DT Dick of the Week – Round 3

Hello there to all you Fantasticals.  We had another weird, wonderful and whacky week of Fantasy fun this week didn’t we?  For me and so many more it was yet another reminder of why this game is so great and tipping comps can eat a big bag of crap.  Tipping has knobs all over it and this Fantasy caper is at least every bit as enjoyable as it is annoying.

Plenty more for Dick talk this week and quite a few candidates once again for our weekly DT Talk Dick of the Week (DoW).

Firstly, not quite a Fantasy DoW relevance but just an overall thing as I am now forced to listen to much more commentary of AFL games than I have in the past.  Can we please get some Chamomile Tea and calming salts out into the booths, media rooms and group think tanks the media populate and calm the hell down on the Nick Daicos is the best player in the comp talk.  He’s a great kid, doing an amazing job and is a Fantasy godsend for our backlines but a bit more respect is needed for the existing superstars of the comp before we dish out that sort of hyperbole.  Let the kid enjoy his early career and let us enjoy it with him a bit more before we weigh him down with that vocal and written click bait rubbish.  All this sort of premature talk does for him is start the over-rated versus under-rated debates plus I’m sure it puts a target on him with other players and also sucks the fun out of what is a super fun start to his career.  There’s an argument he’s not even the best player in his team so go easy on the best player in the comp stuff.  Most Brownlow votes to this point is fair for sure, but there’ve been a number of winners of that award who’ve reminded us this is not the accurate measure of best players by a long way.

Anyway, on to Fantasy Dick talk and we have a DoW first this week, a Double Dick.  I could not split 2 peo9ple this week and they earn it for very similar reasons.  One perhaps has a longer history of it but I’m going to try to be better at sticking with my own guidelines for the DoW and maintain the rage that past performance doesn’t necessarily weigh in on current DoW dongs.  As always though, we have some close shaves for some potential Dicks so we’ll fire a few shots across the bow on some almost DoW worthy guys first.

The first shot is for great weekend scoring work but it does lead to a Dick nom, the Dick can be fickle.  Now when you do a knee in game 1 and plonk a 14 on your coaches you get very close to being a Dow winner.  We hoped back then Tommy Stewart wouldn’t be out of the game for long and so it turned out.  But for him to do that and be out for supposedly a month at least which leads his shrewd coaches to trade him out BUT to then only miss a week is frustrating enough.  However, to make the early and surprise comeback and then whack out 126 points?  Tommy that’s just being rude.  For the headache’s you’ve caused so many coaches and for showing off just how good you can be so quickly after appearing to be gone for weeks yet is dick-ish for sure.  Top effort but come on, harsh.

Whilst we’re on kind of a positive road and how the positive can still be dick-ish, shout outs to Toby Nankervis and Mason Wood for their early season feats.  The Tank is AVERAGING an immense 113 as we speak and may well see his current 3% ownership rise as a result.  He’s been a draft boon for those that missed out on the early options and Nank is fair dinkum lighting shizz up!  However, its very Dick-ish not to give us a bit of warning Tobes so more of us could have grabbed the $81k you’ve banked for any coaches so far.  Similarly, Mason Wood has donked us an average of 106, even with a slight injury impacted game this week that still saw him give us 118.  As less than 2% of people have Wood right now so he’s the ultimate PoD and man what a great one.  Again, too little warning from Woodsy so a DoW drive-by for that.  Fingers crossed your injury doesn’t dampen this golden run for you.

A double edged dick dong here.  Firstly the positive edge of the sword to the 23 Eagles that ran out on the weekend and their coaches.  Gutsy stuff to make a game of it considering you had so many injuries that Xavier Ellis was in the rooms at 3Q time asking if Nic Nat could lend him some XXXXL shorts to fit him so he could go out and help.  This effort was Fantasy relevant because before their 12^th bloke got carted off, Dom Sheed was doing his old man hickory routine and stinking the joint up.  However with no one on the bench and no one on the field to give the ball too Dom found his way to a not completely gross score.  Not great, but not gross.  The carnage also allowed Long and Chesser to give some decent scoring to coaches who were starting to panic a bit, especially with Chesser.  Our very reliable D rook Rubes Ginbey also had a big day as a result of not being able to get off the ground.  All Fantasy positive sitting next to the positive real world effort.

However the double edge for the DoW mention on the negative side goes to the Eagles strength and conditioning or high performance team or whatever we call them nowadays in the Clubs.  Too many injuries over too long now for bad luck to be the only factor.  Some very handy careers are cliff diving at the moment and some of them are causing significant Fantasy pain.  Give us Yeo or at least give your supporters 23 blokes who can make it threough a game without breaking in half.  It’d also be handy to let your rooks in to a kitchen or a gym from time to time because my God little Longy looks like he could do with a feed.  Good kid for sure but when you have Hungry Jacks as your major sponsor surely you can feed the bloke up a bit!  While we do get better JS for Chesser, Long, Hunt, Hewett etc, you Eagles training experts need to give your supporters better than a regular injury list almost longer than the available one and you need to give us better Fantasy options.

Back to more classic DoW behaviour, I have to give a tip of the dick to Tanner Bruhn for ongoing DoW adjacent behaviour this year that continued this week.  Game 1 this season and the young Cat was 40pts before half time and looking like the steal of the season.  Any coach who had him had the Brereton chest all puffed out and the Connor MacGregor arm swing going as they walked in any room.  Since then though young Tanner has been less stud and more spud.  On the weekend in tricky as buggery Gold Coast conditions the ball moved about as quickly as a drunk 3-legged draft horse, it was close contact gear.  Our boy laid 1 tackle and plonked only 42 points on the board for his coaches.  For a slice of negative relativity, Gary Rohan had the same number of points AND tackles as Tanman in this one.  If you still have him, you would have to have him on field at that money and that score doesn’t do a dam thing for anyone still hanging on.  Lift young man.

Also from this game a fairly popular breakout candidate was running around after being less than inspiring in his early work.  However, Sam Flanders was giving his coaches something that looked like hope early on with a flicker of what could be a pretty decent start to a game before slowing down horribly and then getting subbed off injured.  He’s only 2% owned now so doesn’t make the DoW cut but he was a pretty popular pick early on and that ownership number has dropped like a ball hitting Jack Darling’s chest in the last fortnight on the back of some Flanders floundering.  Thankfully, most who backed him in to break out have got off before now but those that didn’t have now copped a further $25k price drop for their troubles.

Last week there was some conversation as to whether Jack Macrae may not have been the best DoW choice.  It was valid given some other options but the subsequent amount of stress and concern during the week for coaches on multiple platforms with the “keep or kill” Jack debate made me feel right about my choice last week as a worthy but slightly tilted Dick.  A lot of the talk for those cutting ties with Jack was about who would be the new body in those now Dickless teams – if we did get Jack out.  High on the list of those seen as good inclusions was the young star on the rise in LDU.  He was a darling of the cutting Jack crew and he responded by being a late withdrawal about 45secs before the bounce in his game which no doubt caused even further confusion for his new coaches.

This super late change required thousands, maybe millions, to try out the new Edit Trade button on the Fantasy site.  No idea how that worked out for everyone but I bet it wasn’t pretty given how late it came.  If you had LDU, who did you edit too as you’d already locked in the JMac part?  Poor LDU doesn’t get a DoW dong for all this but North Melbourne does for making it happen and doing it so late.  They also get a dong for doubling up on Fantasy impact by killing off much of Darcy Tucker’s mid-price DPP appeal by naming him the sub and getting him in the game late for only 24pts.  A final DoW mention is for the north staffer/coach/liniment sniffer I heard on the radio after the match say the “long flight” to Tassie from Melbourne had contributed to LDU’s injury.  Say what?  How long is that flight?  25 minutes?  Did he drag the plane out on the runway prior to take-off by himself?  Did he carry Clarko up the stairs on to the plane?  Was he doing Business Class drinks service?  How did that little puddle jump impact things?  There’s a bunch of players in Perth, Brissie, Adelaide etc who want a word about what constitutes a long flight and I can tell you something for nothing, that flight aint it. A DoW dong for North then.

Dick puns will be a staple of this piece each week, mostly because of the name but also because I am a child and dick jokes make me happy.  Some players are made for this weekly dick dump either by deed, by score or by name.  Now if we’re talking dumping Dicks then it was only a matter of time before Cumming got a mention wasn’t it?  That’s certainly the case when Isaac Cumming has had such a flaccid start to the season and then gives coaches yet another soft week this week.  For coaches with him, it’s hard to keep Cumming I’d suggest.  There’d be plenty with Cumming as their main team issue and for those coaches he’d be getting ejected from many teams this week I reckon.  Cumming early has been a disaster so far so he gets a DOW dong.

Whilst we’re in Sydney, there’s two Harbour City identities who need to lift after putting in DoW worthy performances as medium forwards.  Toby Greene and Isaac Heeney combined for 50 total points on the weekend.  That’s right 50 – BETWEEN them.  50 would be sad for 1, but they only just got there together!  They combine for 7% ownership in Classic (Heeney the bulk of that with 6) so are definitely only fringe DoWers but they are on many a Draft team so about 20 points each is not anywhere near enough for their teams and that means they get cracked here.  What a disaster for Draft or Classic owners of these too “studs”.

Finally in the brush-offs, some quick mentions for others who almost got the Dow dong this week.  Rory Laird is making all those who waited for him look like genuises and those who got him feel like Dicks again.  Expect 150 this week from him though.  Others who would have had owners raging at their phones/tablets and PC’s include Butters, McGrath, Warner, both Brayshaws, Worpel and Ziebell all for different reasons and to different extents.  Ziebell gets listed here mostly because he was a huge traded in man this week and anyone who did that would have been hoping for much more than a 78.  Darcy Cameron as well who got the sole ruck job to himself this week, only to bugger his knee in some shocking luck.  Nick Daicos may have to ruck this week for the Pies.

OK, the drive-by’s are done so we now dive in to the real deal.  As mentioned I couldn’t split them this week so we have shared Dicks for the first time.  There’s only a very few occasions where 2 Dicks are better than 1 but I just couldn’t split them so here we are.  Both guys were very, VERY close last week but in a field a little light for a definite lock this week, and with both guys proving their own dick-ishness from previous weeks with their own responses this week, it became clear to me this was the only path.

The joint DoW this week is shared by Coach Justin Longmuir and Coach Luke Beveridge.

This week Sean Darcy rewarded those smart enough to keep him for the Derby.  And wouldn’t you know it!  If you play Seany D as a ruck he is actually pretty bloody effective.  Not just in the real contest but also in Fantasy!  If there were 2 people in Australia who thought Sean Darcy would make a great stay at home Full Forward I’d be stunned.  Unfortunately for Darcy and his Fantasy owners, 1 of them does exist and he coaches Freo.  Not only that, but whilst you hide Darcy at FF you throw a young athletic type at a grizzled old vet in Todd Goldy last week to compound the Darcy dumbarsery.  Goldy has been eating athletic rucks alive for 30 years, he’s a machine.  You know the guys he has more trouble with?  The big dogs who can out physical him.  Pity Freo doesn’t have one of them huh?  Oh wait, yes they freakin do!  Now all that is what nearly got JL2 over the line last week but he got pipped at the post.  However, last week impacts on this because what did we see this week?  DARCY…as a RUCK!  Holy HAT what a concept!  And what does he do?  A lazy 52 hitouts and 3 more shots on goal than he had as a FF last week and a very cozy 128 Fantasy points.  Doing something so obvious 1 week after after being so bell-ended about it the week before kept the DoW dream alive for JL2.

But the kicker to launch him to DoW this week comes in another ongoing piece of Fantasy Foolery which is flying under the radar a bit.  Not only does Freo have a ruck weapon the coach is loathed to actually max out in benefit, but down back they have one of the best kicks in the comp.  A young dude, named Hayden Young who could probably pull his ponytail around to blindfold his eyes, spin around three times and still hit a piece of pigeon shit off Mark Ricciuto’s ample noggin from 50m away.  You’d think that might be a handy weapon too huh?  Maybe, like you did in the pre-season so often, you could use Youngy’s lethal left slipper to break zones by kicking out from points?  Then, whilst you’re using that lethal weapon to break opposition teams open you could also throw us Fantasy owners a frickin bone with an extra 15 points or so a game from easy kick-ins?  2 birds/1 rock?  Nah, instead lets give the kick-in job back to Luke Ryan who did well under half of them in the pre-season so he can kick it to the same contest at the same spot time after time and hope that one time soon it might work, even though it hasn’t for 25 games in a row.  Luke has now sucked in 6% of new owners as a result of this after starting off at under 1%.  Weight of dickishness and complete commitment to the cause gets you the DoW dong this week and it is well deserved Coach JL2.

As an aside you also get it for giving a debut game to a young guy as sub.  Honestly any coach doing this should be blasted for it in my opinion.  Terrible idea in general but when it means you shoot to hell a rookie’s BE then it’s just not on.  Poor form all round to do this to a kid and this week it was Matty Johnson.

For similar reasons as JL2 and his weird-arse Ruck Darcy use, Lukey B gets a share the DoW too.  He could have had it 2 weeks in a row now, as could Justin, but instead he splits it with his coaching colleague.  In exactly the same way JL2 has been misusing then using Big Seany D, Bevo has, for a long while now, had an amazing collection of midfielders that he instead wants to turn in to attacking defensive midfield ruck interchangers.  We saw what happened last week that got Jack the dong and, just like JL2 above with Darcy, Bevo decides the innovation he seeks is plonking one of his best midfield assets actually in the dam midfield.  I’m pretty sure Bevo looked in the mirror after gameday on the weekend and said to himself “you’re an innovative genius mate, look at what we did tonight, we turned an under-performing forward in Jack Macrae in to a gun midfielder…now THAT’S innovation, THAT’S coaching!”.  Well actually its not Bevo, when the whole world sees it before you do, it means you’re just catching up, not coaching.

Now when you add in the fact that by “rescuing” Jack for a week results in 2 other of your midfield guns going to sleep for long stretches and that in turn kills off a bunch of Fantasy teams for the week then you have to get yourself a Dick.  Almost as many who had floated Macrae to LDU had also floated Macrae to Bont (94) or Macrae to Smith (71) as the best moves when moving Jack on.  Those who did that and ignored the overarching threat of Bevo in that trade were left pounding the couch in a whole new version of the rage they’d experienced the week before.  Even those who kept Jack and ended up with an entirely decent 111 had to endure some stretches of Wandering Jack getting nowhere near it.  Jacky pumped out a 111 but he was 27 at the 10min mark of Q2 and hardly did anything in the early part of Q3 either.  Bevo gets a team sheet together with a totally scary midfield and decides nah, only 1 at a time boys.  I’m starting to think he looks at the Fantasy pages on the web and decides who his key man will be each week based on things like Roy’s Stocktake report on Wednesdays.  “OK Lads, 25% of people are trading Jack out this week so we’re going to spring a surprise on Fagan and the Lions and Jack, you’re our #1 mid this week mate!”  Shame on you Fages for not seeing it coming and losing the game to him.

So there we have it.  2 coaches this week and no players.  I do admit to factoring in the fact that both Bevo and JL2 were coming under some increasing pressure last week coming off 2 losses each and I didn’t want to pile the enormous weight of the Dick of the Week on to an already stressful week for them.  That obviously played only a small part as overall Jack Mac was the best DoW last week.  But this week both JL2 and Bevo showed themselves up by their own actions and gave us all a much clearer view of just how Dick-ish they’d been early on this season.  For that they now each have a dick.  Bevo probably won’t care one bit as he also has an AFL premiership on his mantle which JL2 doesn’t but it does mean between these 2 coaches they now have 2 dicks and one Cup (IYKYK).

And yes, splitting this week’s DoW so I could make that joke was absolutely a factor in this decision, for those that don’t get it, you’re much better off than those that do.  Anyway, commiserations to JL2 and Bevo who officially share this weeks DT Talk Dick of the Week!

No nominations this week for a League DoW from out in the Fantasy League’s world so no other grubs in the tub in that respect.  I’m a bit surprised to be honest, I was expecting a few nominating Leaguers like my mate SOTSA in our league who went Darcy out only to watch him go massive.  SOTSA did get a decent score from his ruck choice but only kicked the can down the road a bit by grabbing Grundy in a move that’ll earn him some more scorn in our League email this week.  He’s piling up the DoW’s in our league.  If you have a SOTSA similar story then please whack me an email at dicksofDT@gmail.com to get a potential share of a Moreira’s Magic subscription for next year!

Enjoy Folks and catch you next week!