Victory. Don't it make you, as Paul Robinson off Neighbours reminded us way back in 1989, feel good?
I'm not going to come on here and lie about how I saw it coming. Some did and for that I applaud you, but maybe you don't suffer from the same chronic Melbourne Supporter Depression Syndrome (MSDS) as I do. Certainly when it came time to hurriedly do tips on Friday afternoon the Dockers were pencilled in without hesitation.
It's the MSDS that made me look beyond their ridiculously long injury list and the fact that they're as bad at the MCG as we are everywhere else other than the MCG. It's what made me think that somehow titans of the game like Clayton Hinkley and Ben Bucovaz would put in the same level of performance as the Pies did last week. It wasn't that we lost to the best team in the land last week, it was how we played and yada yada yada that's an argument to be had six days ago, let's talk about today instead and how wrong I - mercifully - was.
As promised early in the post about Monday's game I'm treating today's performance in complete isolation and not projecting anything forward about next week. Ok, maybe a little bit but there'll certainly be no going right over the top Darryl Eastlake style about it. The lid is not only firmly on, but I'm welding it up and throwing the whole pot down a copper mine in Mt Isa just to make sure there's no chance of getting overexcited about beating the brains out of an injury riddled team who spent the entire second half serving up utter filth that even we'd have been embarassed by at our lowest moments.
But next week is a problem to be solved on Saturday afternoon, for now let's talk about our biggest ever win against the Dockers. Hard to believe that we were four goals better today than that classic afternoon late in 2009 when it was pissing rain, nobody cared about us any more because we were filthy tankers and about 15 people showed up to see us thrash them. Since then Freo have turned out to actually be quite good, as long as they're not at the 'G anyway, before losing pretty much every quality player they've got to injury other than Pavlich.
There was some suggestion during the week that both Jamar and Sandilands were a chance of returning for a clash of the (not entirely fit) titans, and while we were robbed out of Russian vs Giraffe when neither of them made it at least it meant another week of Maximum Gawn Mania, a celebration of the next big thing in cult figures. If you could guarantee me that we'd still win by 15 goals I'd love to have seen Sandilands vs Gawn. Giraffe Jr. might have been thrashed but who wouldn't want to see the two most gigantic bastards in the competition jumping at each other?
Still, if you thought our tall men stocks were slightly wonky without Jamar how much must the Dockers hierachy have had to be held from jumping out the window when Kepler Bradley had to be withdrawn late? Ironically we've emerged from the Russian injury disaster with some credit thanks to the Stef Martin Experience thriving and Gawn being far better than he had any right to be based on the handful of VFL games he played before being promoted. Between them they comfortably looked after the all-star combination of Jonathan Griffin and Zac Clarke, and even though we did get beaten out of the middle for most of the first half it was anything but a disaster considering what we were doing around the ground.
Just think, if the Spencil hadn't done his knee and Juice his whatever we'd probably not have seen Maximum until later in the year, and then we'd have to have waited to have our suspicions about his cult figure status confirmed. His goal today was nearly my highlight of the whole thing, especially considering that farcical miss in the dying minutes against Essendon. Still say they should play this after every goal he kicks so we can sing along with MAXI! MAXIMUM! WHOA OH!
Gysberts going out late was a blow to us, but who could have forseen just how good Nicholson would be as a replacement? Finally given the chance to play a full four quarters instead of donning the council worker vest and riding an exercise bike for three quarters he was immense - especially considering that this time last year he was running around getting paid not a cracker in the amateurs. I see what they meant about explosive pace when he was drafted, the way he burnt off a cavalcade of nobodies and kicked that goal today was magic. It's suicidal to rate people on their first few games (you're talking to the guy who gave Kyle Cheney five votes on debut, but that was more due to the rest of the team being shite) but I'm putting him next to Maximum in my "Sure fire hits, absolutely no way they can turn out to be rubbish and make me look foolish" list. Tapscott would be there as well but I'm restricting it to players taken at pick 30 or under.
In retrospect the first quarter was great fun, but I have to admit to sitting there at the time being a depressed bastard wondering when it was all going to go horribly wrong. We weren't dominating out of the middle by any stretch, but with Scully going around getting touches at will (each one of them accompanied by this noise. At 100 touches he would have gotten an extra life), Freo botching chances up front and our backline returning to what they do best instead of being monstered by Donkey Kong style freaks we were by far the better team. "If we started winning this out of the centre we'd win by a 100" I said, unintentionally getting something perfectly right for once.
Now, like a handful of other people I was at the ground with no access to the television commentary but I will guarantee you every day of the week that there is no way whoever was calling the game for Fox would have been able to resist that old chestnut when Green smashed home the opener off the ground from close range. You just know that if Dwayne Russell (P.S - Best thread ever) had been there he'd have let rip with something like "THAT'S A GEM! HE SHORTS IT THROUGH THE GOALS JUST LIKE HE DID AT OLD TRAFFORD WHEN HE PLAYED FOR MANCHESTER UNITED! THAT COULD BE THE FIRESTARTER!" Sadly for me, but luckily for anybody who was watching on TV, he's doing the Port/Eagles game instead, where he will almost certainly suggest that "the firestarter" has just been kicked when Port snag a lucky one while 72 points behind. Still, at least if you're going to make cliched references to Green doing anything on the field not involving his hands at least today's effort would legitimately have been a goal in soccer unlike the one against Essendon which would have been more likely to decapitate somebody sitting in Row Z than trouble the keeper.
The question is did they also chance their arm on a soccer comment when Sylvia toe poked the second through? Slightly less risk to making comment about that spot of bother he had with his missus that time. Back to more savoury things I loved that goal because of the way he chased it right to the line before smashing it home after having jumped in the contest. Also because they played it in slo-mo on the scoreboard and even though the ball was clearly in play the Freo muppets around me started bleating about it.
It would have been easy to give up after jumping into the marking contest but he was rewarded for second effort. I'll bet everyone who spent the best part of five years posting "thank god we got McLean because Sylvia is going nowhere" rubbish is frantically denying they were involved now. Sadly nobody's going back through thousands of forum posts to make fun of them but I'm sitting here with years of posts that say exactly that. I WAS WRONG. My god was I wrong, and there's nothing better than being wrong when you thought somebody wasn't going to be much chop. Jamar + Sylvia = the greatest slow cooked duo ever.
In every aspect other than the clearances we were destroying them and our ball movement was pretty good going the other way. Was very happy to see Petterd playing more in the midfield after he dominated the VFL playing there last week, because how many times have you seen somebody playing in a different position in the seconds, dominating and then being recalled only to be put back exactly where they were before getting dropped in the first place?
He didn't dominate by any means but 18 touches, eight marks and 1.1 will do me very nicely as an up the ground forward/midfielder. Interesting to hear an interview from Chris Connolly before the game (yes, he is still alive and employed for more than just cracking funnies at the AGM) where he said their specific reason for dropping him was to send him back to try and get him to play more in the centre. Fair enough if it works like it did today, especially considering he could go forward as a secondary target or switch to running off half-back if required.
Funny thing about the first quarter was how few inside 50's we had for our lead. Old Owl Eyes Mark Harvey must have been tearing his hair out at how easily we were scoring when we did finally get it in there as opposed to how terrible his own forwards were. Whoever they were.
We didn't even have to rely solely on forward targets to get the job done - which was handy considering The Jurrahcane was trying his hardest but getting absolutely nowhere. Even though we weren't going inside much, and the game was being played in a gigantic rolling scrum between the two 50's, we were doing the job when we got there and I can't have been the only one beaming with favourite player pride when the Experience kicked his first goal of the year (well, there's at least two of us sporting the number on our jumper. Then there's his parents..) but even in the wildest dreams of the SME Fan Club (inc. 2009, surprisingly not by me) we couldn't have imagined that he'd get three. Even Frawley was wandering forward to have shots. Admittedly it was an absolutely putrid set shot at a time where we were really threatening to put them away, but what did you expect from a guy who had two goals in 72 games, both of which came from gigantic hoofs on the run from outside 50? I certainly didn't expect him to actually end up kicking a goal from a gigantic hoof on the run from outside 50 but that's just the sort of day we ended up having.
The last thing I wanted was to concede the last goal of the quarter, because that's always the slippery slope to throwing away a big lead, so when Clancee Pearce kicked that goal (and who can ever hear his name without thinking about Chief Wiggum's wife saying "oh Clancy"? Oh, just me? Carry on) to finally get them on board just when we threatened to keep a team goalless in the first quarter for the first time since I listened to the game against Freo on my deathbed in Round 16, 2008 and we eventually lost by fifty points (#statmybitchup).
Hooray then for Thank God For Brad Green who bounced back from his horror outing against the Pies to boot his second for the quarter on the lead (yes! leads! and oh there was so much crumb as well!) and kill their momentum going into the second quarter. His much vaunted accuracy was in question again today (as most "much vaunted" things usually are) but as an unashamed Green sympathiser I was thrilled to see him bounce back today because he's the barometer for this side.
Don't know what we expected him to do last week with the ball going inside 50 so few times (apparently the third biggest difference between teams ever on record, which is absolutely ludicrous) but he showed today what he could do with decent service. Almost killed Scully in a marking contest too which we might very well have looked back on next year and smiled about if he'd connected.
What I loved most about the first quarter, apart from the crumb and kicking to leads, was McKenzie vs Pav. I'm sure without their top goalkicker Bradley out there (yes, Freo's top goalkicker is Kepler Bradley. Start applying purple ribbons to the premiership cup now) they'd love to have played him forward from the start, but clearly that's not the done thing in the land of purple this year considering how he's not even in their top five goalkickers so far.
Problem for the Dockers is they can't have both Forward Pav and Midfield Pav. If they did you could play 15 x Jay Van Berlo and get away with it. Today at the first bounce it was Midfield Pav, and Midfield Pav was absolutely destroyed by the tackling machine from regional Victoria in that first quarter.
Can I take a minute to tell you how much I love Jordie? I'll say it every week if I have to, but we missed out big time not having him in the first half of the year. There's nothing better than a guy who just goes out there, knows his limitations and gets the job done. Today he had two kicks and 26 handballs, and that's just fine with me. Speaking of records that's got to be some sort of one. He only laid three tackles today but it didn't matter because he was damaging enough with his handballs that most of the time Freo were chasing him and not the other way around.
If Jordie vs Pav was a matchup inside 50 you'd laugh at it even more than Rivers vs Cloke, but in the middle of the ground the no frills option absolutely slit the superstar up a treat. Pav is easily my favourite player from another club but it was a delight to see him get stitched by Jordie to such a degree that they had to throw him forward in the second quarter even if it almost got them back into the game.
The move could have gone badly for us, he's dominated us at this ground before. Remember his first half that day we came from a billion points down and THE CELEBRATOR famously celebrated? Still, with the defence playing exactly the way it should again - with Rivers and Macdonald jumping all over the top and Frawley/Garland taking the big contested marks he couldn't get near it and only managed one goal from ten kicks. The big four didn't get a massive amount of help from the rest of the defenders, although Morton was ok other than a couple of howlers. Bartram and Strauss were ordinary at best, and I'm not entirely convinced by Strauss yet.
Gutted for Garland at hurting his ankle again though. You could see his frustration when he did it too, knowing straight away that he was going to be back on the sidelines again. Apparently wasn't iced up or on crutches at the end of the match so that's a good sign but it wouldn't be the first time that he seemed to have a minor injury and wasn't seen again for a year. At least it means they won't be tempted to drop Macdonald anytime soon, he more than deserves his spot at the moment. I've got a feeling that the New Jurassic Pack of Frawley/Rivers/Garland is going to achieve Seecamp/Ingerson/Shanahan '98 levels of underrated awesome in the next couple of seasons.
The only Freo player who could do anything up front consistently was the alleyway specialist Michael Johnson but they did look dangerous in that second quarter. When Watts marked and kicked the first goal within the first 40 seconds even I thought we were a chance of running away with it, but of course the worst thing you can do is get excited about a thrashing early in the second quarter because it always ends up going the other way. When they dragged it back to 19 points with a much improved forward line, were still winning easily out of the centre and had started stopping us from going forward I thought "oh shit, we're in trouble here". One to Pav and two to the alleyway specialist and we started to look a little bit wonky.
No need to mention that one of Johnson's goals was an absolutely criminal free against Bartram who couldn't get anything to go his way. There were certainly a couple of terrifying moments throughout the term, the worst being Macdonald's handball to Morton who looked up to find that there wasn't a single MFC player within 50 metres, causing him to try and hit a target 1cm inside the boundary which he missed and gifted Johnson his second goal. Still, I didn't mind his game at all today - mainly due to him never once being involved in a goalsquare marking contest.
Thank god, once again, for Green who kicked his fourth and for Frawley's epic roost which took the margin back over five goals. They got one late but for all our wonkiness in the middle of the quarter we only lost six points off the lead and were left in a position where it would take an epic cockup for us to lose. Exactly that sort of position where you're convinced if you're behind that you're no chance of winning and that if you're in front you're convinced you're going to get done.
They showed in kicking three goals in a row during the quarter that they could get a run on, and were still well ahead in the Inside 50's. I'd like to think that was the most troubling stat of all to Bailey and Co, and to the credit of all involved it was well and truly rectified in the second half.
Freo had even more injuries during the game and had to use the sub (*spit*) halfway through the second quarter but even losing their best tagger who had kept Moloney quiet until then it was no excuse for the absolute garbage they served up from the moment the ball was bounced in the third quarter. Watts got the first of the quarter within a minute again on a kick from Howe - who was super impressive again - and this time we were away to the races instead of sitting back and letting them get three in a row. Also on the podium of my favourite moments of the day was The SME, officially the smartest man in the AFL, running into the square to get the handball over the top from Trengove and stab home his second and our third from 1m or less out at the Ponsford end.
'GOVE, the half of the dynamic duo whose signature we do have on a piece of paper, was involved again with the next goal but the story of it was Maximum's tackle which set it up. That was pretty much the game done and dusted, much to the consternation of the woman sitting behind me who had a placard about her love for Freo which she barely got to wave in the entire second half except for the time it smacked me in the back of the head, so what better way to put the cherry on top of it than the Experience racking up his career high third goal after scoring a 50 which took him to the goal line? More proof that he's the smartest man in the AFL, not only did he get a 99.5 TER score but he also faux played on just enough to roll McPharlin into running off the mark and then stopping to point it out to the umpire. He's a genius. And according to my mum also the best looking player in the team, so if footy doesn't work (which doesn't look much like happening right now) at least he's got the 60-year-old woman market sewn up. Watch out for player sponsors next year, it could be the Mercado Family (all two of us) paying up to hang out with the Experience.
In all seriousness it was well and truly over at three-quarter time, but Howe's miss at the end kept us below the Chris Sullivan Line so I wasn't going to unfurl any COP THAT YOU SWINE banners quite yet. Shame for Jeremy because he was bloody good all day even before his first shot at goal. He reminds me of a more mobile Brad Miller who can take a decent overhead, contested mark - and realistically that was the only thing that stuffed Brad up (until he kicks nine next week) and stopped him from being more successful over the years.
Throw Howe onto the list with Nicholson and Maximum, and the good news is that he's proved to be far more than the bloke who took a screamer of a mark which got a few thousands views on YouTube. He topped off his day with a couple of goals during the avalanche in the last quarter which was a nice bonus for all the hard work he did pushing up the ground during the game. With that ability at contested marking he MAY end up as a big target inside 50 one day. Unless I'm getting roped into making stupid comments again just on the basis of another win over some hacks which is highly likely.
Any suggestion that we were going to go back into our shell was dismissed within the first minute of the last quarter when Watts - the first minute specialist - kicked his third straight opening goal of a term. How gutted would you be if you'd bet on him for first goalkicker today and then watched him do it in every quarter other than the first? He was bloody good today, even when he wound up playing Baileyball on the half-back line he used it well. A couple of times he was beaten comfortably in marking contests but that was usually when the thing was kicked on top of his head instead of to advantage.
Three goals and nine contested possessions amongst 24 works for me, and I'm perfectly happy for him to take the Jamar road and only kick when he's inside 50 and having a shot. Today showed why the next time Bailey picks up the phone to call for Watts to be sent into the backline somebody needs to jump on top of him, wrest the phone away and impersonate voice to cancel the instruction. He hasn't deserved to be there a couple of times this year but I'm glad we keep persisting, and he might not perform to the same level next week but his improvement this year is through the roof. We want more.
What a lovely last quarter it was. Reminscent of the Adelaide massacre we ticked off winning the game early and then it was party time for all. The sort of day where anybody who runs off the ground gets wild applause from the fans - people would have even risen to applaud Isaac Weetra they were so happy. From Nicholson's turbo powered goal to Jurrah finally getting two after a dirty day and Howe being rewarded for his performance the score crept nervously towards the big triple figures. When Jones got his goal to put us within two straight kicks of that magic mark at the 21 minute mark it looked like we could do it.
Sadly Freo then decided that they might actually try defending for the first time all half - they even kicked their second goal which was met by a mild smattering of boos from the hard to please Demon faithful who were dying to crack the ton. At least with Jurrah's second at the end we managed to wipe out the entire percentage we lost during last week's debacle - and added the extra 0.000000000000001% from winning by one point more. It's like Queen's Birthday never actually happened except that we've got a shitload of cash in the bank. Mind you we probably lost half of Monday's payday thanks to the rancid crowd who showed up today.
All in all a good day out and a fair re-enactment of the Adelaide game. As long as we don't continue the re-enactment theme and go five goals up in the first quarter next week before folding like a house of cards. For the third time this year the sporting defibrillator has been applied to our season and our fading finals heartbeat has been restarted. Any danger that this time we might take advantage of it instead of acting like somebody who gets a liver transplant and heads straight to the bar?
Even better news is that the victory has enhanced our push into the Chinese market. Yesterday the Dalai Lama was photographed giving it heave-ho in a Freo scarf, and today we do the job for our Chinese paymasters by smashing his new team. Cue an invite to tour again and to dine at an all-star glittering dinner with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and President Hu Jintao.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Stefan Martin
4 - Jack Watts
3 - Brad Green
2 - Jordie McKenzie
1 - Tom Scully
Massive apologies to Nicholson and Howe who were next cabs off the rank and then Jones, Petterd, Moloney, Frawley, Macdonald, Sylvia and Gawn in no particular order. Not too many liabilities today - Jurrah did his best work in junktime and Bartram was pretty pox but you can't get 21+1 of magic in every win.
Leaderboard
Jamar had better get back soon because The Experience is storming towards the biggest upset win of all time in the Stynes. Unfortunately Garland's injury will cost him ground in the thrilling Seecamp race while Tapscott still has a handy lead in the Hilton, but he's been lucky that Howe has missed out narrowly two weeks in a row.
As for the overall it could still go either way at the top and Jamar hasn't lost a heap of ground in the last month. Have a feeling (and there's no corruption involved if it actually happens) that Watts is going to storm home in the last few weeks.
23 - Colin Sylvia
19 - Brent Moloney
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
14 - Stefan Martin
12 - Jack Watts
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Joel Macdonald, James Frawley
8 - Jordie McKenzie
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans, Brad Green, Tom Scully
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
Scull and Crossbones
I'm so aggravated by the Scully saga that I almost don't want to post about it, but how can you avoid it? As much as I want to hate him for leaving, which he undoubtedly will (/reverse psychology), the article in the paper yesterday about how he will end up the most well paid player on our list if he stays makes me wonder whether it's going to end up being worth it.
Before I start I'll freely admit that I had a nightmare involving this blog last night. No really, it's almost too sad to admit. I dreamt that after writing something sensible yet dismissive of Scully that it got quoted in the papers and when he left he blamed my quote, leading to wild scenes online and bricks flying through my window. Fat chance any journos care what I say luckily, but all I will say is that good luck if you're going to chuck a brick because I live on the 11th floor. And if you're coming on here to write abuse in the comments at least get amongst the ads as well, not all of us are going to be on a mil every year.
Now, there are some potentially sensational players on our list - Trengove, Watts, Gysberts just to start with and Frawley who has already proven himself and will be due a fat pay rise in a couple of years. By my count the following players come out of contract over the next couple few years (and this is an old list, so if there are any extensions that I've missed let me know). Bolded are the players who I am sure would command a decent pay increase based on how they're playing at the moment. Drafted players from last year not included (all end 2012?)
2011
Fitzpatrick, Gawn, Green, Maric, Martin, Morton, Newton, Scully, Sylvia, Warnock, Wonaeamirri
2012
Bail, Bartram, Bate, Bennell, Dunn, Garland, Jamar, Jetta, Jones, Jurrah, McKenzie, Moloney, Petterd, Rivers, Spencer, Strauss, Tapscott, Trengove.
2013
Blease, Davey, Grimes, Gysberts, Watts
So, take that list and consider that Green, Morton, Bartram and Jones wouldn't be coming cheap already and could still enhance their value. Then there's the likes of Blease and Strauss who could go anywhere from here. By 2013 the only players I can see any chance of dropping off that list due to age are Green, Jamar and Davey. Even if we flog the likes of Dunn and Bate to other clubs and replace them with kids how the hell are we going to pay to keep this group together if we suddenly vault a kid who has played 30 games to the top of our payroll just because we've been pitched into a bidding war with the AFL's equivalent of a soccer team owned by dodgy Russians with more money than brains.
Tom Scully will be a star, and almost certainly a superstar but one killer midfielder does not a team make. Good luck finding replacements for Frawley and Watts (presuming he keeps improving at this rate) without having to go through the same process of drafting kids and waiting with fingers crossed to see whether they're going to be quality or not. If we throw $700k a year at Scully for four years as per this article the pressure on him to not only be the best player on our list but to shoot straight into the top echelon of AFL players will be huge. I don't expect that it will affect him, but for 3/4 of a mil every year he's going to not only have to be the ice man in justifying that salary he's going to be pointed at when a Trengove, Gysberts, Frawley etc.. are given derisory contract offers in a couple of years and tell us to get stuffed before joining Carlton and winning a flag.
So I want to hate him for leaving but on the other hand it seems a bit insane to go to the ends of the earth to keep him when midfielders, admittedly not in the same ballpark as him, are probably the easiest position on the ground in which to find a capable replacement. Right now we're like an average looking guy with no money spending every cent he's got trying to win a supermodel when the other option is an ugly millionare who can afford to set her up for life. And how often do you see a supermodel turning down top dollar to shack up with some bloke from Airport West? This is Jamie Packer and Mrs. Packer. He looks like Chip Frawley after being bitten by a poisonous toad. He is also worth six billion dollars. Enough said.
I just wish he'd admit it, put the hand up, get up and tell his teammates he's doing it for dollars, buy a harbourside mansion and stop teasing us without signing on the dotted line. Either that or start playing badly so it doesn't seem like such a big loss when he goes.
Couldn't decide whether or not I was into the 31 - Please Don't Go banner being hoisted in the cheersquad or not. One side of my brain says it's a cute token of our desparation to keep him. The other half says it's a needy token of our desparation to keep him. Just never lose sight of the fact that this isn't a decision based on anything other than enormous wads of cash - banners professing love don't buy Ferraris and five bedroom houses here.
Just hope we don't sell the farm to keep him and wind up regretting it when others are going out the door and he's suddenly one out in a sea of slop a'la J**d in his first couple of years at Carlton. As much as I want him to stay, and I will want to start referring to him as $****y if he goes that article really made me start to wonder if once we get over the blow to our ego and realise that he's going for dollars and not out of love whether we'll really be worse off. This isn't just about one player now, we just don't want to be mucked around and lied to. Sadly I think that while we're still a chance of sneaking into the eight then the football club is going to play him no matter what they know about dodgy backroom dealings.
Crowd Watch
What crowd there actually was. 19,000 is what you get when you remove Pies fans, holiday neutrals and once a year bandwagoners from the Queen's Birthday crowd. It's no great financial result, but geez don't you love being able to get food at half-time and go for a whizz without having to queue? I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to go to games with 50,000 people every week. Especially if it was at Docklands, that would nearly turn me off from going to games once every match was on live. Thankfully we play at the decent ground and only have to go to that monstrosity once or twice a year.
Meanwhile do interstate fans get package deals for seats in the Ponsford Stand? Whenever we play West Coast they give the entire middle deck to 25 of them, and today it was full of every single Freo fan in the state of Victoria. It's probably because the cheer squad are in the same place but for the regulars it really inflates the impression that the place is full of them when there probably wasn't one other person heave-hoing anywhere else in the entire stadium.
The cheersquad hardly covered themselves in glory by busting out soccer chants with Freo in them instead of following convention and restricting themselves to (team name) *clap* *clap* *clap*. If you're going to lower your standards of living far enough to join a cheersquad you're not in a position to be trying to introduce new and exciting crowd participation angles. Despite this not once did they yell out HEAVE-HO! en masse which really would have made my day even before the massacre started.
I noticed a guy wearing a t-shirt that said BANNER TEAM, as opposed to the regulars who were just wearing CHEERSQUAD on theirs. What a terrible trend. Even worse than the guy I once saw with a St Kilda Cheer Squad Official bomber jacket. Sorry sir but being an official in a cheersquad is like being president of Burkina Faso for all the respect that normal people are going to give you. Imagine if you were sitting there and somebody told you off for not waving your pom poms with enough vigour? Normal people would snot them, but normal people wouldn't be waving pom poms. Surely nobody from our cheersquad reads this after seven years of questioning whether or not the people in them should be gassed.
Amongst the cavalcade of Freo fans around us, and their classic outrage when a mark wasn't paid in front of goal because it was touched off the boot which they didn't know because they were watching the replay of the mark and not listening to the radio, there was an odd Melbourne supporting character sitting behind me who would have absolutely erupted if we lost. I can't imagine the filth he was letting out last week, and even though I'm scared of describing people because they either read or somehow manage to find themselves being mentioned on here can I say that he was wearing a cracking combo of lime green sleeveless puffer jacket and yellow t-shirt. It was a fantastic look. If you were a member of Ned's Atomic Dustbin in 1988.
He was one of those guys who just yells players names out. Not just when they're frustratedly trying to will somebody to kick to a free player, but when they get a possession or more importantly do something wrong. His two favourites were Morton and Bartram but I couldn't tell whether or not he was for them or against them by the way his voice rose at the end of each voice for MorTONNNNN! or BarTRAM! He shut up in the second half, probably stunned into silence by us actually playing well for once.
Heave Ho
Freo would be so much more popular if they'd just introduce my version of their song with more heave ho and less of the rubbish verses. In related news I'm the only non-Dockers fan in the state of Victoria who likes the song in any form.
It's a little known fact that I cracked the sads at the Melbourne Hawks so badly that at the time I vowed that I'd become a Freo fan if it went through. Presumably it would have lasted two weeks before there was either a shameful crawl back to the side with what truly would have been the WORST THEME SONG EVER or I'd given up on football entirely. Either way there is absolutely no doubt in the world that if I were sitting here wearing purple, writing Dockerblog and yelling HEAVE HO! at random intervals that my favourite player would be Garrick Ibbotson just because he's got an absolutely ridiculous name. 2nd place to Tendai Mzungu, Ben Bucovaz on the podium.
Next Week
Massive, massive, massive, MASSIVE game against Richmond. Not just because either side is hanging on to the bottom of the eight by our fingernails, and not just because everyone will be holding their breath to see if we get ahead of ourselves again and turn in a stinker. It's most important because we've treated Richmond with contempt over the last few years when we were both in the bottom division of the league, so now that we're both promoted out of Club Slop - and that we've proven we can thrash other sides in our bracket - we've got to fire the first shot in what should be a quality rivalry over the next few years. And they're the only other Victorian team other than Essendon who we can beat, so don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
It's all about the midfield. Our forwards look ok against their injury riddled defence - especially if Howe keeps going and Watts plays there instead of the back pocket - and the New Jurassic Pack has got their opponents covered on paper (remember Frawley's demolition job on Riewoldt last year?), so even if Jamar doesn't come back - and sorry Maximum, we all pray he does - and as long as we can avoid getting killed out of the centre we should be ok. One thing I noticed today was that as long as we could get it to a secondary bounce we were ok. More of the same please.
Was it worth it?
Good god yes. Dum spiro spero as the Romans used to say - while I breath, I hope.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Monday, 13 June 2011
One hit wonders
The Demonblog legal department called me at 5.05pm on Monday to inform me it had come to their attention that I'd been well and truly sucked in by the win against the Bombers, that despite their early form beating them is actually meaningless and that I would now need to post an apology for turning into an Essendon/Carlton fan overnight and swinging wildly from one viewpoint about the coach and club to another on the basis of flimsy, often falsified evidence.
So, raising my right hand I, Adam S Mercado* (*denotes fake name), being of fairly sound mind and body do solemnly, sincerly and truly declare and affirm that I will not, under any circumstances, get roped into believing that the Melbourne Football Club are 'back' or are 'finals contenders' on the evidence of one-off performances again until such time that they put together a decent run of performances and beat some teams that aren't utterly shite and/or from interstate.
Don't know why everyone was getting so excited about our chances in this match. You can understand supporters being roped in by one slashing third quarter amidst a month of slop but even respectable media types were talking up the prospect of an upset based on Collingwood's supposed injury/suspension crisis and the fact that we were one point worse than them over two starts last season.
To be fair the loss of Swan/Thomas/Jolly helped us, well it could hardly hurt, but it's not like our midfield is flying at the moment either so that was always unlikely to be the difference. In all the euphoria of the VE Day style celebrations at the end of last week it seemed to be forgotten that they'd actually smashed us out of the middle and it had been the backline which saved our bacon long enough to wear them down, kick away and almost cock it up again before the defence saved us a second time. If Essendon sans Jobe Watson can do it then the Pies sans half their premiership team are probably going to as well. Still, aren't we used to pundits saying outrageous things just to make themselves stand out from everybody else? Isn't that right Theo x?
Sure last year we had one unlucky loss and a draw. Meaningless in the context of 12 months down the track. The Petterd game gets nothing in retrospect because it's not the first time a good side have had a slow start to the season before getting it together and running away with the comp (Geelong anybody?), and even though in the end we could have won QB game with another ten seconds on the clock we were only there because the Pies were abysmal kicking for goal. They kept going wide, ended up having most of their shots from section Q32 in the Southern Stand and duly stuffed up their chance to win it easily. We had some mighty competitors that day (The Jamar/Moloney Connection anybody?) but it was a stalemate snatched from the jaws of defeat. One year on the Pies have lost two more matches and drawn a Grand Final, so what made anybody in their right mind think we were a chance of winning this?
Maybe if you'd offered me a six goal head start I'd have taken it (if I wasn't avoiding the TAB like the plague) but the $1.20 on the Pies head to head must have been the easiest money some people have ever made. Sucked in to the bookies who would have been taken to the cleaners by people throwing that into multis, good to see money going back to the punters where they will presumably give it back again by making irrational bets on teams called Torpedo Vladimir in the Russian Second Division.
Admittedly we didn't look all that bad for the first 20 minutes. Watts and Sylvia were on fire as a combo up front and other than Frawley who was having an early 'mare with his kicking the backline looked like it could cope with at least one of Cloke/Dawes long enough to at least keep us in the game into the second half again. Another third quarter blast was too unlikely to even consider but imagine how many times Bailey would have gotten to say 'competitive' On The Couch if we'd managed to stick with them until the last quarter? For the record he did say it seven times but I reckon he'd have multiplied that by ten if we hadn't gone tits up so quickly.
Problem was that before you could process the fact that we were not only playing well but actually winning we're suddenly about 20 inside 50's down, getting slaughtered out of the centre and any chance we had of hitting back was killed off by Green (and geez, aren't I glad I've spent the last fortnight defending his honour to the death before he pulled out an absolute stinker) missing a shot he would have eaten for breakfast a few years ago. Commentators must now be duty bound to point out alongside all the "did you know he tried out for...." anecdotes that he also used to be a frighteningly accurate kick. This year he's 15.13 and nothing near a certainty when it's a set shot. I'm keeping faith, mainly because he's the only player older than me on the list so when he retires the measure of "being old" that I came up with as a kid (when every single player on the list is younger than you) will finally apply and I'll have to go bald, buy a sportscar and start hanging around at Venue 28 Doncaster on a Saturday night. Long may Dustin Fletcher continue to play and make me feel sprightly.
You know you're in big trouble at a Melbourne game when the opposition start racking up behind after behind because eventually they'll get it right and we'll have copped a seven/eight/nine point play due to not being able to find a decent kick-out strategy. How many times yesterday were we forced into the big roost to the members/Olympic Stand side of the ground? And how many times did it come straight back again? When the best we could hope for was that it would spill out of bounds it became time to seriously reassess what the buggery we are doing with these kick-ins. The ridiculous disparity of inside 50's against us this year has got as much to do with the kick-ins as it does to getting beaten out of the centre.
The "play on to yourself then hoof it" tactic was fresh and new in the first half of last year when we had Jamar on the end of it, but even when he was in career best form in the second half of the season it stopped working because every other club knew exactly what we were up to. Now we're relying on it to get us out jail with players who don't offer a hundreth of what Jamar does in a contested mark and with a fourth gamer kicking it out most of the time, probably expecting that if he tries anything different and cocks it up he'll be back at Casey Fields next week.
Maybe with Collingwood's dominance out of the midfield the match couldn't have been salvaged no matter what we did, but my god could they have hung Rivers out to dry any more? He had the game of his life floating around the backline taking grabs last week, and surely everybody knows that's what he does best. So when he lined up against Cloke I started sweating a bit. Still, it might have worked. It didn't. I'm concerned whenever I see Warnock in our team but if there was any time to pick him this would have been it. He was pox against Carlton but horses for courses and all that shit. Would have been fair better suited to having Rivers jumping in from the side on the contests and taking grabs instead of suffering the media curse and playing like a man who had just had a double page spread in The Age.
It took five goals in a half of torment for Riv until the penny finally dropped and they moved Frawley onto Cloke. Even to a dunce like me who couldn't identify a tactical manouevre if it were explained in a series of illustrated diagrams it seemed obvious that the Collingwood masterplan was to clear everybody else out and give it to Cloke one-on-one with Rivers where he would monster him. Cue the entire second quarter. Even when he was trying to do the right thing he got stooged when The Experience killed him in the contest that gave Fassolo a goal with his first kick and allowed the commentators to unleash the second biggest cliche after Green spending ten minutes at Old Trafford.
Frawley was having his own issues, shanking kicks and being folded up like an accordian after his contest with Brown, but tell me he wouldn't have given us more in contests against Cloke than Rivers? Sure, maybe then you open up Dawes to run riot but at least try something different when it's not going well. Something that doesn't involve Watts and Morton being expected to play as tall defenders. Sure Morton was getting dragged back there etc.. etc.. etc.. and wasn't doing too badly when it wasn't contested but if you're expecting him to play as a semi-key defender you're having a laugh. Any danger they might try something different with him at some point? Have given up on him ever being sent forward but I'd like to see him thrown in the middle once the season is really dicked (2.45pm next Sunday) and if he gets his fragile sad panda bones snapped in a contest then at least he went down swinging and can stick two fingers up at the critics. I'll be over here waiting for him to wave them at me from an arm in a cast. On that cast I will write CALE - YOU ARE NOW A MAN and watch him win the Brownlow next year.
Once they eventually made the move Chip kept Cloke to one goal from a furious roost that no man could have stopped, and Dawes hardly went near it even when the rest of his team were queuing up to kick goals in the last quarter. Would love to have been a fly on the wall in the coaches box after the third or fourth goal on Rivers to see what the argument in favour of leaving him there was. The worst bit of it all for me was not only that they refused to make the change but that all of a sudden near the end of the second Watts was sent back as a loose man instead. That is not a solution, that's a confidence killer. Not surprisingly from there his game went to shit and he returned to Carlton level kicking efficiency. Would love to see a split between his first and last quarters because he seems to go missing in the second half of games a lot, usually after having been marooned in the backline while it gets machine gunned by the opposition.
The Cloke/Rivers fiasco had a hint of QB2003 about it. Remember Tarrant slaughtering Bizzell for the entire first half before Daniher finally made a change when the game was lost and Chris Lamb held him in the second. Big difference is that Frawley won't cop four goals from Ian Perrie in the first quarter next week, get delisted and end up pulling pints at the Bridge Hotel.
Nevertheless before Cloke really got going we involved ourselves in a cavalcade of shambles from one end of the ground to the other which ensured that there was no possible way we could kick a winning score. I don't blame Green for trying to shepherd Trengove's goal through but if the free wasn't 'there' I can see how the umpire got sucked in to it on the basis of the jostling in the square. Will always go against the player trying to take out the defender in that circumstances. Sylvia got his third not long afterwards and that was pretty much it for us. I'd be interested to see the quarter-by-quarter inside 50's because I reckon we went inside the most during the second but necked ourselves by stuffing it up so many times. Would have had even more if we could move it through the midfield without throwing 57 handballs to guys standing a metre away.
Even when we did finally sneak it inside 50 we just kept shooting ourselves in the foot. Green dropped a chestmark and missed another shot that he should have kicked, Scully missed a set shot and Jurrah tried a half arsed banana to an open goal which didn't even deserve to score. Somewhere Dwayne Russell was champing at the bit, leaping off his chair dying to scream the words "THAT COULD BE THE FIRESTARTER!!?11!!!!!11!" but we never gave him the chance. At least you can be thankful for that.
It wasn't so much the loss, or even the margin, that got to me but the collective head drop as the match went on. If you're going to get thrashed going at it 100% then so be it but even if you take out all the times that the Pies went from one of the ground to the other untouched (and my god there were many) where was the tackling? Where were the contested possessions? Fine if you get the thing and then stuff it up, that's to be expected. Alternatively you could try and take on half the opposition side needlessly a'la Jones before being pinged but that's not advisable unless you want to give everybody the shits. But to go down limply without a fight is what people lose the plot - and in retrospect makes celebrating last week's ultimately meaningless victory like we were the next big thing look unbelievably stupid. Other than a few notable exemptions we caved in yesterday like that horrendous Round 22, 2008 game against Richmond. This wasn't Round 22. Thankfully it wasn't Richmond either or we'd all have jumped into the ocean.
That's the problem with my abusive on-again/off-again relationship with Bailey. It's one thing to go off your nut when you beat Essendon, and I loved it when he started attacking inanimate objects and acting like he'd won Tattslotto, but put that up against the blind insistence on continuing with a matchup even though it was going horribly wrong and we're back to where we were before last week. But I'm still for the wild scenes after that match with no regrets. Who could have forseen that they'd turn up and get bullied from the first bounce? Well, most people I suppose, we're overflowing with workmanlike players but are well short on anybody who could be reliably asked to throw their weight around in front of a 75,000 crowd.
But wait, who did the Pies have in the midfield to do that? Pendlebury was well held by McKenzie early but even at his best he's hardly a fearsome character, striking terror in the hearts of men is he? In fact once Sylvia started playing through the middle more you'd almost say we would have had the advantage in that department and we botched it miserably.
The cycle we're in this year is utterly farcical, firing up for a week at a time based on media scrutiny, running around like world beaters thumping their chests/pointing at badges then turning in absolute garbage a few days later. I reiterate that this isn't based on the fact that we lost in the 1-88 points bracket yesterday. A win was never on the cards, it's that off-field we haven't developed a reliable tactic to clear the ball from defence and on-field the quality of pressure goes from being an "open heart surgeon" to "librarian" on a weekly basis. It's not to say that nobody would care if we were losing games after leaving a trail of blood from here to Timbuktu on a weekly basis, but it would make it easier to accept.
Even Brisbane, ruined for years to come by Michael Voss and his Ken Bruce has gone mad style player trading, managed to rack up a number of fighting losses at the start of the year. Sure they also lost to the Suns, have been flogged for the last fortnight and I wouldn't swap our position with theirs under any circumstances but at least they can point to their collection of hacks + kids and say that they've had a dip in defeat. So far this year we've been beaten by 45, 54, 41, 20, 47 and 88. Just the casual 49 point average loss then. When we're bad, we're rancid. When we're good we're just a week away from being rancid.
In the grand scheme of things the third quarter wasn't too bad. It will certainly look that way in the future when losers like me peruse the stats and go "oh look, they only lost the quarter by three points" but good god have you ever seen a backline so repeatedly under siege as ours were in the first 15 minutes? A non-MFC 2007-2011 one anyway. Did we even have a single inside 50 in all that time? I'm not sure we even went past halfway for about ten minutes at one point. Credit to Frawley and Macdonald (and to a lesser degree Strauss, Morton and Rivers) who kept them at bay all that time when it could have gotten really, really ugly even before we inevitably fell victim to one of the Pies renowned blistering last quarters.
Just when I was trying to find our last scoreless quarter (R19, 2008 in case you care) Howe got a charity 50 just to get us on the board. I really liked his game. He had bugger all chance of getting a kick up front the way we were going an dwent and hunted his own ball. It was a bit like Jurrah against West Coast, and we all hope that Jeremy won't suffer the same loss of interest that the Jurrahcane has in the last month. Ironically he was the other goalkicker for the quarter but it doesn't cover the fact that he was very, very ordinary again - even when the ball did go near him. Still reckon there's something not quite right there.
Given the siege that the backline was under for most of the third quarter it was hard to believe that we were only 40 odd points down at the end of it. There was never any question of nicking it but considering the Pies blistering record in final terms this season it would have made all the difference to have put up a decent fight. Even if we'd been done by ten goals after copping five in the last five minutes you could argue that fitness had something to do with it and gnash your teeth about how the Pies go to Arizona for pre-season while our players take a V-Line coach to Manangatang, but there was no such luck.
Scully and Sylvia combined for the first and the guy in front of me comforted himself by getting a little bit too excited at the prospect of a remarkable comeback but from then on it was all Pie, all the time with nary a fingernail raised in defence.
Reminded me of the Gold Coast game. Both times the underdog started well, slowly went under in the second, did a lot better than expected in the third and then got what they deserved in the last. Speaking of the Suns rumor has it that they raised a flag in celebration of... something.. on Saturday night. Good to see that we've made a buck subcontracting our stupid marketing ideas to somebody else, now sell them the fireworks from last Friday. Bit rude of them to pre-raise the flag they're going to win in five years though. Apparently the crowd went absolutely mild, so at least we've got that in common with them.
So, another great day out for the family then. The way this is going our crowds won't be able to utter the new MCG slogan of "meet you at the footy" without putting "I'd rather go on a road trip with the Milat family than..." before it. I'll meet you at Odyssey House if we keep on going this way for much longer.
One thing that will make me absolutely vom, even more than reading that worst of phrases "will he be in our next premiership team?", is if I pick up a paper or go online and see somebody citing Simon Buckley looking half decent in a team full of champions as a reason we should have kept him. Never a big fan myself but good luck to the guy, if we have to cop a Pies flag I hope he plays in it BUT at the moment he's like a midget hanging around with the Hells Angels. Looks like much more of a threat than he is because he can let Shaw/O'Brien/Maxwell etc.. do all the hard work and then stick the boots into the prone corpse. No thanks. I'm not entirely convinced by Strauss yet but I'd rather we completely exhausted all other avenues before panicking about whether or not we've missed the boat on Buckley.
Didn't mind Morton when he was doing what I expected him to do, mopping up around the half back flank causing very little damage with his touches. Even when dragged back deep in defence he did a couple of nice things but his whole day was destroyed by his dual failures to go up in the marking contest and also showing no interest in smothering. You might get away with some of that against shit teams and look alright but it'll fail miserably against anybody halfway decent. Good week to have ended contract negotiations as if any of us would be truly shattered if he walked right now. Still, it's got disaster written all over it if he goes to any half decent club. If Simon Buckley can look serviceable in that side imagine what Morton would do? Then again he could go to GWS and get murdered along with the rest of the 52kg bantamweight division.
Either way it's no good getting overjoyed about him going so that they can't have Scully. They could easily take Scully gratis then use the first pick in the PSD on any other uncontracted player they can get their hands on. Even though he's going nowhere with us if you were Senile Sheeds and the Puppetmaster Mark Williams you'd probably fancy him on a free at his age based on what he showed early on. Do we have to rig the Best and Fairest to make sure that we get decent compensation just based on him being a number four pick. Yes, he was a number four pick.
Losing Scully on the other hand would blow a gigantic hole in us. We might get out of it ok in the end but you just don't know, and off the back of his two games so far this year it's going to be a big hole to fill. Let the Visy style rorts begin. Give him a job kicking tyres at Hankook and installing Kaspersky software. Just do something. Unless, of course, they know that he's already signed. Then tell him to piss off.
So if he did walk, and could you really blame him for that price (A: Yes, because we're not rational people we're footy fans), it might be karma for us rorting the draft in the first place but that was our luck that they had such a shit system and we had people who were ready to cynically exploit it instead of listening to filthy hippies like me who have a sick belief in playing to win despite the fact that nobody else did it and that the league was poised to practically pre-hand premierships to two teams who will have 30,000 fans between them.
Everyone who thinks they know somebody or is trying to big note themselves will tell you he's officially gone. Everybody seems to 'know somebody' or they've heard something from their uncle who heard something at the Dapto dogs. Bullshit. Easy to pretend you're an oracle when there's only two options on the table and you're going for the red hot favourite - that's why the people who are saying he'll stay are only talking hunches while everybody else has a 'source' who apparently knows everything. Best one I saw was that theory - backed up by sources of course - that Scully and Bastinac's parents had signed agreements on each other's behalf that their kids would go to GWS next year. Fuck me if that isn't the worst theory you've ever heard in your life bar none, but people will go for anything at the moment. Kevin Sheedy gets up a lunch and claims he's signed two midfielders and everybody jizzes themselves that it's a sign of something. It's a sign of nothing more than a has been talking out of his ring piece.
Thing is though if Scully does go, and based on nothing else other than my own gut feeling I fully expect him to, everyone who has talked out of their arse about it for the last six months will claim that they were completely right and that they're footy geniuses. Rubbish. You're like a goalkeeper in a penalty shootout who jumped in the right direction. The worst offender of all is David Schwarz going on TV and blathering on about his sources and how he's 98% sure that the deal is done. I give Garry Lyon a lot of shit for being partially responsible for the comedy abortion that is the Footy Show but at least to his credit he doesn't come out with zingers like that to try and get himself into the papers. It's one thing to be an ex-player who is so wrapped up in his old club that he defends them even when it's stupid to (*cough* Lloyd *cough*) but it's another to unnecessarily stick the boots in like that just to get some cheap press for a show that nobody is watching.
Problem with this situation is that even after two games where he has proved himself a cut above most of the players on our list despite barely having a kick all year I find it hard to get too excited about anything he does. Certainly won't be sitting there with my arms folded if he wins us the game next week, and I won't rort him out of votes out of spite at him pissing us all around like this but to me he's basically a player on loan at the moment.
Imagine this scenario. It's Round 22 and we're presumably getting thumped sideways by Port because a) it's at Football Park and b) the velvet jacket trumpeter will be caretaker coach. Deep in the last quarter Scully turns to pick up a ball and goes down having blown his knee to pieces. Exclude yourself from this question if you fancy yourself as a Dalai Lama style figure and believe in peace and goodwill for all but are you a) shattered because our best young prospect will miss the entire next season or b) secretly thrilled that GWS have probably signed him up anyway and will get absolutely nothing out of him for a year? If they hadn't yet signed him but were intending to do they then pull the pin on the deal and leave us with him shafted out of millions and sitting on the sidelines for a year? Welcome to conspiracy corner.
Tweet Like A Demon
Unfollowing the lot of them. As much as I love Twitter I've got high standards for having to actually want to read what people are posting and the truth of the matter is that not only that they'll trot out the same old cliches this week but that none of them have written a single interesting thing since the Trengove debacle. Don't give a shit how much they love the Mavs, playing golf, beating each other at FIFA or drinking cafe lattes - if one of them moderately drifts into saying something interesting every man and their dog will retweet it anyway. Until then enjoy hearing about somebody eating a parma.
Talkback Corner
Worst thing about today is that it's open season for every goose on the planet to have their say about us playing Queen's Birthday. Forums, Herald Sun comments, SEN - you know, where all the stars congregate and North fans desperately try to make somebody believe that their club is worth taking notice of.
We were awful yesterday, some of it unavoidable, much of it self inflicted but what we end up with now is all the whinging pricks who support other teams going on about how we should lose Queen's Birthday because of it. It's not ANZAC day, we're not destroying the legacy of the troops by playing badly. It's an ordinary game that just happens to take place on a public holiday.
Were it the sort of game where they started handing out the Prince Albert Medal for BOG then maybe we'd be doing some sort of disservice to the community but as it is.. What's the harm? Kick us out and replace us with Richmond? Like they don't get enough. Boldly experiment with Footscray playing the Pies in front of 40,000 people? Get to shite.
Surely nobody can complain about the match on the basis of quality, otherwise the Pies would have been relegated from it after the second time Yze murdered them. But we'd already have been shunted into playing Freo after losing in '03. It doesn't work like that. The moment you start manipulating big games to suit the expected result is when you end up with an entire league of 'blockbuster' games the calibre of Footscray vs Adelaide this Friday night and are obliged to then start playing GWS/GC classics on ANZAC Day when they're dominating the league.
This is one thing I'm not concerned about the league stuffing up. Sadly at the moment the taunting that it is 'our grand final' is right, and we went along with the GF theme by getting trashed. Doesn't mean it'll happen again next year so get your hand off our fixtures vultures.
Law and Order: Football Investigations Unit
I know the league hate Trengove with a passion for making them look stupid when they suspended him before Dangerfield kicked six the next week but this is two weeks in a row he's been fined for running into an umpire. Scully can afford it, Trengove cannot. Leave him alone and start handing out the fines to the guy with the suspiciously bulging bank account.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Colin Sylvia
4 - Joel Macdonald
3 - Tom Scully
2 - Jordie McKenzie
1 - James Frawley
Apologies to Watts (first quarter only), Moloney, Howe and barely anybody else. Howe probably next cab off the rank on the votes but really only Sylvia deserved what he got and the next two were probably worth two and one only. Democracy doesn't work.
Good to see Macdonald storming into contention for the Seecamp just weeks after I wrote him off forever. Who said there's bias at play here? Or that I know what I'm on about. The only thing he let me down on today was that he didn't turn around after that Leigh Brown mark, grab Morton by the bonce and shake him vigorously while screaming the words "FOR GOD'S SAKE FIRE UP MAN" straight into his face. He looks the type. Happy to admit I was well out of order on him but where does he fit in when Garland comes back?
Leaderboard
So I guess Green isn't going to repeat as winner then?
23 - Colin Sylvia
19 - Brent Moloney
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Stefan Martin, Joel Macdonald, James Frawley
8 - Jack Watts
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year), Jordie McKenzie
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones, Tom Scully
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
1 - Brad Green
2012 MFC coach: the betting market
D. Bailey - 2.75 (Only because I'm convinced Stynes will go into bat for him with positive thinking/crystals/enemas etc.. until he can't possibly defend him anymore. Cue the wildest of wild scenes next season with people burning shit in the stands.)
T. Viney - 5.25
Any other result - 10
M. Malthouse - 18
P. Roos - 20
The guy from the Deep Heat ad - 70 (in from 100-1 last week)
Crowd Watch
Ditched by all and sundry, family and otherwise, I moved to my reserved seat area for the first time all year in the second half just to get away from the filth. Was sure that the guy in front of me said something about Jurrah and jail when he missed that snap, which would be ironic coming from a Pies fan.
Despite my loyalty to the Ponsford I could almost get used to Southern Stand, Level 2, section N1 if it wasn't for the fact my money not only entitles me to 17 games and a guaranteed Grand Final ticket if we make it that I'll never have to use but also the right to be seated a metre from corporate boxes full of drunken arseholes who have no interest in the game itself and instead enjoy themselves by shouting out the worst attempts at comedy since that bloke said "Hey Cameron Bruce, you're loose" against the Bulldogs in '06. At one point when Jones did something stupid one of the clowns yelled out "that's why they bashed your dad". Great society we've got going here.
Was interested to hear something claiming on the radio this morning (SEN, where else) that somebody was tossed out of the Redlegs section for wearing Pies colours and that it's expressly forbidden to don opposition scarves/jumpers etc... in there. If that's true they must have missed the guy two rows in front of me who was sitting there in full black and white outfit. When I went in there the security guard showed so little interest in the card I showed him that it might as well have been a Blockbuster Video membership so I'm not sure they're taking it that seriously. Please advise if you can confirm or deny this. Seems a bit over the top to me. Justified if you're making a tit of yourself but when there's some guy on free booze screaming abuse from behind you for four quarters I'm not sure it's more offensive to wear another team's colours.
In other news surely nobody is still sucked in by the buskers who wait for the result outside the ground, slap on a scarf and start belting out the winning team's song. The only instrumentalist in Melbourne who isn't out there is the tossbag trumpeter. They would have made an absolute fortune if we'd won yesterday and the 20,000 once a year fans who don't realise that it's an elaborate scam (probably controlled by the Russian mafia) and give generously. I'm not advocating that you punch them in the face for their cynical attempts at making money but give your money to somebody who deserves it. Like The Kaiser's Sausage, who I will keep posting about until they recognise it and give me an endorsement deal. Best sausage ever.
In related news who decided that bagpipes weren't the worst instrument ever invented? There were two, TWO people making the noises of cats being murdered before you even reached the top of the bridge. Walking from Fed Square to the G is like wandering through ye olde Scotland before they all ditched music and took up knife crime. I swear I saw more street theatre between Southbank and the MCG yesterday than you would in four years of being at university.
Radio corner
It's shamefully lowbrow but I listen to Triple M at the games. No issue other than the fact that I wouldn't pish on the rest of their station if it was on fire BUT could they possibly ditch the 2000 promos about how allegedly hilarious Mick Molloy? His "I'm a fat chain smoking pisshead" act was midly amusing when he was being carried by Tony Martin 20 years ago, but now it's responsible for a trail of destruction and axed programs - both TV and radio - a mile long.
Almost worthy of changing and listening to a non-gimmick coverage but the problem is that you're always running the risk of hitting a Dwayne Russell, Mark Maclure or Matthew Lloyd elsewhere.
Incidentally speaking of commentators I will be entering this competition, and you will be helping me stack it so I can win and call a quarter of the R22 game against Port on SEN. All bets are off if I'm in the chair with KB when Scully does his knee.
Midweek Magic
During the week I picked up a cheap and nasty DVD called Footy's Funniest Moments. So cheap in fact it was free. Against the odds, and despite being hosted by a clearly irritated Sam Kekovich who looked like he'd been dragged out of bed to do 10 minutes of links to camera, it delivered the goods. For the price paid anyway.
The masterstroke, though I'm sure it was nothing but a cost saving measure, was to just show old Plays Of The Month clips from the 80's and 90's which they'd clearly bought in a job lot from Seven. What should have been an absolute disaster instead delivered some of the best highlights you've not seen since 1992. Contained within, shortly after a shot of Warwick Capper baring his arse on the SCG, was Sydney's Jason Love snapping a miracle goal at the SCG in the early 90's - at which point the greatest banner in the history of AFL football was hoisted behind the goals.
Other trends shown which are now sadly missing included animals running on the field, fans having a BBQ in the outer at the Western Oval, ground invasions by the dozen - often with the perpetrator ending the chase by scurrying over a fence a'la Cops and legging it to safety (wait, that's back in vogue) - and that old chestnut of the past, punters leaping the fence to join in doing the goal umpire's signal. My favourite was when the Geelong mascot stole the Hawthorn mascot's head and some absolute gutter filth leapt the fence to punch on with the triumphant mascot.
Next week
Hopefully we cop a week of media scrutiny/beatings because it seems that's the only way that we could possibly get up enough to beat the Dockers. Did you know that of their ten wins at the MCG we've been on the wrong end of four of them? And if they hadn't imploded in spectacular, magical fashion on that day in 2008 then it would be right on half.
They've not won there since 2007, choked royally on their last visit and are battling an injury crisis which makes us look positively soft so tell me they're not going to be giving it 110% - especially as top four slips away and they're suddenly back in a position where they might not even make the eight.
Apparently Jamar is set to come back - though I hope we're not just rushing him out of panic - so Maximum will go back to the 2's with a 50/50 strike rate from his first two games. Wouldn't be surprised if they swapped Evans and Nicholson around just to try and give them games without having to play too many rookies and Jetta will go with his shoulder injury.
As for the ins Collingwood Reserves were dispatched ruthlessly on Saturday but the gulf in class between their real side and that side is enormous, except when half of them are in the seniors tormenting us, so how much can you read into Petterd dominating the midfield for BOG, Dunn kicking five and both Maric! At The Disco and Bate looking ok in patches. What I did like was Garland getting through the game without snapping in two, though where he fits in now that Macdonald is back and playing good football is a mystery to me. Maybe in for Strauss?
Warnock looked good against his less/not at all fancied opponents but he's missed the boat if he couldn't get a game against Cloke and Dawes. Certainly won't be required to take on any dual towers of terror against our next few opponents, though surely Miller will be the third time lucky ex-player to rip us a new one this season. McLean and Buckley haven't managed it (though at least both were part of a larger ripping) so surely he's going to kick 10.
So, if Warnock doesn't fit, Maric is in counselling with the Morton family and both Dunn/Bate have had their cards marked how about this:
IN: Jamar, Garland, Nicholson, Petterd
OUT: Jetta (inj), Evans, Strauss, Gawn (omit)
No malice in the outs, just keeping it fresh.
The next month
The good news is that we could very well beat Freo, Richmond and Footscray going into the bye then Port after it. The bad news is that if we don't win at least three of them any hope of sneaking into the eight will be dead and if it's two or less then the media circus will well and truly be back on.
Imagine if we lost the lot? People might be able to avert their eyes from a debacle against the Dockers but nobody will take losing to Richmond no matter how much better they are this year. Remember Daniher winning two in a row in '07, accepting plaudits for putting us back on the right track and then being invited to reapply for his own job when we went out and lost to the Tiges a few days later? That could be the absolute killer for Bailey so he'd want to make sure that not only do the players get up this week but that even if they don't win they at least put in a half decent performance in losing - because after those four it's Hawthorn, Geelong and Carlton - and we're more chance of winning the Eurovision Song Contest than beating any of them this year.
Deano, at least we'll always have the dugout punching. Which is not half as filthy as it sounds.
Was it worth it?
In that we made a fortune off the gate and didn't have to come back from Sydney on a bus afterwards it was a roaring success. Apparently some sort of sporting contest was also played on the day.
Final thoughts
Dearly wishing I hadn't set myself the challenge of watching every game this year to the end no matter what. Would love to have kicked a seat and stormed out on about nine occassions yesterday. Still, like the weather it doesn't matter what the forecast is for next week anything could happen so there's no need to smash the panic button into pieces by punching it vigorously. Yet.
So, raising my right hand I, Adam S Mercado* (*denotes fake name), being of fairly sound mind and body do solemnly, sincerly and truly declare and affirm that I will not, under any circumstances, get roped into believing that the Melbourne Football Club are 'back' or are 'finals contenders' on the evidence of one-off performances again until such time that they put together a decent run of performances and beat some teams that aren't utterly shite and/or from interstate.
Don't know why everyone was getting so excited about our chances in this match. You can understand supporters being roped in by one slashing third quarter amidst a month of slop but even respectable media types were talking up the prospect of an upset based on Collingwood's supposed injury/suspension crisis and the fact that we were one point worse than them over two starts last season.
To be fair the loss of Swan/Thomas/Jolly helped us, well it could hardly hurt, but it's not like our midfield is flying at the moment either so that was always unlikely to be the difference. In all the euphoria of the VE Day style celebrations at the end of last week it seemed to be forgotten that they'd actually smashed us out of the middle and it had been the backline which saved our bacon long enough to wear them down, kick away and almost cock it up again before the defence saved us a second time. If Essendon sans Jobe Watson can do it then the Pies sans half their premiership team are probably going to as well. Still, aren't we used to pundits saying outrageous things just to make themselves stand out from everybody else? Isn't that right Theo x?
Sure last year we had one unlucky loss and a draw. Meaningless in the context of 12 months down the track. The Petterd game gets nothing in retrospect because it's not the first time a good side have had a slow start to the season before getting it together and running away with the comp (Geelong anybody?), and even though in the end we could have won QB game with another ten seconds on the clock we were only there because the Pies were abysmal kicking for goal. They kept going wide, ended up having most of their shots from section Q32 in the Southern Stand and duly stuffed up their chance to win it easily. We had some mighty competitors that day (The Jamar/Moloney Connection anybody?) but it was a stalemate snatched from the jaws of defeat. One year on the Pies have lost two more matches and drawn a Grand Final, so what made anybody in their right mind think we were a chance of winning this?
Maybe if you'd offered me a six goal head start I'd have taken it (if I wasn't avoiding the TAB like the plague) but the $1.20 on the Pies head to head must have been the easiest money some people have ever made. Sucked in to the bookies who would have been taken to the cleaners by people throwing that into multis, good to see money going back to the punters where they will presumably give it back again by making irrational bets on teams called Torpedo Vladimir in the Russian Second Division.
Admittedly we didn't look all that bad for the first 20 minutes. Watts and Sylvia were on fire as a combo up front and other than Frawley who was having an early 'mare with his kicking the backline looked like it could cope with at least one of Cloke/Dawes long enough to at least keep us in the game into the second half again. Another third quarter blast was too unlikely to even consider but imagine how many times Bailey would have gotten to say 'competitive' On The Couch if we'd managed to stick with them until the last quarter? For the record he did say it seven times but I reckon he'd have multiplied that by ten if we hadn't gone tits up so quickly.
Problem was that before you could process the fact that we were not only playing well but actually winning we're suddenly about 20 inside 50's down, getting slaughtered out of the centre and any chance we had of hitting back was killed off by Green (and geez, aren't I glad I've spent the last fortnight defending his honour to the death before he pulled out an absolute stinker) missing a shot he would have eaten for breakfast a few years ago. Commentators must now be duty bound to point out alongside all the "did you know he tried out for...." anecdotes that he also used to be a frighteningly accurate kick. This year he's 15.13 and nothing near a certainty when it's a set shot. I'm keeping faith, mainly because he's the only player older than me on the list so when he retires the measure of "being old" that I came up with as a kid (when every single player on the list is younger than you) will finally apply and I'll have to go bald, buy a sportscar and start hanging around at Venue 28 Doncaster on a Saturday night. Long may Dustin Fletcher continue to play and make me feel sprightly.
You know you're in big trouble at a Melbourne game when the opposition start racking up behind after behind because eventually they'll get it right and we'll have copped a seven/eight/nine point play due to not being able to find a decent kick-out strategy. How many times yesterday were we forced into the big roost to the members/Olympic Stand side of the ground? And how many times did it come straight back again? When the best we could hope for was that it would spill out of bounds it became time to seriously reassess what the buggery we are doing with these kick-ins. The ridiculous disparity of inside 50's against us this year has got as much to do with the kick-ins as it does to getting beaten out of the centre.
The "play on to yourself then hoof it" tactic was fresh and new in the first half of last year when we had Jamar on the end of it, but even when he was in career best form in the second half of the season it stopped working because every other club knew exactly what we were up to. Now we're relying on it to get us out jail with players who don't offer a hundreth of what Jamar does in a contested mark and with a fourth gamer kicking it out most of the time, probably expecting that if he tries anything different and cocks it up he'll be back at Casey Fields next week.
Maybe with Collingwood's dominance out of the midfield the match couldn't have been salvaged no matter what we did, but my god could they have hung Rivers out to dry any more? He had the game of his life floating around the backline taking grabs last week, and surely everybody knows that's what he does best. So when he lined up against Cloke I started sweating a bit. Still, it might have worked. It didn't. I'm concerned whenever I see Warnock in our team but if there was any time to pick him this would have been it. He was pox against Carlton but horses for courses and all that shit. Would have been fair better suited to having Rivers jumping in from the side on the contests and taking grabs instead of suffering the media curse and playing like a man who had just had a double page spread in The Age.
It took five goals in a half of torment for Riv until the penny finally dropped and they moved Frawley onto Cloke. Even to a dunce like me who couldn't identify a tactical manouevre if it were explained in a series of illustrated diagrams it seemed obvious that the Collingwood masterplan was to clear everybody else out and give it to Cloke one-on-one with Rivers where he would monster him. Cue the entire second quarter. Even when he was trying to do the right thing he got stooged when The Experience killed him in the contest that gave Fassolo a goal with his first kick and allowed the commentators to unleash the second biggest cliche after Green spending ten minutes at Old Trafford.
Frawley was having his own issues, shanking kicks and being folded up like an accordian after his contest with Brown, but tell me he wouldn't have given us more in contests against Cloke than Rivers? Sure, maybe then you open up Dawes to run riot but at least try something different when it's not going well. Something that doesn't involve Watts and Morton being expected to play as tall defenders. Sure Morton was getting dragged back there etc.. etc.. etc.. and wasn't doing too badly when it wasn't contested but if you're expecting him to play as a semi-key defender you're having a laugh. Any danger they might try something different with him at some point? Have given up on him ever being sent forward but I'd like to see him thrown in the middle once the season is really dicked (2.45pm next Sunday) and if he gets his fragile sad panda bones snapped in a contest then at least he went down swinging and can stick two fingers up at the critics. I'll be over here waiting for him to wave them at me from an arm in a cast. On that cast I will write CALE - YOU ARE NOW A MAN and watch him win the Brownlow next year.
Once they eventually made the move Chip kept Cloke to one goal from a furious roost that no man could have stopped, and Dawes hardly went near it even when the rest of his team were queuing up to kick goals in the last quarter. Would love to have been a fly on the wall in the coaches box after the third or fourth goal on Rivers to see what the argument in favour of leaving him there was. The worst bit of it all for me was not only that they refused to make the change but that all of a sudden near the end of the second Watts was sent back as a loose man instead. That is not a solution, that's a confidence killer. Not surprisingly from there his game went to shit and he returned to Carlton level kicking efficiency. Would love to see a split between his first and last quarters because he seems to go missing in the second half of games a lot, usually after having been marooned in the backline while it gets machine gunned by the opposition.
The Cloke/Rivers fiasco had a hint of QB2003 about it. Remember Tarrant slaughtering Bizzell for the entire first half before Daniher finally made a change when the game was lost and Chris Lamb held him in the second. Big difference is that Frawley won't cop four goals from Ian Perrie in the first quarter next week, get delisted and end up pulling pints at the Bridge Hotel.
Nevertheless before Cloke really got going we involved ourselves in a cavalcade of shambles from one end of the ground to the other which ensured that there was no possible way we could kick a winning score. I don't blame Green for trying to shepherd Trengove's goal through but if the free wasn't 'there' I can see how the umpire got sucked in to it on the basis of the jostling in the square. Will always go against the player trying to take out the defender in that circumstances. Sylvia got his third not long afterwards and that was pretty much it for us. I'd be interested to see the quarter-by-quarter inside 50's because I reckon we went inside the most during the second but necked ourselves by stuffing it up so many times. Would have had even more if we could move it through the midfield without throwing 57 handballs to guys standing a metre away.
Even when we did finally sneak it inside 50 we just kept shooting ourselves in the foot. Green dropped a chestmark and missed another shot that he should have kicked, Scully missed a set shot and Jurrah tried a half arsed banana to an open goal which didn't even deserve to score. Somewhere Dwayne Russell was champing at the bit, leaping off his chair dying to scream the words "THAT COULD BE THE FIRESTARTER!!?11!!!!!11!" but we never gave him the chance. At least you can be thankful for that.
It wasn't so much the loss, or even the margin, that got to me but the collective head drop as the match went on. If you're going to get thrashed going at it 100% then so be it but even if you take out all the times that the Pies went from one of the ground to the other untouched (and my god there were many) where was the tackling? Where were the contested possessions? Fine if you get the thing and then stuff it up, that's to be expected. Alternatively you could try and take on half the opposition side needlessly a'la Jones before being pinged but that's not advisable unless you want to give everybody the shits. But to go down limply without a fight is what people lose the plot - and in retrospect makes celebrating last week's ultimately meaningless victory like we were the next big thing look unbelievably stupid. Other than a few notable exemptions we caved in yesterday like that horrendous Round 22, 2008 game against Richmond. This wasn't Round 22. Thankfully it wasn't Richmond either or we'd all have jumped into the ocean.
That's the problem with my abusive on-again/off-again relationship with Bailey. It's one thing to go off your nut when you beat Essendon, and I loved it when he started attacking inanimate objects and acting like he'd won Tattslotto, but put that up against the blind insistence on continuing with a matchup even though it was going horribly wrong and we're back to where we were before last week. But I'm still for the wild scenes after that match with no regrets. Who could have forseen that they'd turn up and get bullied from the first bounce? Well, most people I suppose, we're overflowing with workmanlike players but are well short on anybody who could be reliably asked to throw their weight around in front of a 75,000 crowd.
But wait, who did the Pies have in the midfield to do that? Pendlebury was well held by McKenzie early but even at his best he's hardly a fearsome character, striking terror in the hearts of men is he? In fact once Sylvia started playing through the middle more you'd almost say we would have had the advantage in that department and we botched it miserably.
The cycle we're in this year is utterly farcical, firing up for a week at a time based on media scrutiny, running around like world beaters thumping their chests/pointing at badges then turning in absolute garbage a few days later. I reiterate that this isn't based on the fact that we lost in the 1-88 points bracket yesterday. A win was never on the cards, it's that off-field we haven't developed a reliable tactic to clear the ball from defence and on-field the quality of pressure goes from being an "open heart surgeon" to "librarian" on a weekly basis. It's not to say that nobody would care if we were losing games after leaving a trail of blood from here to Timbuktu on a weekly basis, but it would make it easier to accept.
Even Brisbane, ruined for years to come by Michael Voss and his Ken Bruce has gone mad style player trading, managed to rack up a number of fighting losses at the start of the year. Sure they also lost to the Suns, have been flogged for the last fortnight and I wouldn't swap our position with theirs under any circumstances but at least they can point to their collection of hacks + kids and say that they've had a dip in defeat. So far this year we've been beaten by 45, 54, 41, 20, 47 and 88. Just the casual 49 point average loss then. When we're bad, we're rancid. When we're good we're just a week away from being rancid.
In the grand scheme of things the third quarter wasn't too bad. It will certainly look that way in the future when losers like me peruse the stats and go "oh look, they only lost the quarter by three points" but good god have you ever seen a backline so repeatedly under siege as ours were in the first 15 minutes? A non-MFC 2007-2011 one anyway. Did we even have a single inside 50 in all that time? I'm not sure we even went past halfway for about ten minutes at one point. Credit to Frawley and Macdonald (and to a lesser degree Strauss, Morton and Rivers) who kept them at bay all that time when it could have gotten really, really ugly even before we inevitably fell victim to one of the Pies renowned blistering last quarters.
Just when I was trying to find our last scoreless quarter (R19, 2008 in case you care) Howe got a charity 50 just to get us on the board. I really liked his game. He had bugger all chance of getting a kick up front the way we were going an dwent and hunted his own ball. It was a bit like Jurrah against West Coast, and we all hope that Jeremy won't suffer the same loss of interest that the Jurrahcane has in the last month. Ironically he was the other goalkicker for the quarter but it doesn't cover the fact that he was very, very ordinary again - even when the ball did go near him. Still reckon there's something not quite right there.
Given the siege that the backline was under for most of the third quarter it was hard to believe that we were only 40 odd points down at the end of it. There was never any question of nicking it but considering the Pies blistering record in final terms this season it would have made all the difference to have put up a decent fight. Even if we'd been done by ten goals after copping five in the last five minutes you could argue that fitness had something to do with it and gnash your teeth about how the Pies go to Arizona for pre-season while our players take a V-Line coach to Manangatang, but there was no such luck.
Scully and Sylvia combined for the first and the guy in front of me comforted himself by getting a little bit too excited at the prospect of a remarkable comeback but from then on it was all Pie, all the time with nary a fingernail raised in defence.
Reminded me of the Gold Coast game. Both times the underdog started well, slowly went under in the second, did a lot better than expected in the third and then got what they deserved in the last. Speaking of the Suns rumor has it that they raised a flag in celebration of... something.. on Saturday night. Good to see that we've made a buck subcontracting our stupid marketing ideas to somebody else, now sell them the fireworks from last Friday. Bit rude of them to pre-raise the flag they're going to win in five years though. Apparently the crowd went absolutely mild, so at least we've got that in common with them.
So, another great day out for the family then. The way this is going our crowds won't be able to utter the new MCG slogan of "meet you at the footy" without putting "I'd rather go on a road trip with the Milat family than..." before it. I'll meet you at Odyssey House if we keep on going this way for much longer.
One thing that will make me absolutely vom, even more than reading that worst of phrases "will he be in our next premiership team?", is if I pick up a paper or go online and see somebody citing Simon Buckley looking half decent in a team full of champions as a reason we should have kept him. Never a big fan myself but good luck to the guy, if we have to cop a Pies flag I hope he plays in it BUT at the moment he's like a midget hanging around with the Hells Angels. Looks like much more of a threat than he is because he can let Shaw/O'Brien/Maxwell etc.. do all the hard work and then stick the boots into the prone corpse. No thanks. I'm not entirely convinced by Strauss yet but I'd rather we completely exhausted all other avenues before panicking about whether or not we've missed the boat on Buckley.
Didn't mind Morton when he was doing what I expected him to do, mopping up around the half back flank causing very little damage with his touches. Even when dragged back deep in defence he did a couple of nice things but his whole day was destroyed by his dual failures to go up in the marking contest and also showing no interest in smothering. You might get away with some of that against shit teams and look alright but it'll fail miserably against anybody halfway decent. Good week to have ended contract negotiations as if any of us would be truly shattered if he walked right now. Still, it's got disaster written all over it if he goes to any half decent club. If Simon Buckley can look serviceable in that side imagine what Morton would do? Then again he could go to GWS and get murdered along with the rest of the 52kg bantamweight division.
Either way it's no good getting overjoyed about him going so that they can't have Scully. They could easily take Scully gratis then use the first pick in the PSD on any other uncontracted player they can get their hands on. Even though he's going nowhere with us if you were Senile Sheeds and the Puppetmaster Mark Williams you'd probably fancy him on a free at his age based on what he showed early on. Do we have to rig the Best and Fairest to make sure that we get decent compensation just based on him being a number four pick. Yes, he was a number four pick.
Losing Scully on the other hand would blow a gigantic hole in us. We might get out of it ok in the end but you just don't know, and off the back of his two games so far this year it's going to be a big hole to fill. Let the Visy style rorts begin. Give him a job kicking tyres at Hankook and installing Kaspersky software. Just do something. Unless, of course, they know that he's already signed. Then tell him to piss off.
So if he did walk, and could you really blame him for that price (A: Yes, because we're not rational people we're footy fans), it might be karma for us rorting the draft in the first place but that was our luck that they had such a shit system and we had people who were ready to cynically exploit it instead of listening to filthy hippies like me who have a sick belief in playing to win despite the fact that nobody else did it and that the league was poised to practically pre-hand premierships to two teams who will have 30,000 fans between them.
Everyone who thinks they know somebody or is trying to big note themselves will tell you he's officially gone. Everybody seems to 'know somebody' or they've heard something from their uncle who heard something at the Dapto dogs. Bullshit. Easy to pretend you're an oracle when there's only two options on the table and you're going for the red hot favourite - that's why the people who are saying he'll stay are only talking hunches while everybody else has a 'source' who apparently knows everything. Best one I saw was that theory - backed up by sources of course - that Scully and Bastinac's parents had signed agreements on each other's behalf that their kids would go to GWS next year. Fuck me if that isn't the worst theory you've ever heard in your life bar none, but people will go for anything at the moment. Kevin Sheedy gets up a lunch and claims he's signed two midfielders and everybody jizzes themselves that it's a sign of something. It's a sign of nothing more than a has been talking out of his ring piece.
Thing is though if Scully does go, and based on nothing else other than my own gut feeling I fully expect him to, everyone who has talked out of their arse about it for the last six months will claim that they were completely right and that they're footy geniuses. Rubbish. You're like a goalkeeper in a penalty shootout who jumped in the right direction. The worst offender of all is David Schwarz going on TV and blathering on about his sources and how he's 98% sure that the deal is done. I give Garry Lyon a lot of shit for being partially responsible for the comedy abortion that is the Footy Show but at least to his credit he doesn't come out with zingers like that to try and get himself into the papers. It's one thing to be an ex-player who is so wrapped up in his old club that he defends them even when it's stupid to (*cough* Lloyd *cough*) but it's another to unnecessarily stick the boots in like that just to get some cheap press for a show that nobody is watching.
Problem with this situation is that even after two games where he has proved himself a cut above most of the players on our list despite barely having a kick all year I find it hard to get too excited about anything he does. Certainly won't be sitting there with my arms folded if he wins us the game next week, and I won't rort him out of votes out of spite at him pissing us all around like this but to me he's basically a player on loan at the moment.
Imagine this scenario. It's Round 22 and we're presumably getting thumped sideways by Port because a) it's at Football Park and b) the velvet jacket trumpeter will be caretaker coach. Deep in the last quarter Scully turns to pick up a ball and goes down having blown his knee to pieces. Exclude yourself from this question if you fancy yourself as a Dalai Lama style figure and believe in peace and goodwill for all but are you a) shattered because our best young prospect will miss the entire next season or b) secretly thrilled that GWS have probably signed him up anyway and will get absolutely nothing out of him for a year? If they hadn't yet signed him but were intending to do they then pull the pin on the deal and leave us with him shafted out of millions and sitting on the sidelines for a year? Welcome to conspiracy corner.
Tweet Like A Demon
Unfollowing the lot of them. As much as I love Twitter I've got high standards for having to actually want to read what people are posting and the truth of the matter is that not only that they'll trot out the same old cliches this week but that none of them have written a single interesting thing since the Trengove debacle. Don't give a shit how much they love the Mavs, playing golf, beating each other at FIFA or drinking cafe lattes - if one of them moderately drifts into saying something interesting every man and their dog will retweet it anyway. Until then enjoy hearing about somebody eating a parma.
Talkback Corner
Worst thing about today is that it's open season for every goose on the planet to have their say about us playing Queen's Birthday. Forums, Herald Sun comments, SEN - you know, where all the stars congregate and North fans desperately try to make somebody believe that their club is worth taking notice of.
We were awful yesterday, some of it unavoidable, much of it self inflicted but what we end up with now is all the whinging pricks who support other teams going on about how we should lose Queen's Birthday because of it. It's not ANZAC day, we're not destroying the legacy of the troops by playing badly. It's an ordinary game that just happens to take place on a public holiday.
Were it the sort of game where they started handing out the Prince Albert Medal for BOG then maybe we'd be doing some sort of disservice to the community but as it is.. What's the harm? Kick us out and replace us with Richmond? Like they don't get enough. Boldly experiment with Footscray playing the Pies in front of 40,000 people? Get to shite.
Surely nobody can complain about the match on the basis of quality, otherwise the Pies would have been relegated from it after the second time Yze murdered them. But we'd already have been shunted into playing Freo after losing in '03. It doesn't work like that. The moment you start manipulating big games to suit the expected result is when you end up with an entire league of 'blockbuster' games the calibre of Footscray vs Adelaide this Friday night and are obliged to then start playing GWS/GC classics on ANZAC Day when they're dominating the league.
This is one thing I'm not concerned about the league stuffing up. Sadly at the moment the taunting that it is 'our grand final' is right, and we went along with the GF theme by getting trashed. Doesn't mean it'll happen again next year so get your hand off our fixtures vultures.
Law and Order: Football Investigations Unit
I know the league hate Trengove with a passion for making them look stupid when they suspended him before Dangerfield kicked six the next week but this is two weeks in a row he's been fined for running into an umpire. Scully can afford it, Trengove cannot. Leave him alone and start handing out the fines to the guy with the suspiciously bulging bank account.
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
5 - Colin Sylvia
4 - Joel Macdonald
3 - Tom Scully
2 - Jordie McKenzie
1 - James Frawley
Apologies to Watts (first quarter only), Moloney, Howe and barely anybody else. Howe probably next cab off the rank on the votes but really only Sylvia deserved what he got and the next two were probably worth two and one only. Democracy doesn't work.
Good to see Macdonald storming into contention for the Seecamp just weeks after I wrote him off forever. Who said there's bias at play here? Or that I know what I'm on about. The only thing he let me down on today was that he didn't turn around after that Leigh Brown mark, grab Morton by the bonce and shake him vigorously while screaming the words "FOR GOD'S SAKE FIRE UP MAN" straight into his face. He looks the type. Happy to admit I was well out of order on him but where does he fit in when Garland comes back?
Leaderboard
So I guess Green isn't going to repeat as winner then?
23 - Colin Sylvia
19 - Brent Moloney
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Stefan Martin, Joel Macdonald, James Frawley
8 - Jack Watts
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year), Jordie McKenzie
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail
4 - Michael Evans
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones, Tom Scully
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
1 - Brad Green
2012 MFC coach: the betting market
D. Bailey - 2.75 (Only because I'm convinced Stynes will go into bat for him with positive thinking/crystals/enemas etc.. until he can't possibly defend him anymore. Cue the wildest of wild scenes next season with people burning shit in the stands.)
T. Viney - 5.25
Any other result - 10
M. Malthouse - 18
P. Roos - 20
The guy from the Deep Heat ad - 70 (in from 100-1 last week)
Crowd Watch
Ditched by all and sundry, family and otherwise, I moved to my reserved seat area for the first time all year in the second half just to get away from the filth. Was sure that the guy in front of me said something about Jurrah and jail when he missed that snap, which would be ironic coming from a Pies fan.
Despite my loyalty to the Ponsford I could almost get used to Southern Stand, Level 2, section N1 if it wasn't for the fact my money not only entitles me to 17 games and a guaranteed Grand Final ticket if we make it that I'll never have to use but also the right to be seated a metre from corporate boxes full of drunken arseholes who have no interest in the game itself and instead enjoy themselves by shouting out the worst attempts at comedy since that bloke said "Hey Cameron Bruce, you're loose" against the Bulldogs in '06. At one point when Jones did something stupid one of the clowns yelled out "that's why they bashed your dad". Great society we've got going here.
Was interested to hear something claiming on the radio this morning (SEN, where else) that somebody was tossed out of the Redlegs section for wearing Pies colours and that it's expressly forbidden to don opposition scarves/jumpers etc... in there. If that's true they must have missed the guy two rows in front of me who was sitting there in full black and white outfit. When I went in there the security guard showed so little interest in the card I showed him that it might as well have been a Blockbuster Video membership so I'm not sure they're taking it that seriously. Please advise if you can confirm or deny this. Seems a bit over the top to me. Justified if you're making a tit of yourself but when there's some guy on free booze screaming abuse from behind you for four quarters I'm not sure it's more offensive to wear another team's colours.
In other news surely nobody is still sucked in by the buskers who wait for the result outside the ground, slap on a scarf and start belting out the winning team's song. The only instrumentalist in Melbourne who isn't out there is the tossbag trumpeter. They would have made an absolute fortune if we'd won yesterday and the 20,000 once a year fans who don't realise that it's an elaborate scam (probably controlled by the Russian mafia) and give generously. I'm not advocating that you punch them in the face for their cynical attempts at making money but give your money to somebody who deserves it. Like The Kaiser's Sausage, who I will keep posting about until they recognise it and give me an endorsement deal. Best sausage ever.
In related news who decided that bagpipes weren't the worst instrument ever invented? There were two, TWO people making the noises of cats being murdered before you even reached the top of the bridge. Walking from Fed Square to the G is like wandering through ye olde Scotland before they all ditched music and took up knife crime. I swear I saw more street theatre between Southbank and the MCG yesterday than you would in four years of being at university.
Radio corner
It's shamefully lowbrow but I listen to Triple M at the games. No issue other than the fact that I wouldn't pish on the rest of their station if it was on fire BUT could they possibly ditch the 2000 promos about how allegedly hilarious Mick Molloy? His "I'm a fat chain smoking pisshead" act was midly amusing when he was being carried by Tony Martin 20 years ago, but now it's responsible for a trail of destruction and axed programs - both TV and radio - a mile long.
Almost worthy of changing and listening to a non-gimmick coverage but the problem is that you're always running the risk of hitting a Dwayne Russell, Mark Maclure or Matthew Lloyd elsewhere.
Incidentally speaking of commentators I will be entering this competition, and you will be helping me stack it so I can win and call a quarter of the R22 game against Port on SEN. All bets are off if I'm in the chair with KB when Scully does his knee.
Midweek Magic
During the week I picked up a cheap and nasty DVD called Footy's Funniest Moments. So cheap in fact it was free. Against the odds, and despite being hosted by a clearly irritated Sam Kekovich who looked like he'd been dragged out of bed to do 10 minutes of links to camera, it delivered the goods. For the price paid anyway.
The masterstroke, though I'm sure it was nothing but a cost saving measure, was to just show old Plays Of The Month clips from the 80's and 90's which they'd clearly bought in a job lot from Seven. What should have been an absolute disaster instead delivered some of the best highlights you've not seen since 1992. Contained within, shortly after a shot of Warwick Capper baring his arse on the SCG, was Sydney's Jason Love snapping a miracle goal at the SCG in the early 90's - at which point the greatest banner in the history of AFL football was hoisted behind the goals.
Other trends shown which are now sadly missing included animals running on the field, fans having a BBQ in the outer at the Western Oval, ground invasions by the dozen - often with the perpetrator ending the chase by scurrying over a fence a'la Cops and legging it to safety (wait, that's back in vogue) - and that old chestnut of the past, punters leaping the fence to join in doing the goal umpire's signal. My favourite was when the Geelong mascot stole the Hawthorn mascot's head and some absolute gutter filth leapt the fence to punch on with the triumphant mascot.
Next week
Hopefully we cop a week of media scrutiny/beatings because it seems that's the only way that we could possibly get up enough to beat the Dockers. Did you know that of their ten wins at the MCG we've been on the wrong end of four of them? And if they hadn't imploded in spectacular, magical fashion on that day in 2008 then it would be right on half.
They've not won there since 2007, choked royally on their last visit and are battling an injury crisis which makes us look positively soft so tell me they're not going to be giving it 110% - especially as top four slips away and they're suddenly back in a position where they might not even make the eight.
Apparently Jamar is set to come back - though I hope we're not just rushing him out of panic - so Maximum will go back to the 2's with a 50/50 strike rate from his first two games. Wouldn't be surprised if they swapped Evans and Nicholson around just to try and give them games without having to play too many rookies and Jetta will go with his shoulder injury.
As for the ins Collingwood Reserves were dispatched ruthlessly on Saturday but the gulf in class between their real side and that side is enormous, except when half of them are in the seniors tormenting us, so how much can you read into Petterd dominating the midfield for BOG, Dunn kicking five and both Maric! At The Disco and Bate looking ok in patches. What I did like was Garland getting through the game without snapping in two, though where he fits in now that Macdonald is back and playing good football is a mystery to me. Maybe in for Strauss?
Warnock looked good against his less/not at all fancied opponents but he's missed the boat if he couldn't get a game against Cloke and Dawes. Certainly won't be required to take on any dual towers of terror against our next few opponents, though surely Miller will be the third time lucky ex-player to rip us a new one this season. McLean and Buckley haven't managed it (though at least both were part of a larger ripping) so surely he's going to kick 10.
So, if Warnock doesn't fit, Maric is in counselling with the Morton family and both Dunn/Bate have had their cards marked how about this:
IN: Jamar, Garland, Nicholson, Petterd
OUT: Jetta (inj), Evans, Strauss, Gawn (omit)
No malice in the outs, just keeping it fresh.
The next month
The good news is that we could very well beat Freo, Richmond and Footscray going into the bye then Port after it. The bad news is that if we don't win at least three of them any hope of sneaking into the eight will be dead and if it's two or less then the media circus will well and truly be back on.
Imagine if we lost the lot? People might be able to avert their eyes from a debacle against the Dockers but nobody will take losing to Richmond no matter how much better they are this year. Remember Daniher winning two in a row in '07, accepting plaudits for putting us back on the right track and then being invited to reapply for his own job when we went out and lost to the Tiges a few days later? That could be the absolute killer for Bailey so he'd want to make sure that not only do the players get up this week but that even if they don't win they at least put in a half decent performance in losing - because after those four it's Hawthorn, Geelong and Carlton - and we're more chance of winning the Eurovision Song Contest than beating any of them this year.
Deano, at least we'll always have the dugout punching. Which is not half as filthy as it sounds.
Was it worth it?
In that we made a fortune off the gate and didn't have to come back from Sydney on a bus afterwards it was a roaring success. Apparently some sort of sporting contest was also played on the day.
Final thoughts
Dearly wishing I hadn't set myself the challenge of watching every game this year to the end no matter what. Would love to have kicked a seat and stormed out on about nine occassions yesterday. Still, like the weather it doesn't matter what the forecast is for next week anything could happen so there's no need to smash the panic button into pieces by punching it vigorously. Yet.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Stay tuned...
God knows why you'd want to read anything more about that debacle, but there will be a post of some sorts on here at some point on Tuesday - hopefully before close of business. No, it's not some sort of elaborate scam to get you to keep coming back so that I can get $0.0000001 cent in advertising revenue per visitor, I'm just half finished it as of 11.30 Monday night and the only thing that gives me more fear than a half finished post is waking up in the morning and having to go outside.
If you, like me, enjoy reading lengthy articles on Monday (or in this case Tuesday) morning as a substitute for doing any actual work at the start of the week may I direct you to this page which has enough reading material to ensure that you're sacked by the boss before midday.
If you, like me, enjoy reading lengthy articles on Monday (or in this case Tuesday) morning as a substitute for doing any actual work at the start of the week may I direct you to this page which has enough reading material to ensure that you're sacked by the boss before midday.
Saturday, 4 June 2011
Violent Mood Swings
Another week, another twist in my abusive relationship with Dean Bailey. After last week's fiasco where he went out to try and defend a nil-all draw, persisting with playing a forward structure that the Diamond Valley Under 12's wouldn't spit on - and a full forward who wouldn't get a game with them - I was firmly back in the "oh my god, what is he doing? What's Todd Viney doing next week?" camp.
It was a drastic overreaction, but the longer you read this page the more you'll be used to that. Fact of the matter remains that nothing is going to happen at this club without the personal stamp of approval by one James Stynes of Dublin, and he's not going to sack anybody halfway through the year no matter what the media says or how much we bleat online - and my god we bleat.
So having gone from SELL to HOLD after the Adelaide game and then back to SELL again last Friday night I'm shamefully backtracking into the HOLD camp again. We can bag out Essendon and Carlton fans for swapping from wanting to lynch coaches to loving them the next, and naturally there were more than a few lining up last night to start the potting process on Hird, but the way this team is playing I feel like that nutbag off Mad Money, running around changing my stock tips on a whim and throwing chairs around the room.
I'm right back to where I was after the Adelaide game - not sure about the long term future and wanting a few good weeks in a row to convince me that he'll be there next year, but watching the replay of the wild celebrations at the final siren made me shamefully backtrack that little bit more. That's exactly what I want in a coach, not just when he's had a shit week beaten from pillar to post by everyone including opposition players and his own supporters, but every week. He usually seems to be under heavy sedation, and reverted to type by the time the press conference rolled around, but the punching of the roof of the dugout was magic. Hands up who else was disappointed when they realised it was water flying off the top of the box and not glass/perspex shattering everywhere?
Thank god we finally got to see the Gawn/Howe show unleashed. Should have happened last week, and probably took Newton's injury to get them both in for the same game, but both impressed and had the rare feat (in the last four years at least) of playing in a win on debut. For #statmybitchup fans, The Stefan Martin Experience is the only other player to have done it since Bails took over, and there have been a lot of debutants in that time.
I did feel sorry for Newton though. To be entirely fair I don't want him in the team, and haven't wanted him on the list since early 2008, but you'd have to be sporting a solid rock, black heart to not at least feel a twinge of sadness for a guy who is in the team, playing to save his career and then suffers a six week mystery injury halfway through the season. Is now surely absolutely finished, and probably knows it very well. Don't know where all this compassion has suddenly come from. I blame Twitter, there would never have been any of this treating players as humans back in the glory days of Luke Williams and Scott Chisholm, but seeing people writing in to the guy with "sucked in, thank god you're injured" etc.. messages made me feel ever so slightly guilty. After all what is this page other than exactly the same thing without the abuse being neatly packaged and delivered to the player's desktop? Half of me says it serves them right for going on Twitter in the first place - especially when 96% of their posts are about the NBA anyway - but the other half wants a look at the sort of messages they're getting sent and the chance to commandeer the keyboard to write some filth back to the community.
Even though there was no way that the same sort of limp, defensive garbage as last week was going to be served up I still didn't think we could win. We did have a lot going for us, the Essendon bubble bursting against the Tigers, the shit record of teams coming off the bye (and don't we know about that) and the "are Melbourne soft?" media frenzy during the week. So there was absolutely no doubt that we were going to come out like a house of fire in the first quarter, especially with SCULLGOVE back in the side, but the big question was whether they could maintain it for four quarters - especially with five players out of 22 never having played in a win and two first gamers in key positions. Apparently it was our youngest team since 1982 and we went out with less total game experience than Gold Coast did this week. Neither fact improved my confidence about us pulling off a shock result.
You'd like to think there was no doubt about them improving their intensity anyway, but I suppose it could have gone the other way with the Bombers blowning us off the park with better intensity in the first quarter. Imagine the obscenity count in this post if that had happened?. But if there was ever any hope for these players, this coach and god help us all this club (in the short term at least) they were always going to come out and have a decent crack at it. Even if they'd done that and the Bombers had gradually pulled away late in the game we'd probably have copped it with a long list of asterixes, backhanded compliments and outright whinges.
So when Sylvia jumped high in the goalsquare from Evans' centre to kick the second goal in the 7th minute it could have gone either way. Nobody's getting sucked in by early form again after the capitulation against North, but at least what we were doing was being built on toughness - and thank god Brad Green was back in the forward line where he belongs. His mark and first goal was the perfect start to stick it up the peanuts who were hammering him last week. He's not getting any younger, he's not going to play in the midfield like he did a few years ago and the only reason he was spending time there was because Scullgove and McKenzie were all out of the side - they're back, he goes forward and Bailey decides to play with a normal forward line again. Result = magic, or at least as close to magic as you get with the MFC. Compare and contrast with the dysfunctional Bomber attack which could barely get near it despite winning the inside 50 count easily with Macdonald, Rivers and Frawley dominating them.
Despite that early dominance we were still giving them chances by the bucketload, and eventually on the strength of a stack of inside 50's they took the lead at quarter time. But as there have been so many times over the years, there were signs. How good was Watts' mark in the square? Perfect bodywork to get rid of his opponent, and even though he spent a fair amount of time playing in the middle of the ground and around the backline he was so much better at that than last week it wasn't funny. Confidence is high, I repeat confidence is high.
Still, I was convinced that we'd probably fired our best shot and would get rolled from there. With them kicking the first goal of the second in 18 seconds (and how often does that happen to us?) and Sylvia looking gone late in the first quarter before pulling the pin entirely soon after, it seemed even more obvious to me that they were going to run over the top of us. But what do I know?
By our recent standards losing Sylvia in the 2nd quarter with a corkie is positively generous. He says he'll be ready for Queen's Birthday, I say he'll somehow be 4-6 weeks by Wednesday if the last few weeks are anything to go by. And Bartram will be found at the bottom of some stairs on Monday morning, having mysteriously plummeted down them at some point over the weekend - extending his injury to 4-6 weeks. Then Nick Smith and Leigh Newton will be revealed as our fitness coaches.
We were still struggling to get it out of the centre, but it wasn't for want of trying. The SME has impressed me with his desperation all year, but how good was he when the ball hit the deck last night? He's no Jamar circa 2009-2011, but 11 contested possessions shits on most of what The Russian gave us from 2003 to when he was finally revealed as one of the great geniuses of the competition. Not to mention that Jamar's famous (by Demonblog standards) PB of 7 kicks in a match was doubled by the Experience. Anyone want Paul Johnson back now? To be honest I don't think anybody not in a mental hospital ever did.
My only sadness is that at some point Maximum Gawn is going to have to go back to the 2's so we don't end up in the same situation as the Bombers where we're trying to force three ruckmen into the side because they're all in form. Was absolutely thrilled with Maximum's debut too - he took a while to get into the game, which is no surprise considering how raw he is but once he did the kid was pretty bloody good. I'm scared of declaring somebody a certainty on the basis of one game, because he'll get a lot more attention next week, but he could be an absolute monster player in a couple of years and not just because he's a 9 foot tall giraffe. Either way has the makings of cult figure status bigger than the Jurrahcane, the Experience and Philthy Phil combined. He also racked up five kicks, and it took Jamar until Round 19, 2007 to do that, so by applying some made up logic a'la SEN talkback callers I'm going to make the outrageous claim that Maximum will be an absolute superstar of the competition by his 23rd birthday. Now watch him do bugger all for the next five years.
What I enjoyed with both Gawn and Howe (who was also super impressive) was their technique of dancing about on the mark, waving their arms in the air like they just didn't care. Reminded me a bit of The Spencil's ruck technique - and hasn't his two year contract saved him from a one way ticket back to Toowoomba now that we've gone from one ruckman to three and with Robert Campbell waiting in the wings as well? Could he end up back on the rookie list again next year? Will be unlikely to feature in the senior squad again unless there's another plague of injuries to talls halfway through next year or he puts on about 50kgs before his return.
They dominated us for the first five minutes of the second quarter, and it could have gone horribly wrong were it not for the dominance of the defence. I'd written off Joel Macdonald pre-season, and I still don't think he could get a game in front of Garland, but he's been immense over the last two weeks. A really good forward line might have put them under more pressure with better contests, but against the wonky Bombers forwards they were nearly unbeatable - and unlike last week where every time Warnock touched the ball the crowd groaned as one you could rest easy when they were kicking it. Even when they were switching the ball from one side of the ground to the other to try and set up the play there wasn't the usual tension that they were going to stuff it up. Even Strauss, whose inclusion I was most surprised by, managed to shrug off one howler OOF kick and getting pinged for holding the ball when Ryder tackled him on the cock to play a really good, composed game.
He wasn't alone. We've had bigger and better wins over the years, but when was the last time you saw us put in a performance where nobody had a bad game? The only person I wouldn't either fit into the votes or give some form of apology to from last night was Sylvia, and I'm sure he'd have carved the joint up if he'd stayed on the field.
It might have had something to do with their opponents not putting the slightest bit of pressure on them but Evans and Nicholson looked comfortably for 2nd/3rd gamers, and even guys like Jetta and Bennell who have spent half the season going in and out of the departure lounge were running around doing as they pleased.
I was also impressed by Morton. He didn't have a great first quarter, but from then on he started playing with more confidence than he has for a year and looked good in the process. I'm no longer expecting him to go out there and play like what I assume a #4 draft pick should, so what he did last night - resembling a fancier version of Daniel Ward - will do me for now. He was visibly a broken man last week, so I'm glad they kept him in instead of bouncing him back to the reserves every second week a'la Bate (who has clearly been given up on) and gave him the chance to get some confidence about him. Maybe they did bust out the sports psycholgist during the week? Maybe he did it off his own bat as a 2-for-1 deal with Mitch, but either way I'm thankful there was no need for Lifeline to be piped over the stadium speakers for either him or his fellow footy depressive Brent Stanton. Hopefully the ex-Sad Panda can build on it and really rip a game up sooner rather than later - if we're going to build from defence like that again he'll certainly get his chance to star.
Mind you, I don't blame him for losing confidence over the last few weeks. Playing in the teams that he has over the last four years would make anybody reach for the Zoloft. And don't worry, plenty of us have been there - I spent the majority of the 1999 season on weapons grade doses of the stuff, and as a consequence don't actually remember most of it or Year 12. Which is not such a bad thing considering how rubbish we were on field and I was off it. I wouldn't blame Morts for lining up with a script for bucket loads of the stuff after having played 12 wins in 55 games, and I feel like I should throw my support behind him and punt his career home but we've all seen how well that's gone for Emo Maric this year so I'll stay well clear.
Incidentally what was with the Bombers banner congratulating Stanton on "150 Loyal Games". Great way to make him feel wanted. Surely by the time you've hit 150 then you're entitled to be given "150 great games" even if the cheersquad don't actually believe it. Strange club - but what do you expect from people who hold a guy to a ridiculous standard just because he wears the same number as James Hird? To nobody's surprise the hypocrites celebrated as one when he kicked his goal. Hope he tells them to piss off, goes elsewhere and commits the rest of his career to wrecking Essendon every time he plays against them.
On a night where 21 men were equal some were more equal than others. Gysberts, McKenzie, Scully and Trengove did as much as the backline did to keep us in the game in the first quarter and a half. We might not have been winning out of the centre, and Moloney didn't really fire until the second half, but those four were superb. The Gizz was sublime in his best game yet, and could still win this year's Rising Star via a rare 2nd nomination, showing why even as much as I (and almost certainly nobody else) would take Brock back to sit on the rookie list next year, there's no doubt that the deal that got him to Melbourne is shaping up as the best trade since Troy Longmuir to Freo for the pick #19 which landed us Green. Time, and the ravages of taggers, will tell if he goes on with it but last night showed that he's got all the makings of a class player.
Trengove too has the making of MFC royalty. He bounced back from being absolutely rorted and forced to spend three weeks in the stands as if he'd never left, and not once did he shirk smashing somebody in a tackle just because he's got a record and could at any moment be outed for 12 weeks on the whim of the morons on the Match Review Panel.
Then there's Scully. Good god. If that's him on 65% of one game in the 2's this year then we must move heaven and earth to keep him at this club. For a club that is supposedly supported by rich businessmen galore why is nobody talking about doing some kind of filthy Vi$y/J**d style deal to close the financial gap with what GWS can offer? It's ugly, it's immoral and it should never have been allowed in the first place but we're not playing on a level field here, if the league are intent on doing everything they can to hand premierships to GC and GWS then let's get down into the sewer and do whatever we can within the rules to stop them. Look at the reaction he got from his teammates when he kicked his goal last night, that didn't look to me like somebody who is a dead certainty of going - so let's work on getting him the biggest deal possible with some outside help and lock him in.
The kid's not considering going up north to wear a hideous coloured uniform and have a pair of ranting crackpots as his senior coaches, he's considering it because they're offering him ridiculous money. We might not be able to match it, but if we can get him a fortune just to take bins out/do a few ads then it might get us a 250 game player and future champion. Either way, if he leaves now and we get some dinky pick 16 compensation selection for him then it's going to be the biggest heel move since Rowdy Roddy Piper smashed a coconut over Superfly Snuka's head in Piper's Pit.
McKenzie, on the other hand, is at absolute opposite end of the class scale from those three. I say that in the nicest way too, they've come from the top end of the draft with every possible chance and are playing silky football whereas Jordie took his chance, came off the rookie list and has been a tackling machine from day one. There's none better at it on our list and we were certainly worse for his absence in the first ten weeks of the season. You're never going to rely on him to get 30 kicks, and even if he gets ten then five of them might be clangers but at the drop of the ball there's hardly a fiercer competitor around. I'm prepared to turn a blind eye to the kicks because I love the way he goes about everything else he does, and I love the way that when he's interviewed he just sounds like a country kid who is just loving being there - no wonder Neil Craig tried to pinch him at the end of his first season. He couldn't be anything less like the two men who wore #13 before him, but he's going to be a great asset for the next few years.
Despite nobody on our side having anything approaching a howler in the first half we were still down at the long break and it looked like the two teams had agreed pre-match that Essendon were a four or five goal better team but that for the sake of Channel Seven and its nervy executives they'd drag it out for at least three quarters. Not that they were playing particularly well either mind you, but you just felt that the lack of experience - and most importantly the lack of winning experience - would count against us. Which is why what followed was such a shock. Turns out that as quickly as Hird managed to polish the turds that Knights left behind, they have managed to go back to their old selves.
By my count it's the second time we've managed to keep a team to one point in a quarter in the Bailey era, and just the fifth time we've kept one goalless. The others are;
0.1 - Q4, Round 3, 2010 vs Adelaide (we scored 2.4)
0.2 - Q3, Round 4, 2010 vs Richmond (7.4)
0.2 - Q4, Round 5, 2010 vs Brisbane (3.6)
0.5 - Q4, Round 20, 2008 vs West Coast (3.1)
Not quite as good as that third quarter against the Tiges, but even with their bubble bursting in epic fashion this year's Bombers are a hell of a lot better than last year's Richmond so it means much more. What it also means is that there's only two times in the last four years that we've really put another team to the sword in a quarter when the game was on the line.
Also shows that R3-R5 2010 don't get half the credit they deserve. Mainly because R3 was won on the back of Adelaide losing half their team, R5 was discredited when Brisbane turned out to be rubbish and when it came to R6 we were shit.
Even when we stuffed it up and allowed the Bombers to practically run into an open goal at the other end they stuffed it up thanks to Rivers storming back into defence to make a contest - and for once our forward line was absolutely smacking somebody. By the time it was over and we'd opened up a five goal lead it was scarcely believable. Even The Jurrahcane, so rightly lambasted last week for wandering around putting in a half arsed performance, was up the ground laying tackles and setting up goals. The only downside to it was Maximum missing both his shots at goal. There was worse to come for him on that front, but at the time we were just sitting there with mouths agape at how easily it was coming to us for once. It was even happening in the hated white monstrosity of a jumper which, even though it's better than the even more monstrous silver version, usually signifies that we're going to be thrashed.
Could it last? Well if previous debacles against the Bombers were anything to go by probably not. They were even nice enough to ask a question about The Chris Sullivan Line game in one of their mid-match trivia segments (hosted by that sellout who also MC's Carlton and North games) so that didn't help ease the tension.
Still, it takes an epic collapse to stuff up a five goal lead at three quarter time. Maybe the sort of collapse that a team who had spent the proverbial petrol tickets in the third, had two debutants, used their sub, featured a superstar coming off one reserves game and were fielding three other players that had never played in a win might suffer? Certainly looked that way after they kicked three goals in a row to cut the margin to under three with 12 minutes of game time left. We could have already finished it off too, which would have made it even more offensive to have thrown it away. Thank god then, as has not been said very often this year, for Brad Green who managed to hoof through that goal out of mid-air to steady the ship. Of course every commentator was moved to crap on about his soccer background (did you know he tried out for Manchester United? No? Well you've not listened to/watched a game on TV in the last decade) even though it was such a vicious mid-air roost that it would have flown out of Old Trafford and landed in Brussels. Was hit roughly as hard as this shot but fortunately not with the same hilarious consequences.
That pretty much did it. They went down the other end and flavour of the month Crameri finally kicked one after missing them all night to at least keep us nervy, but with the backline playing like they were we couldn't be beaten. Macdonald's big contested mark which ended in Watts pulling down a hanger on the half-back flank was the defensive sealer, and we deservedly went on to smash them from there and eventually win the quarter despite giving them the first three goals.
Luckily when Maximum took the massive pack mark over Fletcher and went back only to deliver one of the three worst set shots I can remember in modern times (The Spencil against North when he dropped the ball in the run-up and Holland from the square in the last game at Princes Park the only two keeping him off the top of the list) the game was already won, but it would have absolutely bought the house down if he'd put it through. Shame too because for somebody with a giraffe-like build his other four kicks for the night were pretty good. Was nice to see the Bombers fans flooding out of the ground when he took the mark too. Obviously the ones who left didn't remember the fiasco of us copping four goals in the last four minutes of Daniher's last game.
Despite the Gawn shank it was still the opening of the floodgates. The Jurrahcane did a classic pickpocket with his octopus arms and kicked the real sealer, before Bennell's nifty handball to Nifty Nev and Moloney's Tapscott style roost put an exclamation point on it. Siren, wild scenes, loved every second of it - except the ones where I thought we were going to get dicked.
Matthew Lloyd was having a sook on the radio about us celebrating the win too vigorously, but there's no surprises there considering he spent the whole night slurping up his old club's plums and vigorously making apologies for anything they did wrong. It's quite right to say that we shouldn't have to cop it from the entire football community in order to put in a tough performance, but to deny them the chance to enjoy it is just boring. Much like the diving master himself. The only reason I was listening to SEN was because Triple M had Luke Darcy (never again), the ABC is like listening to 1958 and 3AW's signal apparently doesn't reach the top deck of the Ponsford.
Walking home through Birrarung Marr the only thing better than the shellshocked looks on the faces of Essendon fans was the absolutely trashed businessman, shirt untucked and stumbling everywhere who was trying to walk the other way across the bridge. Poor bastard was tottering like a drunken sailor in a Tijuana whorehouse, clutching the railing for support and finding that the fans of a defeated sports team have absolutely zero interest in moving out of the way for a fat pisshead. Epic.
Tweet Like A Demon
Hey @demonblog, stick that up your arse by @deanbailey - 10.34pm, Friday 3 June 2011
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
In complete contrast to last week where there were ten very, very ordinary players who had to be squeezed into the five - undeserved - votes this week is a nine player cavalcade of superstars who might have gotten one. Your top five may vary, but never before have there been so many apologies given out on the same week.
5 - Jordan Gysberts
4 - Jordie McKenzie
3 - Jared Rivers
2 - Joel Macdonald
1 - Jack Trengove
Absurdly apologetic apologies in no particular order to Scully, Green, Frawley, Moloney and the Stefan Martin Experience. If there was any justice in the way these awards are handed out they'd be given a share of the votes awarded after last week's debacle. But there isn't. Everyone else except Sylvia gets lesser apologies.
Leaderboard
19 - Brent Moloney
18 - Colin Sylvia
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Stefan Martin
8 - Jack Watts, James Frawley
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail, Joel Macdonald
4 - Michael Evans, Jordie McKenzie
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
1 - Brad Green
Crowd Watch
Seems like every time we play Essendon I'm the only MFC fan not to have gotten into a near brawl with a freak and last night the tradition continued. Can isolate a classic moment of tension and drama against every Victorian club, but can't for the life of me remember - without going through the archives - an incident with one of their fans in the last few years. Still, seems like once again the rest of the ground was a series of pitched battles while Q33 in the Ponsford Stand was an oasis of calm.
In fact I've had a cracker of a run this year with avoiding ordinary humans. Terrible news for those of you who love coming on here just to read about crowd watch antics, but definitely a bonus when trying to enjoy a game. Should come to a crashing half next week when the doors swing open on Queen's Birthday and thousands of black and white muppets are suddenly introduced to thousands of bandwagon once-a-year Demon fans who reinforce the stereotype of us all pip pipping and not knowing who half the players are. These people are going to have a nervous breakdown when they show up next week to find a 47, 49 and 50 in lineup.
What I did enjoy last night was Essendon showing the names of first year members on the scoreboard before the game, just because it gave us the chance to piss ourselves laughing at some of the abysmal names that people have inflicted on their poor children. At least I'm assuming that Kyly and Jesuha are little kids, because there's no way that the moment they hit high school they're not just going to call themselves Kylie and Joshua to avoid distress.
Contrary to what some members of the underclass thought when I posted this on Twitter before the game it's not a shot at Essendon fans in particular, god knows if I'd wanted to swing at them I wouldn't have had to look any further than the mulleted porkies sitting two rows in front. I blame society in general and fear that if you'd done the same thing for our 'new' members (i.e kids signed up without knowing it) there'd be as many heinous crimes against humanity. For god's sake if you must have kids then give them sensible names - and if you want them to have the best possible chance of playing for the Dees make sure it's something starting with J - preferably Jack.
People who only go to home games miss the ludicrous pre-match entertainment gimmicks that other clubs get up to. The trumpet makes me want to neck myself, and the less said about the flag raising debacle the better but contrast it with the farcical angles that other clubs are getting up to and you feel that little bit better. Essendon play an air raid siren before the theme song (yes, we know you're the Bombers very humorous) and then the Red Energy "Energy Meter" goes off like Thousand by Moby before the first bounce, generally scaring the shit out of the kids and/or people who grew up in war zones/the Western Suburbs.
In other news what was the guy who operates the scoreboard on last night? The following names were botched at various times - Arron Davey, Jarred Rivers, T. Coyler and T. Belchambers. You'd think that a basic knowledge of player names would be a basic requirement of the job, but obviously not. Happy to put my hand up and have a crack at the job if the MCG are keen, but I'm putting it out there that I will be chucking sickies if Melbourne are playing elsewhere at the same time and that I won't be turning up for cricket season.
Next Week
None of the above means squat if they don't do it for four quarters against the Pies next Monday week. I'm not expecting a win, and you can forget last year's QB when they handed us two points with absymal kicking for goal and the presence of Josh Fraser, but as long as we play with the same intensity as last night and give ourselves every possible chance then I'll be happy.
Suddenly games against Freo and Richmond which were iffy the way we played the last three weeks seem winnable again, and with Jamar potentially coming back in against a sans-Sandi Freo so much the better. I'll take 2-1 over those three games, but only if we lose the Pies. God forbid we find a way to win on Monday week we've got to win the lot and set the season up. Bulldogs come after that and they're probably going to be even more of a farce in a month than they are now.
Last night I was convinced that the players do want to play for the coach and that he can deliver the goods so let's consolidate and have a belated decent crack at this season shall we?
Final Thoughts
What did I miss? The whole bloody thing is a big old blur to me other than the last ten minutes which I got home in time to see on the replay.
It was a drastic overreaction, but the longer you read this page the more you'll be used to that. Fact of the matter remains that nothing is going to happen at this club without the personal stamp of approval by one James Stynes of Dublin, and he's not going to sack anybody halfway through the year no matter what the media says or how much we bleat online - and my god we bleat.
So having gone from SELL to HOLD after the Adelaide game and then back to SELL again last Friday night I'm shamefully backtracking into the HOLD camp again. We can bag out Essendon and Carlton fans for swapping from wanting to lynch coaches to loving them the next, and naturally there were more than a few lining up last night to start the potting process on Hird, but the way this team is playing I feel like that nutbag off Mad Money, running around changing my stock tips on a whim and throwing chairs around the room.
I'm right back to where I was after the Adelaide game - not sure about the long term future and wanting a few good weeks in a row to convince me that he'll be there next year, but watching the replay of the wild celebrations at the final siren made me shamefully backtrack that little bit more. That's exactly what I want in a coach, not just when he's had a shit week beaten from pillar to post by everyone including opposition players and his own supporters, but every week. He usually seems to be under heavy sedation, and reverted to type by the time the press conference rolled around, but the punching of the roof of the dugout was magic. Hands up who else was disappointed when they realised it was water flying off the top of the box and not glass/perspex shattering everywhere?
Thank god we finally got to see the Gawn/Howe show unleashed. Should have happened last week, and probably took Newton's injury to get them both in for the same game, but both impressed and had the rare feat (in the last four years at least) of playing in a win on debut. For #statmybitchup fans, The Stefan Martin Experience is the only other player to have done it since Bails took over, and there have been a lot of debutants in that time.
I did feel sorry for Newton though. To be entirely fair I don't want him in the team, and haven't wanted him on the list since early 2008, but you'd have to be sporting a solid rock, black heart to not at least feel a twinge of sadness for a guy who is in the team, playing to save his career and then suffers a six week mystery injury halfway through the season. Is now surely absolutely finished, and probably knows it very well. Don't know where all this compassion has suddenly come from. I blame Twitter, there would never have been any of this treating players as humans back in the glory days of Luke Williams and Scott Chisholm, but seeing people writing in to the guy with "sucked in, thank god you're injured" etc.. messages made me feel ever so slightly guilty. After all what is this page other than exactly the same thing without the abuse being neatly packaged and delivered to the player's desktop? Half of me says it serves them right for going on Twitter in the first place - especially when 96% of their posts are about the NBA anyway - but the other half wants a look at the sort of messages they're getting sent and the chance to commandeer the keyboard to write some filth back to the community.
Even though there was no way that the same sort of limp, defensive garbage as last week was going to be served up I still didn't think we could win. We did have a lot going for us, the Essendon bubble bursting against the Tigers, the shit record of teams coming off the bye (and don't we know about that) and the "are Melbourne soft?" media frenzy during the week. So there was absolutely no doubt that we were going to come out like a house of fire in the first quarter, especially with SCULLGOVE back in the side, but the big question was whether they could maintain it for four quarters - especially with five players out of 22 never having played in a win and two first gamers in key positions. Apparently it was our youngest team since 1982 and we went out with less total game experience than Gold Coast did this week. Neither fact improved my confidence about us pulling off a shock result.
You'd like to think there was no doubt about them improving their intensity anyway, but I suppose it could have gone the other way with the Bombers blowning us off the park with better intensity in the first quarter. Imagine the obscenity count in this post if that had happened?. But if there was ever any hope for these players, this coach and god help us all this club (in the short term at least) they were always going to come out and have a decent crack at it. Even if they'd done that and the Bombers had gradually pulled away late in the game we'd probably have copped it with a long list of asterixes, backhanded compliments and outright whinges.
So when Sylvia jumped high in the goalsquare from Evans' centre to kick the second goal in the 7th minute it could have gone either way. Nobody's getting sucked in by early form again after the capitulation against North, but at least what we were doing was being built on toughness - and thank god Brad Green was back in the forward line where he belongs. His mark and first goal was the perfect start to stick it up the peanuts who were hammering him last week. He's not getting any younger, he's not going to play in the midfield like he did a few years ago and the only reason he was spending time there was because Scullgove and McKenzie were all out of the side - they're back, he goes forward and Bailey decides to play with a normal forward line again. Result = magic, or at least as close to magic as you get with the MFC. Compare and contrast with the dysfunctional Bomber attack which could barely get near it despite winning the inside 50 count easily with Macdonald, Rivers and Frawley dominating them.
Despite that early dominance we were still giving them chances by the bucketload, and eventually on the strength of a stack of inside 50's they took the lead at quarter time. But as there have been so many times over the years, there were signs. How good was Watts' mark in the square? Perfect bodywork to get rid of his opponent, and even though he spent a fair amount of time playing in the middle of the ground and around the backline he was so much better at that than last week it wasn't funny. Confidence is high, I repeat confidence is high.
Still, I was convinced that we'd probably fired our best shot and would get rolled from there. With them kicking the first goal of the second in 18 seconds (and how often does that happen to us?) and Sylvia looking gone late in the first quarter before pulling the pin entirely soon after, it seemed even more obvious to me that they were going to run over the top of us. But what do I know?
By our recent standards losing Sylvia in the 2nd quarter with a corkie is positively generous. He says he'll be ready for Queen's Birthday, I say he'll somehow be 4-6 weeks by Wednesday if the last few weeks are anything to go by. And Bartram will be found at the bottom of some stairs on Monday morning, having mysteriously plummeted down them at some point over the weekend - extending his injury to 4-6 weeks. Then Nick Smith and Leigh Newton will be revealed as our fitness coaches.
We were still struggling to get it out of the centre, but it wasn't for want of trying. The SME has impressed me with his desperation all year, but how good was he when the ball hit the deck last night? He's no Jamar circa 2009-2011, but 11 contested possessions shits on most of what The Russian gave us from 2003 to when he was finally revealed as one of the great geniuses of the competition. Not to mention that Jamar's famous (by Demonblog standards) PB of 7 kicks in a match was doubled by the Experience. Anyone want Paul Johnson back now? To be honest I don't think anybody not in a mental hospital ever did.
My only sadness is that at some point Maximum Gawn is going to have to go back to the 2's so we don't end up in the same situation as the Bombers where we're trying to force three ruckmen into the side because they're all in form. Was absolutely thrilled with Maximum's debut too - he took a while to get into the game, which is no surprise considering how raw he is but once he did the kid was pretty bloody good. I'm scared of declaring somebody a certainty on the basis of one game, because he'll get a lot more attention next week, but he could be an absolute monster player in a couple of years and not just because he's a 9 foot tall giraffe. Either way has the makings of cult figure status bigger than the Jurrahcane, the Experience and Philthy Phil combined. He also racked up five kicks, and it took Jamar until Round 19, 2007 to do that, so by applying some made up logic a'la SEN talkback callers I'm going to make the outrageous claim that Maximum will be an absolute superstar of the competition by his 23rd birthday. Now watch him do bugger all for the next five years.
What I enjoyed with both Gawn and Howe (who was also super impressive) was their technique of dancing about on the mark, waving their arms in the air like they just didn't care. Reminded me a bit of The Spencil's ruck technique - and hasn't his two year contract saved him from a one way ticket back to Toowoomba now that we've gone from one ruckman to three and with Robert Campbell waiting in the wings as well? Could he end up back on the rookie list again next year? Will be unlikely to feature in the senior squad again unless there's another plague of injuries to talls halfway through next year or he puts on about 50kgs before his return.
They dominated us for the first five minutes of the second quarter, and it could have gone horribly wrong were it not for the dominance of the defence. I'd written off Joel Macdonald pre-season, and I still don't think he could get a game in front of Garland, but he's been immense over the last two weeks. A really good forward line might have put them under more pressure with better contests, but against the wonky Bombers forwards they were nearly unbeatable - and unlike last week where every time Warnock touched the ball the crowd groaned as one you could rest easy when they were kicking it. Even when they were switching the ball from one side of the ground to the other to try and set up the play there wasn't the usual tension that they were going to stuff it up. Even Strauss, whose inclusion I was most surprised by, managed to shrug off one howler OOF kick and getting pinged for holding the ball when Ryder tackled him on the cock to play a really good, composed game.
He wasn't alone. We've had bigger and better wins over the years, but when was the last time you saw us put in a performance where nobody had a bad game? The only person I wouldn't either fit into the votes or give some form of apology to from last night was Sylvia, and I'm sure he'd have carved the joint up if he'd stayed on the field.
It might have had something to do with their opponents not putting the slightest bit of pressure on them but Evans and Nicholson looked comfortably for 2nd/3rd gamers, and even guys like Jetta and Bennell who have spent half the season going in and out of the departure lounge were running around doing as they pleased.
I was also impressed by Morton. He didn't have a great first quarter, but from then on he started playing with more confidence than he has for a year and looked good in the process. I'm no longer expecting him to go out there and play like what I assume a #4 draft pick should, so what he did last night - resembling a fancier version of Daniel Ward - will do me for now. He was visibly a broken man last week, so I'm glad they kept him in instead of bouncing him back to the reserves every second week a'la Bate (who has clearly been given up on) and gave him the chance to get some confidence about him. Maybe they did bust out the sports psycholgist during the week? Maybe he did it off his own bat as a 2-for-1 deal with Mitch, but either way I'm thankful there was no need for Lifeline to be piped over the stadium speakers for either him or his fellow footy depressive Brent Stanton. Hopefully the ex-Sad Panda can build on it and really rip a game up sooner rather than later - if we're going to build from defence like that again he'll certainly get his chance to star.
Mind you, I don't blame him for losing confidence over the last few weeks. Playing in the teams that he has over the last four years would make anybody reach for the Zoloft. And don't worry, plenty of us have been there - I spent the majority of the 1999 season on weapons grade doses of the stuff, and as a consequence don't actually remember most of it or Year 12. Which is not such a bad thing considering how rubbish we were on field and I was off it. I wouldn't blame Morts for lining up with a script for bucket loads of the stuff after having played 12 wins in 55 games, and I feel like I should throw my support behind him and punt his career home but we've all seen how well that's gone for Emo Maric this year so I'll stay well clear.
Incidentally what was with the Bombers banner congratulating Stanton on "150 Loyal Games". Great way to make him feel wanted. Surely by the time you've hit 150 then you're entitled to be given "150 great games" even if the cheersquad don't actually believe it. Strange club - but what do you expect from people who hold a guy to a ridiculous standard just because he wears the same number as James Hird? To nobody's surprise the hypocrites celebrated as one when he kicked his goal. Hope he tells them to piss off, goes elsewhere and commits the rest of his career to wrecking Essendon every time he plays against them.
On a night where 21 men were equal some were more equal than others. Gysberts, McKenzie, Scully and Trengove did as much as the backline did to keep us in the game in the first quarter and a half. We might not have been winning out of the centre, and Moloney didn't really fire until the second half, but those four were superb. The Gizz was sublime in his best game yet, and could still win this year's Rising Star via a rare 2nd nomination, showing why even as much as I (and almost certainly nobody else) would take Brock back to sit on the rookie list next year, there's no doubt that the deal that got him to Melbourne is shaping up as the best trade since Troy Longmuir to Freo for the pick #19 which landed us Green. Time, and the ravages of taggers, will tell if he goes on with it but last night showed that he's got all the makings of a class player.
Trengove too has the making of MFC royalty. He bounced back from being absolutely rorted and forced to spend three weeks in the stands as if he'd never left, and not once did he shirk smashing somebody in a tackle just because he's got a record and could at any moment be outed for 12 weeks on the whim of the morons on the Match Review Panel.
Then there's Scully. Good god. If that's him on 65% of one game in the 2's this year then we must move heaven and earth to keep him at this club. For a club that is supposedly supported by rich businessmen galore why is nobody talking about doing some kind of filthy Vi$y/J**d style deal to close the financial gap with what GWS can offer? It's ugly, it's immoral and it should never have been allowed in the first place but we're not playing on a level field here, if the league are intent on doing everything they can to hand premierships to GC and GWS then let's get down into the sewer and do whatever we can within the rules to stop them. Look at the reaction he got from his teammates when he kicked his goal last night, that didn't look to me like somebody who is a dead certainty of going - so let's work on getting him the biggest deal possible with some outside help and lock him in.
The kid's not considering going up north to wear a hideous coloured uniform and have a pair of ranting crackpots as his senior coaches, he's considering it because they're offering him ridiculous money. We might not be able to match it, but if we can get him a fortune just to take bins out/do a few ads then it might get us a 250 game player and future champion. Either way, if he leaves now and we get some dinky pick 16 compensation selection for him then it's going to be the biggest heel move since Rowdy Roddy Piper smashed a coconut over Superfly Snuka's head in Piper's Pit.
McKenzie, on the other hand, is at absolute opposite end of the class scale from those three. I say that in the nicest way too, they've come from the top end of the draft with every possible chance and are playing silky football whereas Jordie took his chance, came off the rookie list and has been a tackling machine from day one. There's none better at it on our list and we were certainly worse for his absence in the first ten weeks of the season. You're never going to rely on him to get 30 kicks, and even if he gets ten then five of them might be clangers but at the drop of the ball there's hardly a fiercer competitor around. I'm prepared to turn a blind eye to the kicks because I love the way he goes about everything else he does, and I love the way that when he's interviewed he just sounds like a country kid who is just loving being there - no wonder Neil Craig tried to pinch him at the end of his first season. He couldn't be anything less like the two men who wore #13 before him, but he's going to be a great asset for the next few years.
Despite nobody on our side having anything approaching a howler in the first half we were still down at the long break and it looked like the two teams had agreed pre-match that Essendon were a four or five goal better team but that for the sake of Channel Seven and its nervy executives they'd drag it out for at least three quarters. Not that they were playing particularly well either mind you, but you just felt that the lack of experience - and most importantly the lack of winning experience - would count against us. Which is why what followed was such a shock. Turns out that as quickly as Hird managed to polish the turds that Knights left behind, they have managed to go back to their old selves.
By my count it's the second time we've managed to keep a team to one point in a quarter in the Bailey era, and just the fifth time we've kept one goalless. The others are;
0.1 - Q4, Round 3, 2010 vs Adelaide (we scored 2.4)
0.2 - Q3, Round 4, 2010 vs Richmond (7.4)
0.2 - Q4, Round 5, 2010 vs Brisbane (3.6)
0.5 - Q4, Round 20, 2008 vs West Coast (3.1)
Not quite as good as that third quarter against the Tiges, but even with their bubble bursting in epic fashion this year's Bombers are a hell of a lot better than last year's Richmond so it means much more. What it also means is that there's only two times in the last four years that we've really put another team to the sword in a quarter when the game was on the line.
Also shows that R3-R5 2010 don't get half the credit they deserve. Mainly because R3 was won on the back of Adelaide losing half their team, R5 was discredited when Brisbane turned out to be rubbish and when it came to R6 we were shit.
Even when we stuffed it up and allowed the Bombers to practically run into an open goal at the other end they stuffed it up thanks to Rivers storming back into defence to make a contest - and for once our forward line was absolutely smacking somebody. By the time it was over and we'd opened up a five goal lead it was scarcely believable. Even The Jurrahcane, so rightly lambasted last week for wandering around putting in a half arsed performance, was up the ground laying tackles and setting up goals. The only downside to it was Maximum missing both his shots at goal. There was worse to come for him on that front, but at the time we were just sitting there with mouths agape at how easily it was coming to us for once. It was even happening in the hated white monstrosity of a jumper which, even though it's better than the even more monstrous silver version, usually signifies that we're going to be thrashed.
Could it last? Well if previous debacles against the Bombers were anything to go by probably not. They were even nice enough to ask a question about The Chris Sullivan Line game in one of their mid-match trivia segments (hosted by that sellout who also MC's Carlton and North games) so that didn't help ease the tension.
Still, it takes an epic collapse to stuff up a five goal lead at three quarter time. Maybe the sort of collapse that a team who had spent the proverbial petrol tickets in the third, had two debutants, used their sub, featured a superstar coming off one reserves game and were fielding three other players that had never played in a win might suffer? Certainly looked that way after they kicked three goals in a row to cut the margin to under three with 12 minutes of game time left. We could have already finished it off too, which would have made it even more offensive to have thrown it away. Thank god then, as has not been said very often this year, for Brad Green who managed to hoof through that goal out of mid-air to steady the ship. Of course every commentator was moved to crap on about his soccer background (did you know he tried out for Manchester United? No? Well you've not listened to/watched a game on TV in the last decade) even though it was such a vicious mid-air roost that it would have flown out of Old Trafford and landed in Brussels. Was hit roughly as hard as this shot but fortunately not with the same hilarious consequences.
That pretty much did it. They went down the other end and flavour of the month Crameri finally kicked one after missing them all night to at least keep us nervy, but with the backline playing like they were we couldn't be beaten. Macdonald's big contested mark which ended in Watts pulling down a hanger on the half-back flank was the defensive sealer, and we deservedly went on to smash them from there and eventually win the quarter despite giving them the first three goals.
Luckily when Maximum took the massive pack mark over Fletcher and went back only to deliver one of the three worst set shots I can remember in modern times (The Spencil against North when he dropped the ball in the run-up and Holland from the square in the last game at Princes Park the only two keeping him off the top of the list) the game was already won, but it would have absolutely bought the house down if he'd put it through. Shame too because for somebody with a giraffe-like build his other four kicks for the night were pretty good. Was nice to see the Bombers fans flooding out of the ground when he took the mark too. Obviously the ones who left didn't remember the fiasco of us copping four goals in the last four minutes of Daniher's last game.
Despite the Gawn shank it was still the opening of the floodgates. The Jurrahcane did a classic pickpocket with his octopus arms and kicked the real sealer, before Bennell's nifty handball to Nifty Nev and Moloney's Tapscott style roost put an exclamation point on it. Siren, wild scenes, loved every second of it - except the ones where I thought we were going to get dicked.
Matthew Lloyd was having a sook on the radio about us celebrating the win too vigorously, but there's no surprises there considering he spent the whole night slurping up his old club's plums and vigorously making apologies for anything they did wrong. It's quite right to say that we shouldn't have to cop it from the entire football community in order to put in a tough performance, but to deny them the chance to enjoy it is just boring. Much like the diving master himself. The only reason I was listening to SEN was because Triple M had Luke Darcy (never again), the ABC is like listening to 1958 and 3AW's signal apparently doesn't reach the top deck of the Ponsford.
Walking home through Birrarung Marr the only thing better than the shellshocked looks on the faces of Essendon fans was the absolutely trashed businessman, shirt untucked and stumbling everywhere who was trying to walk the other way across the bridge. Poor bastard was tottering like a drunken sailor in a Tijuana whorehouse, clutching the railing for support and finding that the fans of a defeated sports team have absolutely zero interest in moving out of the way for a fat pisshead. Epic.
Tweet Like A Demon
Hey @demonblog, stick that up your arse by @deanbailey - 10.34pm, Friday 3 June 2011
2011 Allen Jakovich Medal Votes
In complete contrast to last week where there were ten very, very ordinary players who had to be squeezed into the five - undeserved - votes this week is a nine player cavalcade of superstars who might have gotten one. Your top five may vary, but never before have there been so many apologies given out on the same week.
5 - Jordan Gysberts
4 - Jordie McKenzie
3 - Jared Rivers
2 - Joel Macdonald
1 - Jack Trengove
Absurdly apologetic apologies in no particular order to Scully, Green, Frawley, Moloney and the Stefan Martin Experience. If there was any justice in the way these awards are handed out they'd be given a share of the votes awarded after last week's debacle. But there isn't. Everyone else except Sylvia gets lesser apologies.
Leaderboard
19 - Brent Moloney
18 - Colin Sylvia
16 - Mark Jamar (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
10 - Jordan Gysberts, Jared Rivers (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)
9 - Stefan Martin
8 - Jack Watts, James Frawley
7 - Colin Garland
6 - Luke Tapscott (LEADER: Jeff Hilton Medal for Rookie of the Year)
5 - Jack Trengove, Rohan Bail, Joel Macdonald
4 - Michael Evans, Jordie McKenzie
3 - Jack Grimes, Liam Jurrah, Nathan Jones
2 - Ricky Petterd, Clint Bartram, Neville Jetta
1 - Brad Green
Crowd Watch
Seems like every time we play Essendon I'm the only MFC fan not to have gotten into a near brawl with a freak and last night the tradition continued. Can isolate a classic moment of tension and drama against every Victorian club, but can't for the life of me remember - without going through the archives - an incident with one of their fans in the last few years. Still, seems like once again the rest of the ground was a series of pitched battles while Q33 in the Ponsford Stand was an oasis of calm.
In fact I've had a cracker of a run this year with avoiding ordinary humans. Terrible news for those of you who love coming on here just to read about crowd watch antics, but definitely a bonus when trying to enjoy a game. Should come to a crashing half next week when the doors swing open on Queen's Birthday and thousands of black and white muppets are suddenly introduced to thousands of bandwagon once-a-year Demon fans who reinforce the stereotype of us all pip pipping and not knowing who half the players are. These people are going to have a nervous breakdown when they show up next week to find a 47, 49 and 50 in lineup.
What I did enjoy last night was Essendon showing the names of first year members on the scoreboard before the game, just because it gave us the chance to piss ourselves laughing at some of the abysmal names that people have inflicted on their poor children. At least I'm assuming that Kyly and Jesuha are little kids, because there's no way that the moment they hit high school they're not just going to call themselves Kylie and Joshua to avoid distress.
Contrary to what some members of the underclass thought when I posted this on Twitter before the game it's not a shot at Essendon fans in particular, god knows if I'd wanted to swing at them I wouldn't have had to look any further than the mulleted porkies sitting two rows in front. I blame society in general and fear that if you'd done the same thing for our 'new' members (i.e kids signed up without knowing it) there'd be as many heinous crimes against humanity. For god's sake if you must have kids then give them sensible names - and if you want them to have the best possible chance of playing for the Dees make sure it's something starting with J - preferably Jack.
People who only go to home games miss the ludicrous pre-match entertainment gimmicks that other clubs get up to. The trumpet makes me want to neck myself, and the less said about the flag raising debacle the better but contrast it with the farcical angles that other clubs are getting up to and you feel that little bit better. Essendon play an air raid siren before the theme song (yes, we know you're the Bombers very humorous) and then the Red Energy "Energy Meter" goes off like Thousand by Moby before the first bounce, generally scaring the shit out of the kids and/or people who grew up in war zones/the Western Suburbs.
In other news what was the guy who operates the scoreboard on last night? The following names were botched at various times - Arron Davey, Jarred Rivers, T. Coyler and T. Belchambers. You'd think that a basic knowledge of player names would be a basic requirement of the job, but obviously not. Happy to put my hand up and have a crack at the job if the MCG are keen, but I'm putting it out there that I will be chucking sickies if Melbourne are playing elsewhere at the same time and that I won't be turning up for cricket season.
Next Week
None of the above means squat if they don't do it for four quarters against the Pies next Monday week. I'm not expecting a win, and you can forget last year's QB when they handed us two points with absymal kicking for goal and the presence of Josh Fraser, but as long as we play with the same intensity as last night and give ourselves every possible chance then I'll be happy.
Suddenly games against Freo and Richmond which were iffy the way we played the last three weeks seem winnable again, and with Jamar potentially coming back in against a sans-Sandi Freo so much the better. I'll take 2-1 over those three games, but only if we lose the Pies. God forbid we find a way to win on Monday week we've got to win the lot and set the season up. Bulldogs come after that and they're probably going to be even more of a farce in a month than they are now.
Last night I was convinced that the players do want to play for the coach and that he can deliver the goods so let's consolidate and have a belated decent crack at this season shall we?
Final Thoughts
What did I miss? The whole bloody thing is a big old blur to me other than the last ten minutes which I got home in time to see on the replay.
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