Mighty Bucks – Negligently Causing Serious Injury
In what is becoming a tradition, the AFR year kicks off with a grand final replay in round 1. However in a blunder that admittedly all of us have been guilty of at one point or another, it seems Mighty Bucks team manager Kent forgot that there was a match on Wednesday evening to start the round as he didn’t submit his team selection until Thursday. And it wasn’t just any old game that he missed out on. But the one in which the Buck’s captain Max Gawn and Bayley “I’ve averaged 4 goals a match in my last 5 games” Fritsch were playing… And whilst some people may have thought that this could have been a new form of tactics from the maverick manager who took the league (and the Standa Cup) by storm last season, his replacement players for those two omissions were ones the Bucks picked up in rounds 8 & 10 of the PSD. By my calculations, had he played Frisch and Gawn in the positions ultimately filled by Riccardi and Fort, the Bucks would have scored 19.5 points more.
Now the more observant of you may have noticed that Bucks lost the grand final replay by 20 points, meaning that the extra 19.5 would not have been enough by the slimmest of margins. But the extra observant of you would have looked at Champions League Group D – otherwise known as the group of death. The group the premiership runner up Bucks are in with the Blue Flames, The Brawlers and the Marvels (3 of the top 5 teams in recent AFR history). The group that no team can afford to drop a game against that competition. The group with 4 of the top 6 scoring teams in the round. The group that contains the Bucks who lost their game by 19 points!!
If the Bucks had selected their team on Wednesday afternoon instead of Thursday, they would have scored 19.5 more points and be sitting on top of their Champions League group, instead of already be facing a tough battle to not be eliminated in the first stage.
On the charge of Negligently Causing Serious Injury to their Champions League prospects, I find the Mighty Bucks… GUILTY!
Kent
In my defence I actually thought I put in my team late on the Sunday or Monday night after the draft, thinking I’ll do it now before I forget.
I also actually checked it at half time of the dees dogs game and I just assumed the site was glitching as my team seemed to glitch on the live scores a fair bit last season.
But to make the result even more frustrating, I was 50-50 on Riccardi and Rachele and ultimately that was the difference between a win and a loss..
Cam Baker
I cost myself a game in the Covid year because I thought I would do my team selection on Thursday arvo before the game started but that round the Thursday game was played at like 4pm and not the regular 7:30 so I missed selecting my only ruck available before the bounce… 🤦♂️