The results this weekend are now starting to firm up who will not be in the finals. The BIG deal is Collingwood (my team) cannot now make the finals.I'm not a Collingwood supporter ( Go Hawks!), but my younger son is. He is not unhappy with Buckley because he reckons that Collingwood has a team of kids (apart from Cloke, Pendlebury and Swan). Give them another season or two and Collingwood should have a really good side. The same can't be said of Carlton, Brisbane or Melbourne since all of them appear to believe in a recruiting policy of old has-beens rather than developing youth.
I am also starting to think Buckley is never going to coach us to a win. Should he go?
Hird as coach may also be in doubt?There should not be any doubt whatsoever about Hird. He should have been sacked at least a year ago. He has, virtually single-handedly, destroyed a once great club. To this day, his players don't know what they were injected with, and Hird still refuses to take responsibility. Have you seen him recently, coaching from the boundary line without headphones? Hird has one view of the play, and his assistants are up in the box with a different view, yet they can't communicate with him. Why bother with your assistant coaches et al if you're not going to listen to them? The hubris of the man defies belief.
Hird as coach may also be in doubt?There should not be any doubt whatsoever about Hird. He should have been sacked at least a year ago. He has, virtually single-handedly, destroyed a once great club. To this day, his players don't know what they were injected with, and Hird still refuses to take responsibility. Have you seen him recently, coaching from the boundary line without headphones? Hird has one view of the play, and his assistants are up in the box with a different view, yet they can't communicate with him. Why bother with your assistant coaches et al if you're not going to listen to them? The hubris of the man defies belief.
Hird has taken a once proud club and placed the club on its knees. Anyone thought about the losses and perhaps it is the players who are deliberately losing to send the Essendon Management a message about Hird?To be fair to them, it's understandable that players staring down the barrel at a doping suspension of between two and four years wouldn't be too motivated to play well.
In other words do the players now also want the last connection to the doping scandal gone and who many probably believe was the architect of the scandal?
James Hird deserves the same sanction as Lance Armstrong, who got a life ban from all sport for being the kingpin in a much smaller case of institutional doping.
Absolutely he does. He has caused years of turmoil at Essendon and caused issues across many players who would undoubtedly be feeling aggrieved and they should.It's probably bad enough that he should take certain precautions to ensure his personal security once the AFL decision gets overturned by the CAS.
Just the idea of undertaking a programme of drug taking on such a scale should have lead to Hird being immediately sacked.The institutional doping (i.e. a team-wide program) is what deserves a life ban for Hird, Dank and Little. To put it into perspective, the Essendon doping program was (pretty sure it's was rather than is, there certainly weren't any PEDs involved with their performance on Saturday night) larger than all the known cases of team-led doping in the history of cycling put together!
Essendon's administrators might as well have spent the past few years standing outside their new high performance centre at Tullamarine throwing wads of cash into the breeze.If a series of on-field humiliations haven't been bad enough, those running the club continue to make decisions bordering on farcical. James Hird's departure as coach is just another.
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