smokey - very emotive reply. You obviously feel strongly about it.
What can I say Stripes, I'm an emotive person when it comes to the Tigers.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Jumping up and down the ladder from between 16th to 9th, from one year to the next, for over a decade and yet expecting to become a flag contender is madness. Stringing a few wins together one season and then struggling to win more than a handful of games the next makes me sick to my very core.
Yes it is Stripes, absolute madness. That's exactly what I would call our past 30 years as we continually ignored the need to consolidate our club and succeed in the long term through professionalism, innovation, improvement, and plain old common sense, thinking instead that success was a God given right to our powerful club and that all we had to do was shut our eyes and think of Ol' Blighty. We could have had the number 1 draft pick every year for each of those 30 years and we would still be the barren laughing stock we became. Not seeing the wood for the trees makes me sick to the core.
So if we do manage to finish down the bottom of the ladder this year and even next and gain the raw talent we need to develop into a premiership side then don't embarass yourself by trying to look me in the eye when I'm celebrating my team's win through the virtues of hard work to draft well and develop the talent we choose, courage to take the pain of short term losses, honesty to realize that our misguidied belief as a club that winning at all costs is futile when we do not have the players to rise above mediocre and team who should always strive to win regardless of what the administration engineers. If we have success through playing the system, through making the hard decisions and not always trying to be noble when it has been our proven cause of failure for decades, don't try and look me in the eyes - I won't bother meeting your gaze...
I really don't have anything to add to this - if you think that our "proven cause of failure for decades" has been our because of our nobility or lack of playing the system then there is not a lot more I can say. Maybe re-read my comment above about wood and trees.
There is no cap on the money spent of development or the staff acquired through off field spending so clubs such as Collingwood have an advantage over most of the restof the competition, us included. Leigh Matthews is right to point to the Collingwood side and highlight the players that appear to be playing far above their initial draft potential but he fails to finger the inequity in off-field spending too. This fund discrepency or CHEATING if you like, can not be exploited by us at the moment but the draft can.
Fund discrepancy - cheating? Can't be exploited by us? What the? Last time I looked this was a professional sport played in a country run as a capitalistic democracy with no rules regarding how wealthy individual legal entities such as clubs are allowed to become. You really are a 'rules' type of person aren't you! I ask how committed to your cause you would be comrade, if Richmond is instructed to hand over a healthy percentage of it's profits to North Melbourne in order to redress some of this "cheating" imbalance in club funds? I find it laughable that you do identify one of the real prime causes of our lack of recent success and then claim that it is only based on unfairness because we have been too stupid, too unprofessional, too factional, too lazy too damn whatever to take the necessary steps to correct it and that the fault lies with the system, not the club!! Do you think therefore, that getting the next 3 or 4 number one picks will address the "cheating" financial advantage that Collingwood, Essendon, West Coast, Adelaide, Hawthorn etc have built for themselves over recent years by gaining superiority in the area of development? Hhmm, typing out those club names identifies a common thread to me - longer sustained periods of success, power and respect. Coincidence maybe? Who knows but running your club as profitably as you can and then choosing to reinvest a large part of those profits in your football department is certainly legal and it is certainly professional and it is certainly smart and it is certainly not cheating.
Say what you like about the theory of engineering losses to finish down the bottom of the ladder to advantage yourself in the draft but all clubs seek to gain advantage of the systems and laws they have placed before them by the league including Collingwood, including Geelong, including Brisbane, including every team you can think off. Tanking is merely one way.
Tanking is the way a few clubs have chosen. Until I see success and premierships delivered to those clubs by this method of cheating compromise and the subsequent due respect accorded them by the football world in general, then I can never hope to support it.
Karma. You can't see it, feel it or touch it but it bites very, very hard when you poke it with a big stick.
