Don’t deliberately mispronounce players names (over and over) and think this is the height of quirkiness or humour…Lllloyd… I’m looking at you BT… if childishly mispronouncing player names is really the best some commentators can come up with then can the networks do us all a favour.

The Suns/Giants had a mixture of very young players and veterans… but it is true that the the balance overall was very young talented kids playing against seasoned teams with experienced players, and it was a struggle. I sat through many Giants games where we got belted before things turned around and we made a GF.
It seems that a second Brisbane side is a foregone conclusion now, and a move to 17 teams with a weekly bye most likely. The AFL had 17 teams for one season when the Suns came in. This will give a weekly game at Suncorp for most of the season but there’ll still only be 8 games for broadcasters..so there will be the expense of funding an extra team which is hopefully offset by having a Brisbane game every week rather than every second week… I’m not sure 17 teams is a great number of teams but you might do that for one round of broadcast deal (5 years) and then move to 18 teams over a longer term horizon if that makes sense… or a club may fold at some point and you drop back to 16. The AFL is facing it’s own dilemma with potential expansion to Tassie which would make 19 teams.. I’d prefer them to add two teams or none at all… or just bite the bullet and send a Melbourne club to Tassie.

I tend to agree with RL commentators who are concerned about player depth when it comes to adding one or two new teams… the proposed conference structure might work OK but if you’re adding teams at a time where there’s been a long term decline in junior participation then it’s a recipe for lower playing standards and lopsided results. And yes this did happen in the AFL where both expansion teams were badly beaten in the initial seasons, and in the case of the Suns they are only now starting to come good after more than 10 years in the AFL. And even the Swans are only now starting to produce their own local junior talent in any numbers after around four decades In the competition. If the NRL does expand then it’d better be prepared to dig in for the long haul, and it’d also want to reverse or stop the trend of declining junior participation otherwise it could be introducing a step change dilution of playing talent at the wrong time. As with many business decisions, in this expansion strategy there are short incentives and long term consequences.

Matty John’s (who also dislikes Aussie Rules) was just fishing for a sound bite which he got… so good on him I suppose if he want to ask that sort of nonsense. PVL claims he finds Aussie Rules boring, and that the AFL somehow is behind the NRL.. great….but I think he doth protesteth too much… if the AFL actually was rubbish in the all the ways he claims he wouldn’t need to keep making that type of claim all the time….I even saw him rubbishing the AFLW because it had to cancel last year’s Grand Final due to Covid… he’s a real class act

Seriously? He was at the mercy of state health authorities, as was everyone. He simply had no special influence there. And broadcasters? Then, as now, broadcasters have the upper hand, and they negotiated significant discounts (which RL journalists like Masters say were more bigger discounts than other codes). Finally, what were these ‘logistics’ you’re talking about ….. I didn’t see anything special, certainly not on the scale of sorting out 18 clubs based across 5 states. The NRL had a far simpler problem to solve… certainly nothing there at all for the AFL to ‘copy’. Self praise is no praise – when PVL starts telling everyone how well the NRL handled things (that is, how well HE handled things) I guess that convinces some people…

You do realise that Marty Johns and PVL are almost totally unknown in AFL circles.. this question, and PVL’s hilarious answer, are entirely for a certain subsection of the RL audience… it’s not intended to rile up AFL followers 99.99% of whom won’t even be aware of it. Simple as that.

You got me there… this is my life..well played.

Mate he’s a boring man baby… but if seeing the head of your game fire off childish insults floats your boat then great ..enjoy… there’s plenty more where that came from…and it will (yawn).

Mate own it… you’ve got a boring, insecure loudmouth as the head of your game who will continue to embarrass himself, and your code, as this season unfolds within schoolyard level insults. Own it. It’s not ideal but it happens to be the hand you were dealt, or your game chose in fact. You may think he’s a brilliant administrator so bully for you… but however great you may think he is, at the same time his childish sniping must be boring even RL people who may have found it funny at first… time for Peter the man baby to grow up… not that that will happen any time soon..

Exactly… how is plucking a return date out of your ass “leading the way”? He plucked a date, and through forces nobody had any control over, the virus happened not to spread in Australia… it had nothing to do with NRL ‘leadership’… unless PVL has some magical crystal ball then he, like the rest of us, were totally clueless about the future course of the pandemic in Australia in 2020… and this “we were first” nonsense means nothing. Yes the NRL was first but so what!? The AFL returned according to it’s own schedule, plan and risk appetite… AFL’s return had ZERO to do with the NRL. PVL is deluded if he thinks otherwise.

Say what you like about PVL … but he is consistent…and as dumb as a plank of wood, deploying non sequiturs at will, as he so often does in his ramblings to credulous RL journalists. And he laughs at his own odd little joke that AFL players having to be great athletes because AFL is such a boring game… illogical, and more importantly very unfunny. What an embarrassment.

AFL does accomodate varying shapes and sizes… but at the same time at the it is just a brute fact that if you look across the elite AFL competition you see the evolution of what is required of a player to enter the system – 6 foot or more (mostly), aerobically elite (mostly), highly adept kicking amd marking skills (mostly)… there are exceptions always but on the whole you’re just not going to ever be seeing the AFL drawing high numbers from Pacific Island nations for the same reason the NBA doesn’t draw their players from that region. They’re just not physically suited to play AFL (or NBA) at the elite level – possibly in a previous era but not the modern game. Pacific Islanders are clearly suited to NRL but they are a fish out of water when it comes to the AFL. There will be the odd exception but on the whole AFL at the elite level isn’t likely to suit many athletes from Pacific Island nations.

We’ve all seen that experiment…on ability alone, he wouldn’t be offered a spot at an A grade club in a suburban amateur competition let alone the AFL. I know you’re probably joking but be clear that AFL clubs won’t exactly be lining up to sign a player who gets about four possessions a game. Seems like a nice enough chap with some odd religious beliefs … and a very ordinary AFL player.

Western Force and Western Reds? How did those teams go? Notable omissions from your summary.

What are you talking about…Denigrating the AFL, and telling fibs, is par for the course for some RL journalists. Water off a ducks back mate…childish gibberish. I won’t bore you with examples but there are plenty, every year. Trust me – whatever complaints you have of SA journalists are more than covered by Sydney based RL journalists.

Mate have you noticed the coverage AFL gets in NSW papers…. anyway it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is people who want to see their sport can now do so online, and through cable TV. Coverage of AFL in Sydney papers is rubbish but who cares – there are plenty of options to bypass the bad coverage. Same applies for NRL followers who live in states other than QLD/NSW – they have plenty of options to see the games and commentary on the games. And it’s been like that for some time. It’s a non-issue.

Why are people so unkind…you really know how to hurt a guy..

He took a punt. So what. If he was wrong and the virus spread the resumption would have been moved back from May to a later month. Big deal. I just have to confess that I just don’t get these repeated claims that there is something special on display here… to me it just seemed like he got the NRL back a few weeks earlier than other sports because he was prepared to take more risk. Why that deserves ‘credit’ is beyond me. And ultimately, it wasn’t even up to PVL – at any time the state health authorities plus have pulled the pin. It was never even PVL’s call anyway. Confused.

All of it was luck. All of it. PVL had no crystal ball, and nor did state health officials. The statements PVL made were all conditional on future events unfolding in a manner over which he had no control. None. Had the virus spread, as it has in most other countries, then the NRL would not have resumed in May. Right now, if the virus gets away again in NSW and Qld, then it’ll be and interesting start the the 2021 NRL season. You are living in an odd world where you think PVL has some magical powers to plan away the realities of a pandemic.

Mate you’re making the claims here .. not me. The onus is on you to back up your assertion. You name one idea the AFL copied…just one. Of course the AFL had a resumption plan, as did all other sports and businesses. Having a resumption plan isn’t copying the NRL – each sport/business had a plan suited to their own business. The AFL did things differently across the board in almost every detail from starting date, schedule structure, government approvals, hubs, testing regimes and so on… I’d love you to come up with a single thing that you claim the AFL ‘copied’. Please do educate me. And in the unlikely event that you can flag one incidental aspect you claim is ‘copied’ then I’d just say so what – there may be areas where the AFL had a similar approach but there was no ‘copying’… what a juvenile claim to be making by the way. The AFL resumed its season as best it could based on its own plans, suited to its own sport (which was faced with very different geographical issues, including virus expansion into where it plays most of its games)…. ‘copying’ the NRL had nothing to do with the AFL resumption of season 2020.

Exactly how did Gil ‘copy’ the NRL approach by the way?… the AFL had a very different approach in fact, and they had a very different problem due to more diverse geographical spread of more teams across more state borders than the NRL. The AFL took a more cautious approach on return date than the NRL as they were entitled to do – that’s all. Being more cautious and retuning later isn’t actually ‘copying’ anything is it.

It was all luck. It was all totally out of PVL’s control, and he had no magical access to special information not available to others…..there is no logic at all in any of these frequently repeated claims that he is some sort of genius as a sports administrator. Repeating nonsense doesn’t make it true. He had no say in the virus spreading (or not spreading) and he had no real power to resume the competition – all power was, and is, with the state health authorities. The resumption of the competition was never in PVL’s hands – at all times it was ultimately up to whether the virus would happen to spread, and the view taken by health authorities at the time.

No… no it doesn’t. No recognition needs to go to PVL. This misguided narrative circulates in sports media but it’s just nonsense. Sorry. PVL took a punt, plucked a date from the air..and it just happened to turn out OK…this time. The whole thing was actually out of his control, and anyone’s control. Sport came back which was a very a good thing but let credit be given deservedly.

It’s all basic physics.. the helmet will actually do something to dissipate the force and increase the time of the impact. It’s not correct to say helmets do nothing – that’s far too simplistic and just untrue. The issue of brain injury is real and they will be (or should be) looking for effective way to deal with this… that is, to minimise the incidence of brain injury. Helmets should be part of the solution but I suspect it’ll be more changes in rules that’ll get to the core of the issue.

I’m not sure it’s correct to say that helmets do ‘nothing’… yes the brain rattles internally, but isn’t the idea that the helmet itself dissipates some off the force and you end up with less brain rattling… your son falls off his bike and his head hits the road – do you want him wearing a helmet or not? I want the helmet. I do think helmets do provide some protection but they can’t magically prevent all brain injury. This is a issue for contact sports and they’re going to have to improve their processes (and rules) to provide as much protection as possible, and also put in place some sort compensation scheme for players who’ll inevitably get injured… I don’t think it’s good enough that the mental health of a group of players continues to be viewed (by some) as acceptable collateral damage… this issue does affect other sports like Australian football where recent autopsies have shown the same issue (eg. Polly Farmer). I think we’re entering an era where sports will have to be held accountable, as they should be.