - Jordie McKenzie
6 - Lynden Dunn
5 - Ricky Petterd, Tom Scully, Jamie Bennell
3 - Matthew Warnock, Brad Miller
2 - Cameron Bruce, Neville Jetta, Clint Bartram, Jack Watts
1 - Jared Rivers, Joel MacDonald, Nathan Jones, Colin Garland

Crowd Watch
You'd think that the perceived rorts that the Bombers were subject to all day would have caused their fans to turn homicidal and burn the joint down. Maybe they did somewhere else, because in the Demonblog section of middle deck of the Ponsford they were surprisingly quiet. Guilty conscience I reckon because deep down they knew the decisions were right. The best they managed was a bit of half hearted booing at the end of the second quarter, and one guy in front of me leapt up shouting and waving his arms in the air like Jake Spencer standing the mark.

Draft Corner
5.5 wins and no more priority picks of any kind. Thank christ for that. Here's to this win closing the gate on our shameful era of existing on charity handouts…

Financial Crisis
… but speaking of handouts need I say what a good idea it is to donate to Debt Demolition? You won’t get a chicken dinner with Josh Mahoney out of it and you can’t deduct it from your taxes, but even if you can only tip in $20 everything counts. Can you imagine what we’d be like today if Gardner/McNamee had still been in charge? If there’s any reason to give it’s to say thanks to the Stynes/Schwab team who have dragged us off the canvas financially over the last two years.

Next Week
Fremantle in Perth. Well, we all know what's going to happen there don't we? Surely the Dockers won't let themselves get dudded at home after dropping a match to Richmond. Either way the irresistible clash is going to be Jamar vs Sandilands - surely The Russian is already a cert to at least make the All-Australian bench, but if he wins the big clash next week then he's got to at least be in contention for the top job. If you'd told me I'd be writing that two years ago I'd have had you committed under the Mental Health Act 1986. The world is an amazing place.

Final Thoughts
Right now we're only 1% closer to 16th than 8th. Stop the season, I'll take 11th.

Welcome To The Leisuredome*

(* Let the fact that it's not, nor has it even been a real Dome detract from the ordinary, Frankie Goes To Hollywood inspired, title. Frankie Say Relax.)

The omens for this afternoon were bad a long time before the tipping dog in The Age picked every other game to be closer than ten points, and for St Kilda to win by 99. Ridiculous tipping by the worst newspaper dog since Fred Bassett aside, we were in trouble for this one from the moment the ball was bounced at Football Park last week. For, in case you've been held hostage in Iraq for the last few years, St Kilda are quite good. Relatively speaking of course, because most things could be considered 'quite good' when you've got 110 years of losing to compare it with. Contrasting the air of moral bankruptcy which wafts over Junction Oval, Moorabbin, Frankston wherever they play this week, was the Melbourne Football Club. Cornerstone of all that is right and true in Australian society we may be, but after four years of playing punching bag to the world only the most optimistic or masochistic showed up to Corporate Stadium to watch us today. I was in the second camp, and the question was whether it would be more or less painful to go to the game or to a BDSM dungeon and let somebody go nuts with the whips.

First surprise of the day was that we were only $6 in the betting. It seemed fairly low odds considering our respective successes and disasters in the last round. Admittedly that still puts you as a massive underdog in a two-horse race, but we've been at bigger odds against worst teams in the last couple of years. It can't have been Kosi's omission that did it, he wouldn't trouble a school side this year, but there must have been somebody out there with too much time and money sensing a miracle in the making. Maybe it was a reaction to the Saints taking the piss in a massive way by sending out a side to face us featuring Peake (Freo reject), Pattison (Richmond reject) and Dawson (Hawthorn reject). Was never going to be an issue anyway because the match was the real life equivalent of when you play somebody in Supercoach who put their team in before Round 1, lost interest and haven't made a change all year. You can get away with three zeros because your opposition has got a squad with more holes than Swiss cheese and will score nothing. In case you're having trouble following this ludicrously convoluted analogy we're the cheese – and not the one that smells nice.

In the world of technological innovations Bailey joined the bandwagon and coached from the sidelines for the first time. Fair enough if you want to try something new and exciting because everybody else is doing it (I love how coaching has the sort of peer group pressure that you see in high schools. If Paul Roos starts ripping Winnie Blues on the sidelines it's all over), but if you're the sort of guy considering starting The Spencil at FF then you'd might as well coach from a payphone at Kananook railway station for all the good it's going to you. Maybe he’s starting to feel guilty about hanging around all the assistant coaches and assorted flunkies that he’s going to have to sack at the end of the year to try and keep his job next season? I can see it now, Josh Mahoney sitting there going “Yeah Dean, we’re going to be great next year aren’t we?” and Bails nervously adjusting his collar and starting to blush.

So, for all the talk of how our intensity had been shithouse and how we were going to come out and make a big stand at the opening of the match this week we proceeded to be absolutely shit for the first fifteen minutes. Remember a week ago when we made a big song and dance about how we were going to get our farcical travelling record right, and now this. Next week for god’s sake nobody is allowed to mention the 2000 Grand Final or the day Matthew Lloyd took a dive against Nicho and got the double free to win them the match. There was a stat on SEN that is probably the most damaging thing that I've ever heard about The Bailey Era, correct me if I'm wrong on what I heard for I can't be arsed doing the maths myself, but I'm sure they said that since he took over we are down 350 odd points in the first ten minutes of games. That is an inexplicable outrage. You'd like to think that a coach would have no control over that sort of thing but bloody hell somebody's got to put their hand up and say something's wrong because we've had a lot of players go through the team in that time and they can't all be responsible.

Truth be told Spence wasn't too bad at the centre bounces (relatively speaking), but he was pretty rank around the ground. My highlight was when he took his first mark and the crowd gave off a little cheer, then he completely torched one that was about 500 times easier. Later on he'd drop a sitter in the square to cost us a goal. It was that sort of day. So we've got two options, exile him back to Casey to go around with the rest of the forgotten men or to just throw him out there for the rest of the year and hope for an absolute miracle. I'll give you scenario (C); we play him no matter what just to protect Jamar. We've finally struck gold on a ruckman who is in career best form, what do we gain from here by running him into the ground by playing him on his own in the ruck for 90% of the game when we're not playing for anything anymore? Gawn won't play seniors this year, Johnson is proven mediocrity and Meesen is veering dangerously close to Harold Holt style "we can't prove that they're dead but we're pretty sure of it" territory.

Our options are to go in with two proper talls and hope for the best or to flog Jamar to death with token appearances in the middle by forwards who have no idea what they're doing AND aren't tall enough to even convincingly fake it. I have no faith in the Spencil selling his soul at midnight to the devil and suddenly becoming a gun in the next six weeks, but I know that we've finally got one ruckman in the best form of his life and I want to make sure that he's ready to go come Round 1 next year when we can realistically expect to be a better side.

It's not tanking, it's an insurance policy against our future because unless we can trade for a decent ruckman in the off-season - which is unlikely - then we're one Russian disaster away from having to go to the likes of Spencer anyway. I want Jamar to play every game, and I want him to play the majority of the game in the centre but let's be frank any half decent team is going to have to absorb some spud-like players in the team and compensate so we'd might as well get a handle on it now.

So after being bashed senseless for the first fifteen minutes of the match we finally got a goal through Nifty Nev and for the rest of the quarter it was like a completely different team was out there. Dunn missed an absolute sitter for what would have been our second, but after the Spencil stuck a big mitt out and intercepted a Goddard handball to set up Green then Beamer got one, god help us all we were nearly level with them at quarter time. The way we’re going I’ll take ‘nearly’ as a victory. Reminded me a bit of Round 22 last year except this time we might have had some minor interest in winning instead of rolling over to rort the draft.

Then in the second quarter a pattern started to emerge when the Saints smacked us around for the first fifteen minutes again before we did anything. This would happen again in third, and then to a ridiculous degree in the last where we took a good 25 minutes before even going inside 50. That we got so close without the Saints ever really pulling the pin and letting us back into it is a good sign, but bloody hell how big was the gap between the sides? Even when we got back into it during the third quarter there was this feeling that they were just playing with us. I despise their club openly and every time somebody uses the term "Saints Footy" I want to garrotte them with piano wire, but they've definitely got something about them at the moment. On the odd occasions where we actually had a forward line and kicked it in there they'd outnumber us, then get the ball out to the wing with free players running everywhere and kick inside 50 to at least a one-on-one, if not another guy on his own. At least in the clinches we were putting pressure on and causing them to make mistakes, that's the least you can do when a team is going to run around you all day - make them work for it when the ball hits the ground. It's all the other times that it gets dicey.

At least no matter what else you remember from today you can say you saw, live and in person, one of the worst misses in VFL/AFL history. On one hand I'm surprised it didn't come from one of our players, but realistically you have to get the thing down there first before you can stuff it up. Stand proud then young Rhys Stanley (never heard of him), who managed to completely cock it up in the square and ensure that he will feature in every single highlights package put together from now until the end of time – possibly with the Benny Hill Show music playing in the background. When they announce that the meteor is finally coming to kill us all at any minute there will be people charging to YouTube to watch it one more time before we're all wiped out. I'd say the guy (was it Malcolm Blight?) who stormed into the open 'goal' and kicked it straight through the points would probably have him covered for the all-time best but this would have to go close. My favourite bit was the pissweak effort he makes at kicking it out of the air just before it bounces through. Mind you they almost got one back in the last when the ball landed in front of Jamar just outside the square and almost bounced back in on a ludicrous angle. I feel like this is where I should write something about the Saints and justice but there's nothing to say that wouldn't land me with a cease and desist letter. Speaking of Blight, what the hell is he wearing in this video?

I can't split the award for worst miss I've ever seen in an MFC jersey between Ben Holland missing from the square in the last game at Optus Oval, or Jamar marking on the line and stuffing it up trying to play on against Essendon in 2008. Both worthy contenders that I will be screaming bloody murder about and blaming while being wheeled into an operating theatre after having my third heart attack. The blame on the first two are reserved for Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders respectively.

Speaking of Jamar related disasters (and we get so little chance these days now that he’s a great man) how when he got pinged for smacking the ball through from the ball-up in the last quarter? Now, I'll accept the argument that technically it may have been correct - after all he hardly tried to disguise it - but is there any danger in the world that they would have paid that in a high profile, tight game? That's my problem with this rule. Of course it wouldn't have been a problem if we hadn't wandered out of the square at the kick-in AGAIN, but forget the AFL and their bloody rules DVD because we should have to take notice of it when the umpires do. At least now you know that the Kurt Tippett fiasco last week was just cutting out the middle man because we would have copped the goal anyway. Unless you're suggesting that the umpiring standards veer wildly on a week to week basis, and surely THAT couldn't happen could it? Not with this glorious administration in charge of the great game. I thought it was ironic that in the two weeks of the World Cup when poor officiating has been a blight on soccer football’s greatest showpiece that the league would decide to over-umpire dramatically instead of easing off a bit and showing why our game is so good.

So eventually we not only got one inside 50 in the last quarter, but actually scored a point. Then god forbid we even got a goal, yes it's come down to these small mercies for the Dees. One thing I found troubling, and nearly offensive, was when Watts - who had been doing some really good work around the ground now that Bailey has come to the decision that he'll be dropped if he goes near the goalsquare - took the ball in the middle of the ground, looked up and the only target he could see was Spencer. If he ends up dicking us and joining the Gold Coast I'm blaming that moment. It was like caviar kicking to a Quarter Pounder. Surely after the strong contested mark he took on the lead for the goal he kicked earlier in the game the kid (the good one) could go up front and get in the mix down there - especially when the game is well and truly lost and we could do with some experimentation. Thought he did a really good job around the ground, and never looked as troubled in traffic as he did against the Pies. MORE PLEASE, and on the back of another rancid performance by Nick Nat for the Eagles are the peanuts in the press and on the internet finally going to accept that you can't judge the worth of a draft ten minutes after the names are announced.

Speaking of kids, Trengove was good but if Hannebery doesn’t win the Rising Star then they’re all on drugs. Hopefully he biffs somebody and gets suspended at some point – or goes on another end of school year egg throwing rampage – so Trengove can score a Bradbury style victory.

What Stephen Milne Did
[SNIP! - Demonblog legal department]

Crowd Watch
Congratulations to the person sitting next to me (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) who came to the sudden realisation that Etihad was an airline and not a person when an ad came on the big screen offering business class flights to Paris. Magic moment.

Apart from this touch of greatness, and the foul creature across the aisle from me who hocked a loogie onto the staircase during the third quarter, the humanoids were suffering a distinct lack of interest in the match. The Saints fans could barely get interested about grappling with bottom four buffoons, and the only time our 27 fans raised any noise was during the brief third quarter rally. Special mention should go to the lady behind me who was giving it a bit of "ooh Lenny, ooh Dal, ooh Stevie" every time they went near the ball. But never for Peake, Pattison or Dawson surprisingly. There was a definite sense that she'd been down to the members end at Moorabbin and faced a couple of balls in her younger days.

Lookalike Central
I know Kyle Cheney was probably stoked that his lookalike Brock Lesnar had pulled off such an exciting and gutsy win at UFC 116 just two hours before the first bounce, but did he have to spend the whole day trying to kill Brendon Goddard?


Brock

Kyle

Ok, so I'm the only person in the world who sees it. Move on.

2010 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Jordie McKenzie
4 - Jack Trengove
3 - Brad Green
2 - Jack Watts
1 - Mark Jamar

Apologies to Macdonald (rancid first quarter cost him any chance), Moloney, Dunn, Rivers and Jones

Leaderboard
I'm leaving open the chance of somebody making a late run at the Jakovich, but in the absence of Grimes – and the possibility that when he comes back he might end up DQ’ed for spending too much time in the midfield, bookies are poised to pay out on Frawley in the Seecamp unless somebody starts a run next week. Mind you bookies paid out on Richmond winning the spoon and look how well that's going for them right now. Elsewhere Trengove wrests back leadership of the Hilton from Q*berts, setting up a ding-dong battle between those two and Scully for the rest of the year.

In other news after all these years I’m considering renaming some of the awards. It’ll be put to a public vote but more legit nominations for players to be honoured with the Seecamp and Hilton will be accepted from now. Obviously the Strawbs is going to be renamed after Jim Stynes so there’s no point even pretending to be democratic about that.

28 - Brad Green
23 - James McDonald
19 - James Frawley (Leader: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), Mark Jamar (WINNER: Strawbs O'Dwyer Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Matthew Bate
13 - Aaron Davey
12 - Jack Grimes
11 - Jack Trengove (Leader: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
10 - Brent Moloney
8 - Jordan Gysberts
7 - Jordie McKenzie, Colin Sylvia
5 - Ricky Petterd, Tom Scully, Jamie Bennell
4 - Lynden Dunn
3 - Matthew Warnock, Brad Miller
2 - Neville Jetta, Clint Bartram, Jack Watts
1 - Jared Rivers, Joel MacDonald, Cameron Bruce, Nathan Jones, Colin Garland

Around The Grounds
I expected North to follow our path to hell and back as they rebuilt their side, but they're massively exceeding expectations. Even though they're unlikely to make the eight Brad Scott, and equally as importantly I'd say Darren Crocker, deserve credit for massaging a team chock full of absolute nobodies into a side that might get stuffed by the big guns but can at least knock over teams in our class without breaking a sweat.

Adelaide are doing what we could have done in 2007 if we hadn't stuffed up the draft so badly in the few years before. When they got stiffed by the senior players they threw the kids into mix and the combination has started to reap some rewards. When our experienced players lost the plot we had nobody else to come in and were cast into football exile for three years (and counting).

Then there's Richmond. Six weeks ago they were the worst side ever, a bad joke who weren't going to win a game and should be ashamed of themselves and now they're in better form than anything we've offered in the last three seasons. I'm still holding onto a childlike dream that everything's going to be alright for us but you can understand why people get shirty when they see teams recovering from the brink or avoiding it altogether while we're still lying at the bottom in a crumpled heap waiting for the ambulance to show up.

Thank christ for West Coast. Wait, what do you mean they beat us?

Next Week
Essendon at the MCG on Sunday. Given our respective efforts at Football Park over the last couple of weeks this game should be sponsored by a rival insurance company as the "We Hate AAMI Stadium Cup". They're so flaky that they could very well come out and lose to us, but we're almost as much of a team of manic depressives so who knows what will happen? You'll go broke tipping us to win, but even without Grimes for a few weeks (*wail*) I've got a funny feeling that we might get up. They're just the kind of side for us to play, not shit enough to think we're going to get up and not good enough to be an absolute certainty to win like the Saints were.

Final Thoughts
At least we were ten goals better than that bloody dog thought we'd be.

Touch It You Rubbish

I'm sure if you went back and looked through every single post on this site from 2005 onwards about games where we played in Adelaide there would be some mention of Andrew Leoncelli, his goal with three seconds left, and an increasing frustration that we've never been able to win there since. Save yourself the trouble and wait for Demonblog: The Book, I'll tell you that it's been a heavy motif. At first when the streak was sitting at four years it was more of a curiosity, in the same way that in 1968 winning a premiership didn't seem so long ago, but as the years have worn on our average losing margin to both Port and the Crows has blown out to something approaching the score in the 5th set of that match at Wimbledon and it's just not funny anymore. And before you do anything else make sure you go down to 4.05pm in this report of that match and read on for what is almost certainly the greatest piece of sports writing since Hunter S. Thompson went to the Kentucky Derby.

Various theories about our inability to win in Adelaide have been floated over the last week, but whatever the reason is the fact remains that from three seconds after Leoncelli kicked his winning goal we've fielded sides more likely to win a shuffleboard tournament aboard the QE2 than a game of football in South Australia. It's no wonder Joel Macdonald got a recall, at least he's played in a winning side there for the Lions - for whatever that's worth. Bruce and Green played in wins there during 2000/2001 but I wouldn't surprised if even they can't remember it. The last time we won there was Darren Jolly's first game for god's sake and he's played for half the league since.

"But Adelaide are pure rubbish!" everyone cried, "if we don't beat them now we never will". I thought that once too - 'twas mid 2004, Gary Ayres had been run out of town on a rail and some old mate nobody had ever heard of called Neil Craig was in charge of his first match. We'd won three in a row and had shot up to second on the ladder, while the Crows languished in mid-table obscurity. "What about the excellent record of first game coaches?" you probably said at the time, "Pure urban myth!" I spat back (or so I'd like to think). They duly tonked us by 72 points. The next week we beat the top of the ladder Saints by ten goals. This is a cursed place that we're talking about.

The win in Darwin took some of the curse off our inability to win anywhere west of Docklands, but when we haven't even won in Perth since 2004 - despite at least one of Fremantle and the Eagles being rubbish for almost every year since then - where else were we supposed to go to try and get our mojo back. East Timor?

And so, thrown into the odd position of being one of only three games for the second half of the split round the papers were alive with stories about our players, all eyes were on Football Park to see if we could break the drought. In fact with it being easily the least interesting of the three matches for the week I'd be surprised if there were more than a handful of eyes (both full and Victoria Park style one real/one glass varieties) on the match. Fox Sports executives were obviously so worried that people would turn over the South Park marathon on the Comedy Channel or repeats of Cops episodes from 1992 that the commentators (more on them later) were instructed to talk the match up as a titanic contest which could be the difference between us playing finals and not. It wasn't, we won't and halfway through the second quarter I started to consider flicking over to Cops to see some criminal behaviour that I didn't have an emotional interest in.

By the time the ball was bounced I'd worked myself up into a frenzy about how this was the time, this was the team and how history (relatively speaking) was going to be made. Then five minutes later the Crows had kicked 1.5 to nothing and for all intents and purposes we were stuffed. Collingwood had let us off the hook two weeks ago with rubbish kicking but at least we were getting something out of the middle that day, this time the Crows learnt the lesson and just sat on us in the centre like some kind of sick German fetish video. Surely nobody was surprised that after the Jamar/Moloney Psychic Friends Connection had been talked up so much over the last fortnight that Adelaide would subject Beamer to the mother of all tags. I suppose he might have busted the tag, got 35 touches and racked up three Brownlow votes, but he didn't and we were much worse for it. And we don't do Plan B. Not only could he barely get near it, but when he did he sprayed the thing everywhere on route to a 58% disposal efficiency. He's still a great man, but surely opposition coaches were sitting on their couch yesterday going "ahh, there's an idea", and his future is being tagged to death for the rest of the season.

Speaking of Jamar he may have got very little around the ground yesterday but he was serviceable in the centre again, especially considering that once again he had zero help other than a brief cameo from Miller who just leapt in the air and threw his arm out in hope more than anything. He got more hit-outs than the entire Crows team combined, but with the midfield clamped down something rotten we were getting no benefit out of it. I just hope we're not about to turn him into the next Nathan Carroll, sans peacock haircuts and alcohol fuelled violence. Remember how halfway through 2006 Carroll had shot from also-ran to a potential All-Australian only to get a bit of publicity, get completely exposed and end up being teed off on by the full-forwards of the world for the rest of the year. I'd like to think The Russian (or is it The Belgian?) is made of sterner stuff than the other bloke, but there's no doubt that by the time the media have started writing stories about how well you're going, that 15 other coaches are all over it and working on plans to counter you.

Eventually after a quarter of epic toil against the general run of play we managed another one of our famous one goal first quarters, but at the other end Adelaide had effortlessly kicked four - including Tippett capitalising on the sort of comedy capers not seen since the 2006 when we played the Eagles and stuffed up a kick-in FIVE TIMES IN A FREAKING ROW before they finally took pity, and an 11 point play, by kicking a goal. First Bartram walked out of the square kicking in, and not even at the top end of it like he was trying to get distance, then despite everybody in the ground, watching on TV and sitting in a hut in Outer Mongolia knowing that the first thing Jamar would try to do was rush the ball from the bounce Tippett was allowed to get free in the square. The punch lacked a bit of vigour, the Crow lacked an opponent and the simplest of goals was duly kicked. Shut the gate, stick a fork in it, *insert your favourite cliche* we were stuffed.

Realistically we were only 21 points down, but that was never going to last. Suddenly the Crows were playing like last year when they were good, and we were unfortunately playing like last year when we were shite. Still, I'm sure if it was that easy to stitch a side up just through pressure they would have done it well before now rather than waiting until they were scraping the bottom of the ladder. We were nothing if willing participants to this massacre. They've been in better form than we have recently, and don't forget since the Brisbane miracle we've won 1.5 matches by 1 point in total, but the fact remains that they're sporting a player called Rory Sloane who looks like Leif Garrett and if we're going to allow ourselves to be pushed around by that sort of outfit we might as well put the FOR SALE sign up and move the team to Poowong.

I know that rebuilding a team from scratch via the draft is like trying to put a third world country back together after a natural disaster, but like the poor bastard whose house has just fallen off the side of a mountain in Bolivia I'd like to know that there's some light at the end of the tunnel and we're not just wasting our time waiting for a miracle. The only thing you can be sure of with this team is that once we're well out of the game they'll start having a proper crack at it, the only difference was that today instead of doing it when they were five goals down they waited until the margin had blown out to 47. Dunn, who I thought was bloody good, and one of the few to come out of it with much credit, got one after the siren to make it a slightly less outrageous shade of disrespectable.

Next thing you know we're only four goals down and things start to look at least moderately interesting again. I'd love to see a comparison between our first quarters and third quarters for the year, because it seems to me whatever they're saying at the long break is having significantly more effect on the team than whatever they're saying before the match. Adelaide did their bit by kicking 1.9 for the term and, much like the Carlton game, we'd come back from a potential third quarter caning to at least within striking distance at the final change. We've lost from better positions than 25 points in front at the last change, it wasn't insurmountable. But the problem was we should have been about 65 down. Moloney had broken the shackles a bit but the Crows had a truckload of chances to put us away and couldn't manage it. A good side would take advantage. A good side wouldn't have come from 47 points behind.

Once again we were treated to the sight of key forward prospect Watts taking marks across half-back and roaming the midfield. I know we only ever seem to kick to targets inside 50 if they're running back with the flight of the ball and nobody in the same coloured jumper within miles but is there any danger at all that he could be put up there as a target sometime soon? I know he's built like a supermodel and will get killed in one-on-one situations but I'm not suggesting leaving him up there on his own and booting the thing a mile in the air to the contest. He's obviously got good hands - ignore the one he dropped in the third term - kick it down there with him, Bate, Dunn and god help us even Miller down there and see who can pluck one out of the air. Seems to work for the teams who play against us, and has been a tried and true staple of the game for a hundred years so it might be worth a crack at some point.

I liked Dunn's game, just as I did against the Pies, and I'm crossing my fingers that he's finally going to hold down a spot in the side and be left in one place for more than a game at a time. But can somebody explain to me what's going on with his facial hair? First there was the ludicrous vaudevillian moustache he sported in his pre-season profile photo, and now there's some sort of really bad teenager looking growth stretching across his lip that is threatening to make me ill. I couldn't quite make out if it was a mo or not at first - and maybe that sort of thing is the reason they invented 3D TV's - but the general consensus was that he's rocking some sort of really bad job across the top lip that was being accentuated by the wearing of a mouthguard. It's unnatural, immoral and needs to be stopped as soon as possible - by force if necessary. What I did like was the goal he kicked when he grabbed it out of the ruck contest and dribbled it in from 20 metres out - that's the sort of inventive stuff that we're sorely lacking at the moment. If I show up next week and he's tagging Nick Dal Santo I'll scream.

Also interesting to note that Watts is pretty much the only player who we might want next year that we haven't signed up. Just imagine the outrage if it came out that he'd dicked us and signed with the Gold Coast. I've threatened the internet collapsing on football related matters before, but this really would be the end of it. He'd probably be the biggest heel at Melbourne since Barassi left, and at least Ron did something before he went and redeemed himself later. There's not nearly enough hate for J**d from our fans, but if this happened? Batten down the hatches when we play them for the first time because it might get violent.

Speaking of draft picks, where's Morton at? He looks good pushed up the ground but I'm starting to have Nicholson-esque heart palpitations every time he gets the ball. Did we really use a #4 pick on somebody just to use him as a loose man in defence? I'll cut SCULLGOVE slack in their wonky kicking to targets because they've played about 20 games between them, but 45 games into his career what are we doing with this guy? I preferred his first year model when he kicked 12 goals in a rancid team. Now he's just hanging around, doing a couple of good looking things here and there but generally being anonymous. He's probably suffering from intense psychological trauma from playing in just 7 wins in 45 matches - lie him down on the couch and bring in a psychologist if you have to, just give us our Cale back.

Then there's our backline. What has stood up masterfully in the face of constant bombardment over the last few years suddenly looks brittle and ready to snap at any minute. Frawley is the only one of the talls I've got any confidence in at the moment, and although Garland played a great last three quarters against Collingwood he always looks panicked. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that his facial expression never changes. Also according to my mum he is a dead-set lookalike for Ben Holland, which is no consolation at all. I'd almost have the Stefan Martin Experience down there - if I knew what had happened to him - the injury list on our website is notoriously out-of-date and wonky but he's not listed on it, nor did he play in the Casey/Williamstown fiasco of a fortnight ago. Another cult hero (for me anyway) chewed up and spat out by the system.

The worst thing about being rubbish is that every Monday morning I have to play Football Inquest with every single person in my office, because obviously none of them have ever met a Melbourne fan before in their lives. The number of times I've had to having a standing conversation about why we can't win at Football Park so far this morning is ridiculous. If I knew why we weren't I'd be too busy writing a 400 page dissection letter to the club/South Australian travel brochure ("watch out for Snowtown, don't ask what happened to the Grand Prix") to stand around having chats and gossips about why we don't consider playing with a forward line to be crucial in today's football.

Fashion Week
Those white jumpers are truly awful. They're a step up on the silver monstrosity of a few years ago, but it wasn't much of a benchmark to beat. Firstly why did we have to wear our clash jumper in the first place? Was it just because the Crows play with a dark jersey? Don't tell me we're forever destined to have to wear different jumpers if there's the slightest of clashes after that pink umpire debacle. And what's wrong with a red clash jumper? Maybe if we're playing Essendon I'll accept that the white might be an option - as if a sash really makes any difference - but outside of that there's no excuse for it.

And what's the obsession with the winking Batman logo? The mailout during the week promised that a new logo is going to be unveiled before the end of the year, and I can tell you that if that rubbish character is featured on it then I'll riot. Even the 80's logo which looked like a trident wielding child molester would be preferable to that rubbish.

Crowd Watch
The scrolling advertising signs at Football Park put me off. You're watching a piece of sparkling play (not by us) and suddenly in the background there's an ad for Farmers Union Iced Coffee. No wonder we can never win there. Did anybody else see the one that said JESUS today? I'm glad the people I was watching with saw it as well otherwise I'd think I was going crazy. Getting messages about religious figures from your television set is the first step, and the next thing you're running from the cops across the MCG footbridge carrying a shotgun.

Kommentary Korner
If you gave me the option of sacrificing my life for one of the commentary team today I'd offer you all three of them. Healy is at best a chat show host, Frawley's only half decent role in life is to the Billy Brownless-lite buffoon for Triple M and Dwayne Russell... My god. How many times did you count him refer to something we did "last week" as if the split round had never happened? And what about when somebody has a shot to the goalsquare with an opposition player sitting there patiently waiting to mark it and he flies off the handle like somebody's kicked one to win the Grand Final. Face facts Dwayne, for all your glib catchphrases and attempts at comedy you'll never be even a low rent version of Dennis Commetti.

The only one who comes out of that lineup with any credit is Colbert and he's exiled to the boundary line. I never thought I'd be hankering for a Liam Pickering/Matt Campbell double act, but there you go. In fact I'd go as far as saying I'd given the choice rather be tied in a chair and forced to listen to the Gladiators of Sport on SEN (the worst radio program ever, including community radio) than to be forcibly subjected to the Best of Dwayne.

Stat My Bitch Up
Great news for Nathan Jones, despite our continuing mediocrity his career win/loss record (24.39%) is now only good for third worst amongst active players. Step forward Paul Johnson (20.63%) and Josh Kennedy (23.28%). If it's any consolation to them at least they're better than Ted Hall who went 1-72, and got his only win on a technicality in a protest after the match had finished.

Bad news is that he has to go on Twitter and apologise for our performance after every loss because nobody higher up than him has the grapefruits to do it. At least he cares.

2010 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
Only the first two are really deserving, but for the sake of the permanent record some others sneak in. Frawley's votes push him to within striking distance of the leaders and an epic Jakovich/Seecamp double.

5 - Matthew Bate
4 - Lynden Dunn
3 - Jack Grimes
2 - James Frawley
1 - Brad Green

Apologies to absolutely nobody. I'm completely baffled that Scully not only got our BOG in The Age, but he snuck into the votes as well.

Leaderboard
25 - Brad Green
23 - James McDonald
19 - James Frawley (Leader: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
18 - Mark Jamar (WINNER: Strawbs O'Dwyer Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Matthew Bate
13 - Aaron Davey
12 - Jack Grimes
10 - Brent Moloney
8 - Jordan Gysberts (Leader: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
7 - Colin Sylvia, Jack Trengove
5 - Ricky Petterd, Tom Scully, Jamie Bennell
4 - Lynden Dunn
3 - Jordie McKenzie, Matthew Warnock, Brad Miller
2 - Neville Jetta, Clint Bartram
1 - Jared Rivers, Joel MacDonald, Cameron Bruce, Nathan Jones, Colin Garland

Next Week
St Kilda at Docklands on Sunday afternoon. By all rights we should be in for an absolute pasting given that, like Football Park, we can't play there at the best of times. Then there's the imminent return of Riewoldt who will presumably come out and wrest the title of "best in the family" back off his cousin by kicking 11.

Post-match Bailey forecast a hard week on the track for the players and all-round changes at the selection table. How about taking some responsibility for once and making yourself run 50 laps? When we let St Kilda jump to a seven goal lead there's not going to be any foot off the gas third quarter comebacks, we're going to get smashed. Sylvia and McDonald should walk back in but other than that if he's going to talk the talk about swinging the axe let's see it actually happen. We're going to get smashed next week anyway so why not ruin the weekend of a few more superstars of the VFL. Miller and Rivers should be absolute certainties to get the boot, and I'll send Jetta and Macdonald off with them. In come The Spencil (I never thought I'd write that), Cheney, Maric and Bennell. Hard to justify bringing four players in off the back of a 20 goal loss in the 2's, and a week off, but what is there to lose? Cheney and Maric especially have got to get a go soon, I'm not prepared to consign them to the Newton/Meesen "gone for all money" file yet but it seems the club might have by the looks of it.

The only tiny, microscopic sliver of hope that I have for pulling off a colossal upset is that Riewoldt's return somehow manages to stuff up what they've been working on for the past few weeks. Fat chance there. Maybe there's something in the fact that we seem to get up for big games (eventually) but show scant interest in playing against teams at our level. Who am I kidding, we'll be lucky not to go under by a hundred or more.

Final Thoughts
By this time next year I shall have been carted off to the insane asylum.

Demonblog's Mid-Season State of the Union address

So, here we are. Close enough to the middle of the season to start making wild judgements about how well it's gone, and it has gone pretty well all things told. We've had our issues but all things told we're in a much better place than most of the 'experts' had us three months ago. With a bit of luck we might have beaten Collingwood (twice) and the Bulldogs, but then we went out and got totally outplayed by the absolutely shite West Coast Eagles.

Highlight
The last ten minutes of the first quarter against Richmond was unreal - especially the Bate goal after Petterd kept the ball in play - but beating up on the Tigers at that time was like driving through the National Under 12's cycling championships in a Sherman Tank.

So instead fast forward two weeks to that glorious Saturday night at the MCG when we went up against the unbeaten flavour of the month Brisbane and demolished them. Choose to conveniently ignore the fact that their key forwards were both crocked, and instead go back and look at the way we killed them through the middle of the ground. Three wins in a row, everyone (including me) suddenly got excited about making the finals and... we lost to North the next week. Welcome to the wide world of supporting the Dees.

Honorable mention - The first three quarters against Port, bits of the Collingwood and Dogs games, beating Adelaide.

Lowlight
We couldn't have gotten off to a worse start than the Hawthorn debacle, and a bit honorable mention to the last five seconds of the first Collingwood match but there's no way I can go past losing comfortably to the Eagles at the MCG as the most distressing moment of the year.

And now for the hits and misses. Before you get excited and start packing letterbombs to send in it's all in alphabetical order. Shall we?

Hits
Clint Bartram
Jamie Bennell
Aaron Davey
James Frawley
Brad Green
Jack Grimes
Jordan Gysberts
Mark Jamar
James McDonald
Jordie McKenzie
Brent Moloney
Ricky Petterd
Tom Scully
Jack Trengove

Misses
Cameron Bruce
Lynden Dunn
Paul Johnson
Joel Macdonald
The Stefan Martin Experience
Brad Miller
Michael Newton
Jared Rivers
Jake Spencer

Neither Here Nor There
Matthew Bate
Colin Garland
Danny Hughes
Neville Jetta
Nathan Jones
Cale Morton
James Strauss
Colin Sylvia
Matthew Warnock
Jack Watts
Austin Wonaeamirri

Where Are They Now?
Rohan Bail
Kyle Cheney
Addam Maric
John Meesen

Awards
In the event that you gave up on the QB report before the votes, and I don't blame you, here's the leaderboard as it stands after round 12.

24 - Brad Green
23 - James McDonald
18 - Mark Jamar (WINNER: Strawbs O'Dwyer Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
17 - James Frawley (Leader: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
13 - Aaron Davey
10 - Brent Moloney
9 - Jack Grimes, Matthew Bate
8 - Jordan Gysberts (Leader: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
7 - Colin Sylvia, Jack Trengove
5 - Ricky Petterd, Tom Scully, Jamie Bennell
3 - Jordie McKenzie, Matthew Warnock, Brad Miller
2 - Neville Jetta, Clint Bartram
1 - Jared Rivers, Joel MacDonald, Cameron Bruce, Nathan Jones, Colin Garland

So Jamar is home in the Strawbs, Frawley is about $1.01 for the Seecamp but everything else is wide open. Gysberts shot to the top of the Hilton on the back of two quality performances in his first two matches, but both SCULLGOVE are waiting in the wings to nip in and steal it off him. I will not be held responsible if it somehow ends up as a draw between them and looks like I've rigged it.

I expect Green to win from here, but I wouldn't rule out anybody down to Moloney.

The next ten weeks
Thanks to the Pies game we're 6pts above where I thought we'd be at this point of the year. The Brisbane, Adelaide and Port wins plus the Pies draw were unexpected wins I didn't see us having but I would have taken any money on beating North and West Coast.

The rest of the year;
Round 13 - Adelaide (FP)
Well if we're ever going to win a game in Adelaide again this is pretty much it. Unfortunately for us they're on a half decent run at the moment, and we've had the week off and lost a bit of momentum after the Collingwood game. I'd like to think we can get the job done here, but we couldn't win at Football Park when we were good so who knows what's going to happen now.

Round 14 - St Kilda (Docklands)
They'll tonk us. Good test though.

Round 15 - Essendon (MCG)
Completely flaky side. God knows where they'll be at by the time we meet them. They could lose the next couple and beat us or win the next couple and lose. Crackhead football.

Round 16 - Fremantle (Subiaco)
Tonked.

Round 17 - Sydney (MCG)
Slaughtered by injuries up to this point. We're some sneaky chance for this one as long as we can keep our own injury list down.

Round 18 - Brisbane (Gabba)
Well they're not going to let us do whatever we like again. Having said that they're wobbling something chronic right now so they could be doing anything in six weeks time. Another one we could pull out if we get things right.

Round 19 - Richmond (MCG)
A couple of weeks ago you'd tick this one off as an absolute sitter, but god knows what they're going to be like now that they've started winning again. One things for sure they've got very little incentive to roll over and finish last this year so we won't be paid back for the Jordan McMahon fiasco with a free win.

Round 20 - Hawthorn (MCG)
If there's any justice in the world they'll go back to being slop again. There isn't so it's probably another belting.

Round 21 - Port Adelaide (FP)
Surely even if we don't beat the Crows then we can take this rabble. Could be the end of Mark Williams if we do them over.

Round 22 - North Melbourne (MCG)
Playing out of their skin at the moment. Hopefully for our sake they're well out of finals contention and depressed by R22 so we can sneak another cheap victory.

I'll go for three wins and a 7-1-14 season.

The writers of Demonblog humbly apologise to Mark Jamar for every single post written pre-2008. We now recognise that he is the greatest human alive.

What follows is going to be different for two different reasons. Firstly it's the first draw I've ever sat down and written about. The only game in Geelong that I've missed in the last ten years was the draw in 2006 (Guest reporter 'Sideshow Bob' did the honours, and before that the only one I'd ever been to was the Round 7, 1992 debacle against Sydney - and frankly nobody wants to read the thoughts of Adam aged 10.5yrs less than Adam aged 28.5yrs.

I had been to a draw at the MCG before though, last year's Brisbane/Essendon game, so the oh so hillarious novelty of playing "No Second Prize" in the absence of a winning theme song was old hat to me. Lucky too as my sides might have split to a dangerous level at the hilarity of it all. Given the rock bottom standard of music played at the 'G these days I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a joke at all and was just another track on the "I love the 80's" CD that they get the rest of the tunes from.

The other difference is that for the first time in recent history I've stewed on the game for more than 24 hours before sitting down to write about it. Circumstances have dictated that I've barely picked up a newspaper or had time to trawl through forums for reasoned (!) and intelligent (!!?) debate about what happened. It's a far cry from the glory days of 2007/08 when I lived next door to the MCG and could be at home furiously mashing at the keys with my fat fingers before the press conferences. So I've had more than a day to make a decision about whether what happened yesterday was a tragic theft of a magical upset by the evil empire or a battered underdog taking shot after shot but holding on for a draw in the last round of a title fight. And all these hours later I'm still not sure. I'd love to watch the last quarter again, but like a complete moron forgot to set the tape to record the game. There's always the AFL website, but it would be easier to go back in time and kill Hitler than to get it working.

Every year I wake up expecting to hear that Her Maj QE2 has gone gently into that good night and that we're actually playing the Pies in a much anticipated King's Birthday clash. Then you remember that her mother was a Robocop style figure who charged through the century mark in rude health before finally giving up the game at nearly 102 years of age. This match could be referred to as QB for many more years to come.

As much as I loathe the way that we treat this match like our Grand Final - because we're too shit to make a real one - and as much as I want to go around slapping headlocks on the once a year fans who would rather die than come and watch us play Fremantle I'm glad we used it as an excuse to get the surviving members of the 1960 premiership out there. Are you as concerned as I am that we've only got one more 50 year reunion to go? At least we'll always have St Kilda, Footscray and Freo to make us feel better. And by the time they've won the next three flags between them we should be cherry ripe to have a crack at it ourselves.

Somewhat more baffling was the opera singer. Sure she put on a better performance than the last few opera singers to grace the MCG (the Three Tenors and that bird who cocked up the singing at a Grand Final), but it was all a bit random wasn't it? I'm all for singing odes to heroes but how about a bit of Grand Old Flag opera style? If we have to listen to the goose in the velvet jacket belting it out on a trumpet every week then I'm sure somebody can locate an operatic arrangement of it. If in doubt call the Mormons.

Speaking of the guy on the trumpet what was the deal with him suddenly opening with a warm-up blast of Ride of the Valkyries? Now that might very well be the most sinister and foreboding piece of music ever written, but it doesn't quite translate to one bloke on a trumpet in a velvet jacket. Compare and contrast;



Not quite the same was it? If we had a shit theme song like Port, Carlton or Footscray I'd totally lobby to have this adopted as our theme music but give me the full opera version (and wouldn't it have been nice if there was an opera singer present?) or give me death. Either that or a helicopter full of soldiers strafing the Pies cheersquad with machine gun fire. It was interesting to see the Velvet Fog answer the critics who have accused him of being a ring-in that doesn't even follow us by letting out a big "Go Dees" at the end. Actually I don't think there are any critics other than me - and the only thing I've ever seen to back up the claims that he wasn't a Melbourne fan was a forum post by some internet nutbag so it's basically been slander the whole time. Still, we've been paying him for three years so even if he is a Hawthorn fan it's about time he fired up and did something other than playing acid jazz (whatever that is) versions of the classics every second week.

Another nice touch was the retro slogans plastered around the place. Initally seems a bit ludicrous to have signage up claiming what a great team you are when you're two time reigning wooden spoon winners and are struggling to avoid being dragged into that mire again this year but as a nod to history and the old school premiership team it was a winner. Next year I'd like to see one that has no historical background but simply reads "WE INVENTED THIS GAME SO SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP YOU FILTH" - which should speak to Pies fans in language that they will clearly understand.

But that's all warmup. There's no point going nuts on the ceremony if the team of the day is going to walk meekly to their deaths a few minutes later. And if you're going to refer to yourself as the "Masters of the MCG" then the least you can do is come out and try to fool the people by playing like it for a quarter. Cue ten minutes of utter ineptitude which threatened to see his five goals down by the time we kicked one ourself for the first time since... last week.

Travis Cloke did his usual trick of kicking the first goal, missing one soon after and then doing absolutely nothing for the remaining three quarters. The inexperienced observer might have thought that he was set for a day out in the Pie forward line, but do the maths and see just how little he does in the second quarter onwards. From then on Warnock pretty much beat his brains out and might have even snuck himself into the votes if he hadn't botched the kick which ultimately led to us not getting the four points. Admittedly beating up on Travis Cloke is to AFL full backs what crossing the street is to the rest of us, but if you kick it at somebody that big they're going to grab one eventually. And if they have enough shots on goal they're finally going to kick one. Quoth noted street poet Sydney Deane in White Men Can't Jump, "The sun even shines on a dog's ass some days".

Still, after Pendlebury got the second and Neon Leon managed to find the ball whilst bludging off the back of a pack for their third we seemed to be entering a world of hurt. Most weeks we're lucky to kick three goals in a half let alone giving that start up to a red hot team of premiership contenders.

Every week it's a lottery between Bate and Green as to who will spark us after our inevitably shit start, and this week the toss was won by Bater who marked in the goalsquare and goalled courtesy of the most token 50m penalty in AFL/VFL history. What happens if somebody is already kicking from the line and you just start acting like an arsehole to them? Run across the mark, push him over, whisper something in his ear about what their mother gets up to on Polish fishing trawlers. Can you get given a second free kick before you've had the first? A free out of the middle? Or is the threat of getting reported for time wasting the only thing behind somebody making a complete idiot of themselves in this situation? There has to be some get out option for the umpires or I'm sure given the sheer amount of freaks who play footy out there some suburban team would have done it in protest. Alas we weren't treated to any sort of petulant exhibition, and Bater took his kick from 3m closer to goal, on a 1 degree better angle and slotted it. So much so typical Bailey era MFC, the only difference being that our token first quarter goal came sometime before the 27 minute mark.

Wait, then strange things happen. Bradforth J Miller, the man that the term "much maligned" was invented to describe got one as well and somehow we were only ten points behind. This made absolutely no sense given that we'd only been inside 50 about four times while at the other end the Pies forwards were teeing off on us while our defenders wobbled around like drunken sailors in a Mexican whorehouse. Their inability to kick straight, and complete and utter refusal to attack directly down the ground meant that we managed to weather the storm long enough to get back into the contest. It was such a surprise that even Bailey - usually silent and fuming at best - openly cracked the shits when Rivers got turned inside for a mark (thanks to the AFL website for loading the highlights nine hours later) by Cloke just before the siren. Not surprisingly Cloke missed and we were off the hook again. Somehow just ten points down when we probably deserved to be in the same position as last week if not worse.

One thing I'd like to achieve before I die (which will inevitably be about two weeks before we win a flag) is to stand around the huddle of an AFL premiership match and watch a coach work his magic. We’ve all seen suburban coaches in full flight, but they're nothing more than glorious amateurs trying to forget that on Monday they have to get up and go to work in offices, factories or on street corners like the rest of us. Even the VFL coaches lack real spice and belief in their delivery, Peter German was a great one for going off his trolley at the players but it always seemed forced to me. He’d start softly, coaxing his players towards a big effort, and when he wanted to make a point he'd slowly ramp his voice up until it GOT REALLY LOUD AND FORCEFUL before tapering off again. I wonder if a Malthouse or a Thompson use the same playbook for their speeches. You can see Clarkson as a quiet, LOUD, quiet man but what about Bailey? Even Neale Daniher, sometimes so laid back that he was in danger of slipping into a coma, seemed more prone to the quarter or three-quarter time explosion than Bails. The only time our man has ever really publically flipped his lid was the Geelong game in 2007 when we were ten goals down at the first change, and if that’s not going to cause you to go right off and start screaming at people then it's debatable that you’ve even got a pulse.

How do you want your coach to act? Realistically as long as the team is winning then most people would take Kim Jong Il in the box, but oh for the chance to be one of these violently fickle Carlton or Essendon fans who rack up thousands of dollars worth of phone bills praising their coach on talkback radio one week and burying him the next. We had a low rent, Big Issue version of the phenomenon after the first Pies game this year but you've got to be winning nearly half the time at least to get the full Ratten/Knights "are we good or aren't we?" sideshow.

So, take wins out of the equation for a second - I'm dying to see Bails really fulfill his promise as a coaching psychopath. He's already demonstrated a bit of the Laidley/Clarkson-esque slice and dice in press conferences when he's received a stupid question and given the reporter a caustic, sarcastic answer. Even better when he answers a question with a question. But let's see some real emotion, let's see him violently shake Jack Watts in a quarter time huddle, screaming "God damn it man, you could be the best". His face so close to young Jack's that he's visibly taken aback and frightened. Let's see him waving John Meesen's prosthetic foot above his head in a huddle.

It's all well and good to look at the thousand yard stare of Mark Harvey and say "well he's not doing too badly", but give me Aaron Sandilands and Matthew Pavlich and I'll give you a decent side as well. Despite the Dockers being a team who achieved the dream of kicking 1.7 in a match before we did, we're still well further back in the pack than they are. We have no recognised superstars. Green is an uncrowned star, both Davey and Jamar (!) have their claims and Chip Frawley is about five seconds away from breaking into the top shelf of defenders but generally it's a mixture of promising kids and ageing warriors. I want a coach who these kids are going to walk over broken glass for. Maybe that is happening, look at the reaction Bails gave to Chris Johnson when he dropped in at training to say goodbye and look at Beamer Moloney's barbed speech about Brock McLean at the B&F. But how long is that going to last for? If we finish bottom four at the end of this year and sit in the same spot next year then the coaching staff may as well start ringing around pizza shops to see if they need a delivery boy because they are Max G-a-w-n. His job is safe for another year, and if we don't start winning there's no miracle short of buying the club outright that'll save him so how about he really starts talking up the kids win, loss or draw. Challenge them publicly if they don't perform. Run down the stairs and start throwing high fives at the crowd when we win a close one. Emotion means nothing if it's not backed up with wins but I just have this sinking feeling that we're going under in a sea of good intentions. Somebody needs to crunt up, and it might as well start at the top.

Am I overanalysing it? Probably. Anyway, what do I know about coaching - if you go back far enough in the archives of this very website you'll posts written by my good self suggesting that the only alternative to Daniher was to go out and sign up Wayne Carey as coach. At that very moment the object of my desire was probably snorting lines off the muff of a Miss Australia and grappling with imaginary dragons in a Gold Coast penthouse.

Err, anyway - there was some sort of match on that had three quarters to run. And somehow we were a chance of winning it. A sneaky half chance, but against a side who insisted on using their natural talents to go forward via platform 11 on Richmond Station at every available opportunity, it wasn't the most ludicrous idea. When Nifty Nev nipped in at the back and stuffed one home for the first goal of the term it was still ludicrous but somehow we'd managed to wrest the momentum away - even if the Pies had kicked two behinds to open the quarter. There was a moment of sheer beauty after one of their points, god knows which one as there were so many, when Davey took the kickout and hit a pinpoint pass to a teammate standing on the edge of the centre circle. It was an absolute work of art, and he was on fire in the second term. After being totally shafted by the Blues last week Flash bounced back to play a big part, third only to the dominant Jamar/Moloney partnership, in getting us back into the game.

Speaking of Jamar, when he laid it off to Garland by hand for the long bomb that put us in front it kicked off a remarkable comeback for Col - beaten from pillar post in the first term, and looking desperately nervous over the last few weeks, he played a magnificent second half and was, without completely pre-empting the votes, one of my best. Amazing what playing with a bit of confidence can do for you? Equally amazing how much confidence you can get against a backline of prize spuds like Cloke, Davis and Medhurst.

Of course we couldn't hold onto the lead. Brad Dick, the man who has become to QB games what Mark McGough was to 'the wet' put them back in front and commentary boxes all over the ground nearly imploded in a rush to do a gag about his name. "Lucky Cox, Goldsack and Ball aren't playing" Grow up you peanuts - get yourself into the sort of sophisticated humor that the readers of Demonblog can enjoy on a weekly basis. And now I'm off to a completely unrelated scene at the Cabana Motel.

We lost the plot going forward in the third quarter, but just like the first all Collingwood could do was miss. When Morton kicked a cracker on the run in the last minute we were still well and truly in. Not sure what to think about his game to be honest, it was a great goal and he seemed much more useful when he pushed up the ground but the first quarter and a half it didn't seem like he was any danger of hitting a target. Understandable if you're, say, Al Nicholson but if you're going to be playing the quarterback then you've got to be cleaner with it. Would still love to see him thrown right into the middle one of these weeks, or even forward - from my uneducated position I'm not convinced that we should be wasting a number four pick doing the mop up work around the back. Now watch him win a Brownlow doing it.

Cue the sort of tension that I imagine can only be matched by being involved with the third day of an airline hijacking. Perhaps mindful of my disgraceful showing after the Bail/Petterd fiasco in Round 2 I sat there with my jaw so tightly clenched that at 8.20pm the next night it still hurts, and my forehead thumping with tension like a bass drum. Apparently there were two old birds sitting directly behind us hootering and hollering for the last five minutes like they were being murdered by the Manson Family - I didn't notice it.

Miller got the goal that put us back front, one of the wonkiest snaps of all time and didn't he know it. Had a pretty good game I thought - at least for somebody who we've basically all written off as a lost cause and who had one kick last week. Was pretty much the Brad we've come to know (and love? Only the ladies), a couple of goals, some marks up the ground and dish off handballs like they're going out of style. May as well keep him in the side for now, but let's not get sucked in by a sudden flourish of late season form just when contract time comes rolling around.

What I did notice from listening to the radio is that we had absolutely no idea how long there was left thanks to the ludicrous Channel 10 coverage and their shithouse five minute warning. Any danger one of the radio stations might actually employ their own timekeeper at some point rather than relying on the 'host broadcaster'? They can give you the stats on how many effective kicks anybody has had on a Saturday in May for the last ten years but can't tell you how long there is left unless the right people are showing the game on TV. Farcical.

Jolly got a handball into the square from *Comedy Surname* (who else?) to put them back in front but until then he'd done absolutely nothing. Of course in true "stick it up your old club" style he later appeared to lay out the pass for the game-tying goal. Happily he'd spent the rest of the game getting a lesson from The Russian, and the Lockyer goal was the first time the Pies had taken a set shot at goal from anywhere closer than Brunton Street so I'd say we just about got away with that one.

*Amusing Last Name* showed up again (really? Where do they keep this guy the other 51 weeks a year?) to boot the goal that put them back in front before the man, the myth, the ruckman of my dreams rose from nowhere 20m out directly in front to mark and kick the equaliser. Where was his opponent? Where indeed. Poor Josh Fraser was about 50m away pondering the meaning of life and the Pies defence went out in sympathy. He's actually quite a good set shot, and that put him to 34.13 lifetime. Would have been 35.12 if he hadn't tried to play on in the goalsquare against Essendon in '08 and stuffed it up. But that was many, many years ago when he was starting to dominante the centre but was still a comedy figure around the ground. Now he's a titan and a colossus. If I wasn't convinced it would destroy his career completely I'd go out and buy a jumper with #40 on it.

By this point I felt like a junkie about three days off the juice. Cold, shaking, wondering if maybe there weren't about five million more important things in the world to be getting angsty about. The answer, emphatically is no. Must be sort of how election night feels when you're really into one side of politics or the other and don't just think they're both a bunch of crooks. This year I'll be voting 1 for the Jamar/Moloney Psychic Friends Connection ticket.

Bate put us back in front with a clutch kick, but what I was most impressed with was Watts leading to him 30m demanding the ball. More on the kid in his own special section later on, but given that he'd stuffed up and cost us a goal not long earlier it was a gutsy call. I remember thinking to myself that it was all set up for him to play some part in the finale - probably stuffing it up just to give various internet and media spastics the chance to hammer him. Didn't get it in the end but I was damn impressed that he would lead for it anyway given the situation. Question is why doesn't he lead at other times? Answer is because he's usually on the wing wondering what sort of tactical genius has him looking up to see an empty forward fifty.

Of course we could have been further in front, even before Bate's kick - Green hitting the post at the last minute. Still, that would have had us eleven points in front and we all know what happened last time we got into that situation against the Pies. So, a goal in front but with plenty of time to stuff it up - and up we did indeed stuff it. Warnock's kick just falling short into the arms of Jolly who will probably get dropped for kicking it to a player 40m out in front and not to somebody 50m out on the boundary line. Not surprisingly this simple piece of football put Lockyer in the perfect spot to kick a goal and he did. Too much time left, both teams almost out on their feet, this was always going to end in heartache and by christ it nearly did. Nathan Jones erupted in the last couple of minutes with some unbelievable defence efforts - the smother off Dane Swan was absolutely immense.

Eventually via some frantic action in the middle of the ground the siren beat everybody and it was a draw. Cue whinging from talkback gits (Gerard Healy I'm looking at you) about playing extra time. I can't tell from the highlights if Davey was going to cleanly pick the ball up just before the siren but unless he was then I'm glad the siren went because we were nearly out on our feet so if the Pies had managed to clear the ball from that pack it could have gotten ugly. The fact that they hadn't been able to kick straight all day stood for very little when all they needed was a point any way they could get it.

Feels defeatist to say I'm happy with a draw, and every half-arsed Collingwood fan in my workplace has spent the day trying to convince me that we're pissweak for not being upset at not winning but bloody hell how can you not be happy? Forget the fact that it might have gone forward and we might have scored. Ignore the shithouse kicking for goal by the other lot. On form we should have lost that game by ten goals, we took it to them and almost got away with it. It won't affect either side, they'll finish top four and we'll finish bottom four - but what it will do is put another 5000 on the gate next year. I'd rather four points now but bloody hell I'd have taken it with grabby hands if offered at any time in the last six weeks.

I'd love to see Jamar's interview after the game. Everything I've heard about it, and the one second in the 'highlights' confirms the slow-burning (six years in the making) man crush I have on him. Unfortunately due to my poor command of the record button and One HD's refusal to replay it anytime soon it's straight to the torrents. Don't blame me Demetriou, the broadcaster is making me do it. Buy it from Name The Game? How about you blow me Andy.

Kids Korner
Forget SCULLGOVE and Q*Berts for a second - let's talk Watts. I'm not any more certain about his performance yesterday than I am about the result as a whole. He's a bloody good set shot at goal, takes a decent mark and his pass to Dunn in the 2nd quarter was a corker but bloody hell what was going on those two times that he got the ball in traffic, spun around a bit and then got tackled? More importantly what the bloody hell is he doing there in the first place? Put the kid inside 50 and leave him there. I'd love to see how much of his gametime he actually spent inside the 50, because most of the time he seemed to be wandering around half-forward or the wing just waiting to get buried by some black and white tool a'la QB2009.

I vote we keep playing him for the rest of the year - what is there to lose? But for feck's how about playing to his strengths a bit more instead of trying to rope him into this bollocks attacking style that we're so insistent on playing. What I do know is that the next time he gets the ball and traffic and has nobody to give it off to he'll almost certainly just torp it forward rather than go through that again.

Crowd Watch
Playing two of the "big three" in consecutive weeks gives us a good chance to rate just who has the uglier fans. I'm going to say from my perspective there were more ugly Collingwood fans in attendance yesterday, but given that there were probably twice as many of them as Carlton fans the week before it's an undisputed (!) scientific fact that the Blues have uglier fans. Your findings may vary.

I was concerned that the guy two rows in front of me who looked like an 80-year-old Ric Flair was going to have a coronary with the way the Pies were refusing to go through the middle of the ground. Every time the ball went wide down the boundary line he'd bounce up and down on his seat and yell, more to himself than anybody else, "kick it! Just bloody kick! Kick it kick it kick it". Despite the presence of a small, seemingly terrified child two seats to his left I'm not sure he was there with anybody.

Now, post match I attended a birthday party and despite the pleas of the Collingwood fans present not to publish this story I've decided that their reputation has been so irrevocably damaged enough by this that nothing can make their fans appear any stupider. Publish and be damned. So, we're sitting there being the sophisticated gentlemen we are - drinking cheap slop fine wine and discussing Supercoach philosophy when a young lady walks in wearing a Collingwood scarf. "Here we go" I think to myself, already outnumbered by about 7-1 by black and white types, when she walks up to ask and asks "Who won?" Pardon? "I was at work" Not knowing this person I thought it would have been rude to ask "Do you not have a phone, a radio or internet access? In fact do you work on an off-shore oil rig you bint?" But I was thinking it. Somebody told her that they won by ten goals and she was relieved. Then somebody said we'd won and she was horrified. At this point I seriously considered smashing myself over the head with the bottle I was holding and leaping, screaming like a banshee and covered in blood, from the second floor balcony. Didn't do it.

Loser Stats Freak Corner
Don't be ashamed, I'm as big a loser stats freak as anybody. The good news is that we're currently living in a glory era for draws. Our last four were Round 18, 1971, the 1992 Sydney debacle and the 2006 game in Geelong - so we're well ahead of our average at the moment. See you somewhere between 2014 and 2031 (against the Yokohama Robochickens) for the next one.

I'd also like to know the last time teams played two Home and Away games in the one season for a draw and one point result (some examples of similar stats here).

One thing we can’t allow is for the league to give in to pressure from journos – and it’s always journos because nobody else cares – to do something stupid like introducing extra time to home and away games. Of course the media want to get rid of draws, they're not selling many extra papers on the back of them. Please tell me the 'fans' don't really want that rubbish, even if professional ambulance chasers and 'opinion makers' like Hutchy try to tell us you do. If we're going to start taking the long handle to the traditions of the game how about starting with the superfluous shit like cheer squads and the banner. And golden goal. Really? Even the sport that invented it gave that away as a stupid idea.

Talkback Mountain
I know people get excited after a close match, but if you're going to ring up and defend the club's dignity against the barbarians at least be rational. The first two callers to Triple M after the match yesterday made a point of how Pies fans "couldn't handle losing" to us. Let's not go over the top shall we?

2010 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
Maximum votes for the PFC, and Garland sneaks one after giving a great last three quarters after providing 100% pure plums in the first term.

5 - Mark Jamar
4 - Brent Moloney
3 - Aaron Davey
2 - Clint Bartram
1 - Colin Garland

Apologies to Bate, Jones, Frawley, Miller, Morton and Dunn

Leaderboard
24 - Brad Green
23 - James McDonald
18 - Mark Jamar (WINNER: Strawbs O'Dwyer Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
17 - James Frawley (Leader: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
13 - Aaron Davey
10 - Brent Moloney
9 - Jack Grimes, Matthew Bate
8 - Jordan Gysberts (Leader: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
7 - Colin Sylvia, Jack Trengove
5 - Ricky Petterd, Tom Scully, Jamie Bennell
3 - Jordie McKenzie, Matthew Warnock, Brad Miller
2 - Neville Jetta, Clint Bartram
1 - Jared Rivers, Joel MacDonald, Cameron Bruce, Nathan Jones, Colin Garland

Next Week
Nothing. Unless you’re the sort of sick freak who is considering heading down to Pt Gellibrand to freeze your norgs off watching Casey against Williamstown (and by christ I'm tempted) you can devote your weekend to something more positive and constructive. Take your dog for a walk, kick the footy with the kids, crack onto your partner. Even better, crack onto somebody else's partner.

The Week After That
Adelaide in Adelaide. If we lose this we’ll enter next year a full decade from our last win in the state of South Australia. Despite the fact that they’ve picked up their act over the last couple of weeks there has never been a better time to snap our losing streak at Football Park. Ten goal loss coming your way.

Not sure on the changes. Nobody really deserves to go, but you've got to bring Sylvia back if his foot hasn't fallen off, and at some point we're going to have to

Final Thoughts
There’s nothing boring about following Melbourne. Except our first quarters.

Hurricane Shithouse

Today had all the ingredients of a shit day out at the football, and by christ it nearly delivered everything you could have hoped (!?) for. Had the feeling we might go alright today - this was based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever other than a pure white hot hatred of the Carlton Football Club, their shithouse song and the grand slam cockhead who does their pre-match 'entertainment'. Today's 'entertainment' featured kids kicking footys into a bin as part of the day long effort to convince us that Visy are a legitimate sponsor of the club and not just there to pay players outside of the salary cap.

Speaking of the Visy Cap I thought it was a nice touch for the Blues to run through the banner with an ad featuring J**d instead of the one with the traditional (allegedly) inspirational message on it. Scum club, scum business and I wish nothing but bad luck on everyone involved including the estate of Richard Pratt - hopefully the bird that he was (allegedly) knocking off and (allegedly) promised $500k a year to gets everything she's suing it for and more. And while we're at it, fuck recycling - I'm not going to the trouble of separating plastic and paper just so they can use the proceeds to pay players.

About the only thing I do like about them is their coach. Our midfield has never purred like it did when Ratten was in charge, and in retrospect I'm slightly aggrevied that we didn't find a way to piss Daniher off and replace him before he went back to the Blues. The other thing I like is how they gave us pick 11 for Brock McLean, but more on that deal later.

And there's no doubt that Ratten joined the seemingly endless list of coaches who have tactically stitched up Bailey this year. It didn't help that our players got sucked into the physical stuff that the Blues dished out before the opening bounce - luckily for Warnock the free kick he gave away to The Irish Juice Newton was pretty much the only kicked Setanta O'Spud got all day. Then there was Davey's running battle with Carazzo - surely the rest of the league have worked out that Flash gets sucked in easily and plays badly when he's involved in a stoush with someone? It's no coincidence that when the game calmed down in the second half he became more useful.

So, by quarter time the match was pretty much over. In fact had we not fired up at the last ten minutes it could have gotten very, very ugly. We might have kicked two goals and avoided the chance for me to update the famous "shit starts" stat, but by copping six goals at the other end we may as well have not even bothered. Surely I'm not the only one who is starting to worry about our backline - for the last three years it has stood up under the pressure of our forwards giving nothing and the midfield getting smashed from pillar to post but the last couple of weeks it has been shaking like a leaf. Not sure why they dropped Warnock instead of Garland in the first place, but I'm really starting to worry about Col and Rivers. Frawley and Grimes the only ones that I've got any confidence in anymore. Morton did alright mopping up around the back in the second half but eventually he's going to have to start becoming a match winner.

One thing that has been constant for years is the utter shambles that is our forward line structure. I'll just say this every week in case it hasn't got through to some people - thank fark for Brad Green. If that man is not our next captain then just walk away because the club don't deserve to have you as a fan. He's seen Jurrah and Petterd drop around him, he's had to contend with flaky types like Dunn and Miller, and he's got Watts down there frantically trying to learn the game under live conditions and through it all he just does his thing with a minimum of fuss. Absolute heart and soul of this club.

Now, even if we bear in mind that Petterd and Jurrah both went down on the verge of being very good players who are we to blame for the fact that our forward structure is always a shambles. Bailey? Mahoney? The players themselves? Given that he's the most expendable of the three I'm going to suggest that whether or not he has got anything to do with it, and as forward coach you'd think he might, that Bails might very well toss Josh overboard at the end of the year. He's going to be in more trouble than the early settlers if we're playing like this at this time next year, so there's no doubt in my mind that he's going to have to try something different at the end of this year. I doubt anybody is going to be parting with a decent key position forward at the end of this year, so unless we can pluck somebody from nowhere to kick goals then it's going to be down to the likes of Watts, Petterd, Jurrah, Green and Bate to play as targets in the future - and what's the point if they're all over the bloody shop every single week. If somehow Scott West gets the boot at the end of this year I'll start to think that Bails is running scared.

What I can't wrap my head around is whether Bailey gets it consistently wrong in the first half of games, whether he's just trying to implement a plan that his side can't get right or whether the players are just utterly shit. The latter might be true for some, but you can't help but notice that we give teams leads and suddenly play a lot better when caution is thrown to the wind and there's nothing left to lose. Is the Brisbane game going to end up going down as our Buster Douglas style one-off shock moment of glory? Are we the new Richmond? Is it right to become this emo over sports? And frankly, is anybody still reading this self indulgent shite?

Speaking of the forwards - as we were about twenty paragraphs ago - what are we supposed to draw from Watts' four games so far this season? Much like last year he's come into the side just when we've hit the wall. Did well against Port, but the other three games have been pretty ordinary stuff. Doesn't ever seem to lead, but is alright when the ball is on the deck and takes a decent shot for goal but there's no way right now that we can rely on him as a key forward at the moment. In a better team you'd park him next to a couple of guns and he'd probably win the Rising Star - where we're at right now he's got to get somebody else down there that means he can play long instead of having to go up the ground to get his kicks. Cue another week of idiots flooding the internet with stupid posts about how we should have picked the other guy. I'll handle the knee jerk reactions around here thanks very much.

The midfield is also doing my head in. Gysberts has been great in his first two games but surely opposition sides will start taking some notice of him soon and clamp down. Didn't seem to do a great deal of damage with his touches either, but he's got ball magnet written all over him and unless Brock fires up for the Blues sooner or later this might turn out to be Grimes vs Johnstone Pt. 2. Both Moloney and Jones were fairly good but Scully and Trengove didn't get much of it (should have rested one this week, one last week) and Sylvia seems to be torching it by foot more often than not these days. The biggest positive in the middle of the ground is Jamar - obscenely predictable as it is that he will try to tap it to Moloney every time, we would be getting sliced and diced by every team in the comp if he wasn't in the centre at the moment. The only problem is that they're going to have to come up with some sort of Plan B for the job because right now if he goes down with an injury - and let's face it he has form - we're royally screwed.

Two goals in the first quarter (wow, we're really going places in the world) were followed by one in the second (normal service resumed) and realistically the game was over. Looked even more likely that we'd get tonked when the heavy rain started, especially given that our kicking efficiency had been woeful up to that point - but what it did do was force us to play direct, and dragged the Blues down to our level in the blundering stakes. All of a sudden we had a run on and got the margin back to just over three goals at the last break. Personal highlight was Jones' 60m bomb after realising that there was no chance that anybody he kicked it at inside 50 was going to take a mark in the conditions.

So, we were in it at three-quarter time and even though it was still a longshot - and in fact would have been absolutely criminal if we'd got up - I still thought we had some kind of shot. Then we failed to score for twenty minutes. Welcome to the wonderful world of supporting Melbourne. After doing absolutely nothing for three quarters, roundly smacked by McDonald, J**d got off the lead in the last quarter and basically won them the game. Watch him somehow still end up with Brownlow votes despite doing bugger all for most of the game.

Don't know why I bothered staying to the end. Must have wanted to hear the Blues funeral march song to convince me that even though 2010 has been a completely rubbish year in music, there was worse being written in 1898. And lest we forget the song it's based on is as racist as it gets. Once a club of arseholes, always a club of arseholes.

Crowd Watch
Nobody cared. Football season is rubbish. If only there was a decent sport to play in the summer I'd be dying for the year to finish.

2010 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - James McDonald
4 - Brad Green
3 - Jordan Gysberts
2 - Matthew Bate
1 - Nathan Jones

Varying degrees of apology - in no particular order - to Jamar (despite the 7 frees against!), Bruce, Moloney, Davey (2nd half only), Rivers, Morton (2nd half), Nifty Nev and Grimes.

Leaderboard

Thanks to the vagaries of the voting system Gysberts has launched into the Rookie of the Year lead after just two games. Morally Trengove leads, but here at Demonblog morals don't come into it.

23 - James McDonald
24 - Brad Green
17 - James Frawley (Leader: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
13 - Mark Jamar (WINNER: Strawbs O'Dwyer Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
10 - Aaron Davey
9 - Jack Grimes, Matthew Bate
8 - Jordan Gysberts (Leader: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
7 - Colin Sylvia, Jack Trengove
6 - Brent Moloney
5 - Ricky Petterd, Tom Scully, Jamie Bennell
3 - Jordie McKenzie, Matthew Warnock, Brad Miller
2 - Neville Jetta
1 - Jared Rivers, Joel MacDonald, Cameron Bruce, Nathan Jones

Next Week
The Pies will spank us something chronic. Forget about payback for the R2 fiasco, we are nearly going backwards from that point at the moment. Garland and Miller have to go. If Frawley is feet he's an absolute moral to come in, and given that Dunn kicked eight for Casey (!?) he's probably earned himself another crack - as long as we play him up front and not hung out to dry on a wing somewhere. We need to persist with Watts, but one more week like this and he'll need to go back the 2's for a spell as well.

P.S - If Jordie McKenzie is fit and doesn't play next week then I'm going to officially lose the plot with Bailey and his coaching panel.

Final Thoughts
It might not surprise you know that I was in a foul mood today. You know what's going to make me feel better? Wasting a public holiday next week to watch us get tonked again. Shit.