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USA Cats fan since 2009.
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“…sometime in the last quarter, the Blues find themselves faced with an opponent seemingly running all over the top of them….”
Maybe walking slowly over the top of them.
My feeling watching the second half (just couldn’t wake fully up for the first half this morning) was that St. Kilda had turned into the Fremantle of the night before. Which is all the more galling because my thought the whole time I was awake this morning is that the St. Kilda that turned up to play against the Cats a few weeks ago was apparently a totally different team who had stolen these guys’ jumpers.
Footy Fix: The Blues looked set to go full Carlton again. This is how they didn't
Lincoln, I learned an invaluable lesson a number of years ago from John Thompson, who was the first African-American coach to win a national collegiate basketball championship (coaching the Georgetown Hoyas, a Jesuit university across town from me). After he retired, he had a daily radio show on which he would talk not only about sports, but about political and social issues. And on that show one day, he taught me that people who have been oppressed learn quickly to see oppression where others don’t — both when it exists and when it doesn’t. If every one of us remembered that, there would be a lot fewer accusations flying in each direction.
AFL News: Koch defends Rioli as more threats alleged, Dees president slams Oliver treatment, Port's mega Butters offer
“Nothing is determined in isolation. What a wally of a position.”
The problem with your wally criticism is that one bad apple (in this case, the Balta suspension) spoils the entire punchbowl.
The other problem with this construct is that the AFL is not a civil society, and so analogies that rely on it being one are fundamentally flawed. Perhaps your perspective has been skewed by your profession, and further by the way that the AFL has chosen over the past decade to run itself with lawyers. But once the AFL establishes its relationship with players through collective bargaining, I am fairly sure that its internal “the rule of law” is reliant on wholly subjective – even arbitrary – judgments on the part of its Czar like “bringing the game into disrepute” like Willy Rioli has, to me, just done.
As I read the descriptions of Rioli’s threat to Dale, the implication wasn’t that Rioli himself would be waiting outside the hotel room, but rather some other unspecified heavies à la some organized crime hit. When the public believes that people operating outside of civil law are controlling outcomes in their sport, they leave that sport behind: Horseracing and boxing used to be the #1 and #2 sports in the US with everything else (including baseball, the “national pastime”) some distance behind. Now, they are essentially irrelevant.
AFL News: Koch defends Rioli as more threats alleged, Dees president slams Oliver treatment, Port's mega Butters offer
Unless Mihocek got injured with 2 seconds to go, he was going pretty darned OK on Saturday night.
AFL News: 'Took it worse than anyone' - Former teammate slams Cornes' hypocrisy, Swans accept Melican ban, Pies injury blow
Maybe it’s like Augusta: You only get one green jacket no matter how many Masters you win, and it stays in the Augusta clubhouse.
The coatroom at the Crowne maybe?
Six Points: Calling out the worst interview question ever, and the new crackdown you (probably) missed
True story: My mother’s family is from Transylvania, and when her cousin did a bunch of genealogy, he was able to find Vlad Tepes in out tree way back there because my grandmother’s parents were some sort of minor nobility. Maybe that’s why I can get up at all hours to watch the footy…
Footy Fix: The Cats buried the Pies with four minutes of magic. Here's how Collingwood nearly beat them anyway
With the percentage gap, maybe three games.
Six Points: Calling out the worst interview question ever, and the new crackdown you (probably) missed
Hill? King.
'Five men stood between Collingwood and victory - four in green': Umps savaged over contentious calls as Cats star grilled
Maybe I’m only looking with one eye, but I didn’t think the umpiring was egregious. Collingwood got some gifts earlier in the game which have clearly been forgotten about, the Bobby Hill legging call was technically there (though I freely admit that I would personally have paid HTB) and the touched/not-touched call was a standard toss-up (50/50?).
Hill was out of line.
'Five men stood between Collingwood and victory - four in green': Umps savaged over contentious calls as Cats star grilled
Not just Stewart and Henry, but Miers would have helped a lot, too. Was very disappointed to see the “TBC” by his name on the Geelong injury report, but choosing to take something away from that report is a dicey proposition.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Footy Fix: The Cats buried the Pies with four minutes of magic. Here's how Collingwood nearly beat them anyway
No, it’s Cameron who’s the all-time Giant.
Footy Fix: The Cats buried the Pies with four minutes of magic. Here's how Collingwood nearly beat them anyway
Really nice article. Well written, well supported. Pro.
Too old, too good: 30 is the new 25 in modern footy - here's why
James Rowbottom is one of the toughest players in the league. If you don’t want him, I’m sure the Cats could find space. With Rowbottom and Heeney using their muscle and Warner or Gulden or the odd Papley using their feet you lot have what I think is still probably the best midfield in the league, and Mills and Adams aren’t terrible cherries on top, either. Too bad for you all that half of the above have been absent most or all of the year.
I would also add that the one thing you lot have in some quantity down back is intercept markers; you just don’t have enough man-up defenders so your interceptors have to instead do what they are not best at.
Get larger down back and better up front and you will be more than fine. In the meantime, just get the players you already have back on the field.
Six Points: Roo's ridiculous suspension demands MRO overhaul, and are the Blues ... back?
What’s interesting to me from a foreign viewpoint is the unquestioning acceptance by all here of Impey’s thump (or a little thump, a “thimp?”) of Smith when he was a couple of meters out of bounds, which was the provocation for the facewash Smith gave Impey. In the NFL, Impey’s here-innocuous act would draw an instant rain of flags, a 15-yard penalty (the NFL’s 50m equivalent), and two of those acts in a game gets a player thrown out of the game and suspended for the next.
The NFL takes cheap shots and taunting extremely seriously because of their potential to incite acts a lot more violent than a leather massage.
AFL News: Nash learns fate for Miers strike as Lethal calls for red cards, Scott defends Smith's antics, Bomber's headbutt ban
I strongly agree here. If you as a moderator are going to shut down conversation on a topic, at the very least explain the principle behind your action.
I guess that the site doesn’t want to put itself in the position of having to ban any of its participants for something written beyond the pale. But to that point, full credit to everybody here for being respectful while making their own views on the matter conspicuously clear.
AFL News: Nash learns fate for Miers strike as Lethal calls for red cards, Scott defends Smith's antics, Bomber's headbutt ban
Wait. The AFL has morals??? I didn’t know that an insatiable hunger for every last dollar was a moral virtue. I’ve been living my life all wrong.
AFL News: Nash learns fate for Miers strike as Lethal calls for red cards, Scott defends Smith's antics, Bomber's headbutt ban
I wrote in a comment to another article that I didn’t know what the right thing to do was in this case. After reading a fair bit about the facts, both during and after the assault, I’d like to give a lot of credit to the judge. I think her order is very, very smart, and very fair.
The curfew means that Balta will miss games in an off-and-on manner, which I think will reinforce the lesson of the whole affair for him, and I think in the larger football world, for much longer and more effectively than a one-and-done, set-it-and-forget-it suspension of X weeks.
AFL News: Nash learns fate for Miers strike as Lethal calls for red cards, Scott defends Smith's antics, Bomber's headbutt ban
Implant chips into each player to cover running too far also!
Six Points: Meet footy's No.1 coach (again), and how to fix the farcical 15m kick crackdown
I think Balta was very much the difference between the Tigers winning and losing.
The question of whether he should play or not is an interesting one for me. I agree that everything points to him having done the right thing after he had that videotape bit of him having been lucky not to have killed a man. And I do very much believe in redemption. But if you are going to fine people for flipping the bird – even just a fine for flipping two of them at once!!! – the concept of “bringing the game into disrepute” is actually very, very real in this case. The idea of football people looking at a subject dispassionately may be scarcely credible, but taking one side of the question still doesn’t mean the outrage is faux or the bias is blind.
The national competition of the national sport just can’t be represented by thugs, hooligans and criminals. It has to be a paragon of fair, honest competition with no suggestion that it is compromised by people who act outside the bounds of the rules – whether playing the game or on their own time – or ultimately it will have no more credibility than the WWE, empty entertainment in the worst senses of the words.
Ultimately I don’t claim to know what the right thing to do with this situation is. I could not disagree more with the idea that what somebody does off the football field has no bearing on whether they are allowed to play on it, and I loathe sanctimonious morality theater, but character does matter. I guess the question here is whether the character Balta showed after committing his assault is more indicative of the man than the character that got him into it in the first place.
Six Points: Meet footy's No.1 coach (again), and how to fix the farcical 15m kick crackdown
Ahhh, the late teens, when the Cats lost prelim after prelim.
Six Points: Meet footy's No.1 coach (again), and how to fix the farcical 15m kick crackdown
Adding technology makes things worse, not better; see: score reviews. For humans, distance is actually pretty easy to learn to gauge to a close-enough degree by eye with a little practice, but only as long as you are standing still so you aren’t continually shifting your frame of reference. So, the answer is just to add even more umpires so they don’t have to run while they officiate the game. If they all stood still in a grid formation, that would add even more points of reference, and as a nice unexpected bonus, the players would also be better able to learn not to run into them accidentally and thereby save some coin.
Six Points: Meet footy's No.1 coach (again), and how to fix the farcical 15m kick crackdown
I like the DTM dots on the field, a 5m grid, may be 1″/2cm in diameter each.
That should run to about 700 dots on the MCG turf, so with a two man crew with the point grid pre-loaded into a theodolite with a data collector, 20 minutes to the instrument set up…get the rod over each point…set the dot template… shoot the spray paint …. 45 seconds per dot… [calculating]… breaks for lunch and coffee… 12 hours should cover the job. Would have to get reshot every month or so as the grass grows. Hope it doesn’t cause interference patterns on the TV broadcasts.
Six Points: Meet footy's No.1 coach (again), and how to fix the farcical 15m kick crackdown
I was thinking the very same thing.
Six Points: Hinkley's Port reach breaking point, Crows should quit sooking, and the recruit holding North back
Adding a fourth umpire notionally means a 33% greater likelihood of a wrong call being made for every on-field action just because 33% more people are looking at each play. But it doesn’t mean 33% more frees are seen and whistled (check the delta in per-game frees called), because in most instances a violation is visible to multiple officials (if not all of them).
So adding more officials paradoxically has a potentially greater effect on creating adverse impacts than it does at reducing them (depending on the incidence of bad calls with respect to correct ones and the incidence of missed calls to available frees to pay). As this sport is subject to more officiating subjectivity than any other sport I can think of that doesn’t award style points, I’d think that the answer will always feel to the viewer like outcomes are worse with more officials.
To prove the question, you would need an impartial assessment of all play and then superimpose on that assessment the data for all whistles blown, to see (1) whether more whistles are being blown when they shouldn’t and (2) aren’t being blown when they should. Can’t imagine that can actually be done.
Six Points: Hinkley's Port reach breaking point, Crows should quit sooking, and the recruit holding North back
Long mired in mediocrity, like Fremantle?
Footy Fix: The Blues looked set to go full Carlton again. This is how they didn't