I believe Bolton is out of his depth. Sacking him is the easy way out. What he needs is support. An adviser if you like. An experienced operator at AFL LEVEL !

For example someone he can liaise with during the week, and even sit in the Coaches box with him on match days.

Pluck out any names you like as candidates, but for me blokes like David Parkin, Robert Walls or maybe Kenny Sheldon. Note there is a Carlton background with each of those guys. Something we lack throughout the present coaching staff.

I wouldn't ask Bolton if he was agreeable to this, because he'd probably say no, I'd be telling him it's happening.

"A little straighter"

Needed to be 19.6 to lose by 10 goals, or for your 90 point scenario - 25.0.

You do realise that they converted slightly ahead of us?....

watch the game? 21pts was very flattering. we were smashed all over the park. dogs kick a little straighter we lose by 10 goals. Dogs really execute in front of goal, we lose by 80 or 90 pts.

... to a dogs team many in the pre match thread thought we were a proper chance of beating – six day turn around from perth, equally as bad form as us etc etc


was there outcry last season?

no there was not, because we were competitive. I watched every game, a fair few at the ground and i can only remember 2 games - port & tigers where we were never in those games. all the others we were pretty good, and had come a long long way from the malthouse nightmare.

this season, 0-6 with possibly the hardest 5 weeks schedule in afl to come and there has not been one game we've been in. we;ve probably played 3 good quarters of football all season so far.

right now this feels more like the pagan nightmare.

i don't think bolton is the right coach for this team. i think our rebuild and squad turnover is a necessary evil we have to endure - very few in their right mind would argue against that path of a total reset.

But! keeping bolton and rebuilding are seperate issues, which lotsa ppl here like to conflate.

i firmly believe there were better options out there when we got bolton (like dew) ... i'm so devout in the belief only someone who has played afl, can coach afl. they don't even have to have had rich team success, but they need to know the level of competition and ruthlessness that they're walking their kids into.

and bolton on gamedays, struggles almightily. i also question whether he commands the total respect of the playing group. tas league footy is a world away from the big league.


i won't be surprised to see bolton sacked at some point, and tbh, i'll be a little relieved when its done.

It wasn't a smashing. In a smashing no way Curnow would have lined up for an easy shot that put us within ten points. It was a poor showing. It was a game I thought we could win but didn't. It hurt just as the rest of this season hurts but truthfully the hurt is as much my fault as anything else. I want this to end. We all do. But it cannot be hurried up. What I have to deal with is my expectations, that's really where the pain comes from. Not Bolton's coaching. Not Casboult's kicking. Me wanting this to end and so over summer I imagined it would end - but we have added DOW & O'Brien to our inexperience. Logically there was always going to be a step back especially when Dockerty, Kruiser and Murphy are missing and Gibbs was traded out. Also Rowe played his first game last week for yonks - history will tell you the following week is the tough one when returning from a long lay off.

Now all of this you can disagree with but 21 points will never be a smashing...Its a sign you only see what they could have done to us and what we didn't do and the truth lies in a lot more than that. At the end you admit you are being driven by an ideology and so there is no point discussing the oros and cons (I know this is therefore a waste but what the heck), your mind cannot be changed. You might as well believe if we all said eight hail Martys at the same time for three month Carlton would win the flag. Its your belief and so a fact like 21 points is not a smashing, matters little, its outside your belief vision and you cannot see it.

The one thing that's clear with Bolton is that with a near full list in the preseason we played a more attacking style which looked pretty good.

Then the injuries piled on from R1 and our 'depth' players just aren't up to that style so we've gone back to last years defensive style to minimize the damage.

Injuries and lack of continuity have halted our development for the time being.

Therein lies our biggest problem IMO.

Injuries shouldn’t be an excuse, but the fact is they’re always available as one.

When was the last time we had a best 22 available without at least one injury, let alone an extended period?

Martin, Cotchin, Rance and Riewoldt have played nearly 5 seasons together uninterrupted. Yet for years we’ve had a revolving door of quality players on the sidelines. Add this to our dearth of players brought in between 2009-2014, and it’s no wonder we have a cohesion problem.

Either our players don’t prepare properly, our medicos aren’t up to it, we select ‘weak’ players, or God simply hates us.

they also turfed a half dozen out on the full, and blew a lot of golden inside 50 chances with horrible decision making and basically stopped running in the last qtr. i can't see how anyone could have watched that game and then tell me with a straight face it didn't feel like a 50 pt loss.

bulldogs are a team desperately out of form - they're actually a woeful side right now, who happened to be younger and less experienced than us as well, and other than Cripps and levi, no player won their position on the night.


make no mistake. we are standing right in line to being the worst team in AFL history. very realistic to think we'll 0-11.

i'm not sure how any coach survives that, whether we like it or not.