West Coast will blame injuries and umpires for their loss, like they did last time when we flogged them. Fact is their depth is shit.

The Eagles don't have good depth, its true. but when the players missing are Embley, Kennedy, LeCras, Nickoski, Shuey, Lynch, Hill and Waters, anyone's going to have a hard time replacing them. Darling is gone now as well, which means we'll have one of of our top 5 forwards for our next game.

Should have been 5 IMO. There was no excusing his actions, his intent was clearly nothing more than to hurt the player.

Exactly, and he had to have known Patch Adams had a bad shoulder. I'm mainly disappointed he's only got 4 because his return game is against guess who... Essendon #-o :lol:

St Kilda players say 'no fat chicks'

DateJuly 17, 2012 - 5:16PM

Two St Kilda footballers have been accused of telling a young woman they would not be in a photograph with her because they were "saving ourselves for the hot chicks".

A 21-year-old woman said the players made the comment to her when she asked to have a photograph with them at Melbourne Airport before the team flew to Brisbane last Friday.

She then told her mother that she overheard one of the players say: "there should be a no fat chicks section in our contracts".

The woman's furious mother called St Kilda Football Club, the club's head of football Chris Pelchen confirmed to Radio 3AW.

He said the club would be making a donation to the Butterfly Foundation, which supports Australians with eating disorders and body image problems, following a request by the young woman.

Mr Pelchen told Radio 3AW the woman had been trying to take some photographs for a friend, who was a Saints fan, and the club had sent her a St Kilda guernsey to make up for the missed shots.

He said when confronted by himself and their coach, none of the St Kilda footballers had admitted making or hearing the insulting remarks.

But Mr Pelchen said the club was taking the matter seriously and a critical letter from the woman's mother would be read out during training.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/st-kilda-players-say-no-fat-chicks-20120717-2284i.html#ixzz20sglP2N5

Jack Ziebell gets the same amount of time out as Judd.

You're fucking joking, right? The Tribunal is a fucking disgrace.

Policing AFL football has never been an easy task. But right now the administering of the rules of the game and the league's entire judicial process is in danger of descending into farce.

What began as a sound enough idea to simplify the disciplinary process via a standardised points system has instead become an unwieldy, wildly inconsistent and contradictory mess, one which if it isn't addressed pronto, threatens to leave most of the key stakeholders, not to mention the people who support the game, completely disillusioned.

The Chris Judd drama only added further fuel to the already raging fires of discontent among the playing fraternity and a significant portion of the fan base about the entire system. And the eventual four-game penalty handed to North Melbourne's Jack Ziebell has brought into question allegedly the game's most fundamental premise, winning the football.
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The old stand-alone tribunal certainly meant lots of paper work and late nights for more people, but at least delivered a uniform set of findings. Now we're stuck with an overly-complex system a vast majority of the football world cannot comprehend, in which final penalties, due to undue weight given to discounts and loading, seldom reflect the merits of the actual incident being assessed.

More importantly, though, it is a system in which three levels of officialdom – umpires, the match review panel and the tribunal – deliver verdicts regularly in complete contrast to and effectively undermining each other.

In the Ziebell case, the tribunal backed the MRP, but certainly not umpire Justin Schmidt, who hadn't paid a free kick as two players, Ziebell and Carlton's Aaron Joseph, inevitably collided in their pursuit of the ball.

Schmidt told the Carlton players remonstrating with Ziebell: “He was going for the ball. He just went the ball.” MRP chairman Mark Fraser, in laying a charge, conceded that Ziebell was looking at the ball, and indeed got his hands to the ball, but slapped a “negligent” rating on it anyway.

That, presumably, had to do with Joseph not playing out the second half, and a reportedly heavy-handed testimony from the Carlton medical team, another example of the inordinate weighting now given the consequences of contact, something surely over which a player laying a bump or applying a tackle has little control.

The tribunal determined that Ziebell had a “realistic alternative” to contest the ball rather than jumping in the air, but felt no compunction to explain what it actually was. I certainly can't fathom what it might have been, other than to stand back and let Joseph have first “dibs”. If that's what players are now going to have to do, then we've just effectively altered the very essence of our game. And not for the better.

The “slide tackle” incident kerfuffle earlier this season was more convoluted and ludicrous officiating at work.

North Melbourne's Lindsay Thomas actually won a free kick for high contact by Sydney's Gary Rohan, only to find himself handed a three-match suspension by the MRP for rough conduct, Rohan breaking his leg as two players coming from opposite directions on slippery turf made contact.

The tribunal then overturned that verdict, arriving at the conclusion that no-one but the MRP had seriously challenged, that this was an unfortunate accident. It also overturned the one-match penalty given Fremantle's Greg Broughton for a slide into Gold Coast's David Swallow, mainly because the Docker had arrived first to the ball

Fraser's response after that reversal was hardly encouraging on the consistency front. “Obviously the tribunal decisions with the two incidents will change our thinking a little bit because the tribunal didn't believe that that was rough conduct,” he said. So, two judicial bodies with wildly conflicting ideas about what is punishable. And, from the sounds of it, doing very little comparing of notes.

AFL football operations manager Adrian Anderson then pulled some legislation on the run, tightening interpretations of rules against sliding, but conceded few players would be suspended unless the laws were formally changed.

The Thomas and Broughton verdicts were just one of a number of MRP findings with which the tribunal has disagreed. It overturned the ridiculously harsh two-match penalty given Hawthorn's Brendan Whitecross after Geelong skipper Joel Selwood cannoned into him, a rough conduct charge dished out to the Cats' Steve Johnson, while a striking charge on St Kilda's Leigh Montagna was withdrawn.

Montagna had been charged after Melbourne's James Magner ended up with a cut eye, the Demon subsequently confirming the cut had been accidentally caused by Montagna's knee. Tribunal counsel Jeff Gleeson said MRP chairman Fraser had told him he was comfortable with the charge being withdrawn, “and that had the MRP been aware that the contact was made by the knee the MRP would not have charged Montagna.”

Hang on a second. So the MRP wasn't sure what caused the cut, didn't bother to find out, but charged him anyway. Yep, there's a system just ticking over beautifully. Not.

Don't we have a major problem if an umpire, on the spot viewing an incident in real time and in context, can award a free kick to a player for being infringed, or for holding an opponent in possession (as was the case with Thomas and Adelaide's Taylor Walker, who'd just sling-tackled Richmond's Steve Morris) and the player who wins the free ends up being suspended?

And don't we have an even bigger problem if the AFL's judicial bodies pick and choose who and what they're going to make an example of? You could argue the Judd “chicken wing” effort was a very bad look, and an adequate suspension symbolically important.

But was Geelong's Josh Hunt's effort in needlessly standing forcefully on Carlton's Eddie Betts' hand a few weeks back any less damaging a look? It was just as unrequired, unsportsmanlike and to be frank, cowardly. Judd got four weeks, fair enough. Hunt got a $1350 fine.

There's just too many contradictions like that going on, from penalty to penalty, between the umpires running the actual game and those who deliver the verdicts after it, between the verdicts themselves, overloaded with the asterisks and footnotes of loading, discounts and early pleas, and frankly, in the wake of the Ziebell case particularly, between what we know as the spirit of the game, and how it's currently being policed.

It's one big mess, in which nobody, players, fans or club officials, is happy. And if the AFL is, it's either content with some pretty low standards surrounding fairness, simplicity and consistency, or just in complete denial about a system which has spun way out of control.

http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/unwieldy-and-wildly-inconsistent-afl-judicial-system-descends-into-farce-20120718-229py.html

Geelong getting a fair bit of help from the umpires tonight so far.

johan botha ‏@johan_botha

@samjacobs24 Will be away for next 2 months,back in Oct-think I'll miss rest of AFL season.Will be back to celebrate Grand Final win:-)!!!

The Swans will be playing for fat women everywhere.

In seriousness though, the StKilda players were right. Lose some fucking weight you goddamn idiots.