Milton66 wrote:Mr Magic wrote:
Great to see you feel rodgerfox is worth defending. That's your opinion and you're entitled to have it.
As are I and others who feel he is nothing more than a 'baiting troll'.
Of course he does. Any defender of GT is a friend of MB.
Sadly, MB is blinded by his obsessive need to defend GT's legacy that he'll sell his sould to the devil to achieve his objectives.
And to think that RF accuses you of having a man-crush.
Interesting that all of RF's insults and name calling are quickly forgotten abd his "views" are held with such esteem when it suits someone's agenda.
To deal with the last point first, when posters make serious comments, I take them seriously. The fact that they have previously insulted other posters is irrelevant to me: if it wasn't, I wouldn't take the posts of many others on here seriously: including your own and, when I think of it, including my own.
rodgerfox is not an especially abusive poster. He did gratuitously abuse someone earlier this year who (unknown to rf, I assume) had cancer very badly and who took the insult a bit personally. I would see this as an unfortunate chain of events rather than as being indicative of rf's unusually evil nature. But there you go, people tend to interpret the same event differently.
In terms of whether rf is/is not Violent Stool, I neither known nor care. Nor do I care who you or anyone else on here actually is, or whether you have multiple personas, or whatever. I can't recall that Violent Stool has posted on any threads for 6 months or more, so what's the point of bringing it up?
In terms of GT's legacy regarding injury, fitness, etc., I would make the following points.
1. He certainly had some injury-plagued players in his time: X, Ball, Hamill, Kosi, Gram, Watts, Brooks, Raph, Max, Goose (after 2006), Harvey, Gehrig. Some of these guys had recurrent soft-tissue problems, others had problems with OP and joints, others just had persistent bad luck.
2. If more of these guys (plus Sam Fisher in 2005 and Lenny in 2006) had been fully fit at the end of 2005 and 2006, we might well have won the flag as IMO we had more talent around the ground than either the Swans or WCE (we didn't have any serious injury problems in 2004: personally, I think we weren't quite ready in that year. But it could have been because of GT's lousy coaching, who knows?)
3. The injury problems of many of the above persisted under Lyon and meant that 2007 was our worst ever year for injuries.
4. Misson arrived at the end of 2007 and things have improved since then. That said, we have steadily gotten rid a lot of our chronically injured players. Kosi has become more dependable, and Raph (although it might be that the diagnosis and treatment of his epilepsy has helped a lot there): so fully praise for Lyon/Misson in that area.
5. GT has consistently said that he thinks that the importance of "conditioning" is overrated. I note that, in his time, he brought (I'm told by people on here that he called all the shots on these things) two of the most highly-regarded conditioners in the AFL - Larcome and Starch - to the club. But things only got worse: perhaps this is one of the reasons he doesn't rate conditioning very highly?
6. As far as I know, GT tried as hard as he could to get the best people and the best setup for player conditioning within the small budget he had for this (much less than the Board now allocates). There are no allegations that he siphoned off money from this area to other activities, or that he tried to micromanage Larcome and Starch and tell them how they should do their work.
Things might be better now, but I still think that a lot of criticism about the 2002-06 era is based upon prejudice and making stuff up rather than on facts.
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
- Jonathan Swift
