DT Dick of the Week – Round 1

Footy finally arrived back in our lives in the official capacity this week and it was great to welcome the big dogs back in to our lives.  Some of us as fans are celebrating it’s arrival like Festivus (Essendon, St Kilda, Collingwood etc) and others are wondering what all the fuss was about and looking to ignore the football week (Freo, Brisvegas, Dogs) and some others are wondering why everyone is talking about kissing their sisters (Blues, Tigers).  Meanwhile us Fantasy coaches are back to checking our phones every few minutes and dancing or cursing depending on the +’s that have added on to our favourite or just our chosen players.

There’ll be plenty of substantive discussion around the deep strategy, value hunting and best moves for the week by those in the white coats, bow ties, Hats and all with more nous than me.  I’m not going to add to that informed noise.  I am going to look over our shoulder at the week that was and shine a light on those who threw us a disaster or were responsible for stress for us.  The biggest pain will get the weekly DT Dick of the Week award.

The first order of business with the Dick of the Week (DoW) wrap is to give an outline of the criteria.  The short answer there is that the criteria are looser than Aaron Hall’s defensive work.  The ‘award’ will shift and move based on my whim and mood.  To be included as a player, you’ll need to do something heinous and be around the 10% owned mark so its affecting more than just a couple of coaches.  Now the DoW is not in any way related to Paddy at the Blues (soon to be Saints).  It is just one of those weird coincidences that this great game throws up.  Had it been around a couple of years ago I’m sure he’d have won it, as would Roy and any other Blueboy with a Fantasy platform for pushing him.

Now I’m not on Twitter but Flipper doesn’t live in a fishbowl.  I do see and I do hear you so rest assured, I get the all feels both good and bad from the Fantasy fraternity and these views will be taken in to consideration too.  Whilst this column won’t talk for you, it does give some voice to the rage many of you will feel after a weekend where someone has dicked you in the Fantasy realm.  Hopefully it’ll help a little in a few ways.  It might assuage that anger a bit, save you a rage trade or two and hopefully save any of you from sending an angry tweet or DM to the player concerned (let’s face it, that should NEVER happen).  Loosely though the weekly Dick of DT award winner will be someone who has put in a shocker, whether it be through form or injury…so yes, sometimes it’ll be grossly unfair.  Sometimes though, it might be a coach who has DoWed us via the use of the whiteboard (Bevo) or a tagger (Mitchell).  It could also be the tagger himself.  The range is wide and the field each week will likely be large.

The final thing about the DoW is that previous form doesn’t matter one bit.  This is VERY much a “what have you done for me lately” award.  You may smash out a 150 odd one week, but if you dick it up the next, last week won’t matter.  This is especially true for last season’s form or previous runs on the board.  As was seen in the Dicks of DT piece done pre-season, previous form does not matter.

SO, on with the show.  Initially we’ll do some dishonourable mentions.

Firstly, to Justin Longmuir.  All pre-season we heard about the slick ball movement and aggressive game plan you were going to roll out.  Come Sunday we saw a stagnant and frankly gutless display in terms of both those things.  Why a DoW mention?  If we’d known chipping it around the backline and then bombing it long so it can come straight back was on the cards, Hayden Young and Luke Ryan would’ve been in MANY more teams.  Brennan Cox would’ve risen up the draft Boards too.  Jordan Clark as well.  Unforgiveable from Coach Longmuir.  Now if it continues it’ll be bad for Docker fans but we’ll have some rolled gold bargains down back for Fantasy Coaches so he won’t get the DoW this week.

Next mention goes to myself and therefore also one of my bosses on this site in Calvin.  Calvin has been doing more smoke blowing work on Rory Laird than anyone in Australia…other than me.  Calvin has the much larger platform but I was as loud as my tiny microphone would allow on pushing for the sure thing Rory to get in to sides.  I was spruiking it all over the shop to anyone who’d listen – pick Laird because he can’t miss and make him Captain for the same reason.  Didn’t that end well, I’m a clown and pushed others in to that boat as did Calvin so we came close to winning our first DoW’s as well.

Another real AFL coach who needs a mention is Alistair Clarkson.  For his selections rather than gameday.  The stress he caused by leaving out Phillips and, to a lessor extent, big Goldy was intense.  Sides were re-worked, structures were revamped and consideration was given to the big X-erri as a R2.  Thankfully not too many coaches fell into that trap but Clarko needs to be better than that.  Almost DoW worthy Clarko.  Big Tristan is only in 1% of teams so he (and Roy for pushing him) gets a let off from DoW consideration.

The final coach I’ll mention gets mentioned because he’s not in the running but some might be thinking he should be.  I’ve already said that coaches who kill us with taggers etc and kill our Premo’s are coaches who might get the DoW weekly honour.  Both of you reading this could be thinking that Pipes Kingsley may well have earned it this week for his work on Rory Laird.  Well he did kill a super Premo, but when you warn us all it’s coming and then you make it happen, then you get off scott free.  Well done Pipes, you did the work, you even told us it was coming, 30% of us just didn’t listen and that’s on us so no DoW for you.

Liam Jones has to get a mention.  A year out relaxing and avoiding needles, a pre-season game that made him look great value and then he nearly breaks his neck on his own teammate?  He actually rockets DOWN in price this week – something hard to do when you start at $321k.  Atonement can come easy for Liam now he’s been given the OK to play this week but it had better be swift and it had better be beautiful.  If the Dogs play like Freo did then expect a lazy 100 from Lanky Liam.

Whilst we’re on the injury front, in a surprise to no one, Lachie Whitfield hurt himself in a game of AFL and will likely miss a game or more.  He did it whilst looking very decent for those who grabbed him expecting the upcoming DPP move with 48pts in less than a half but man he gets himself smashed around.  DoW worthy but not quite DoW enough.  Depending on how big the bonk was, he may now miss that DPP.  Similarly, Tom Stewart got himself injured as well in a very innocuous way that looks like it’ll sideline him for a bit.  That could easily have got him the weekly award with only 14pts to his name and a healthy ownership but I’m a selfish man so that saved him here.  In a late swap I moved him out as part of the required Phillips re-jigging so I feel lucky to have missed that one and will decline to award Tommy the DoW for that reason and also in hoping he has a quick recovery.

Some others who could have earned the very first DOW weekly nod include big names like sure thing Josh Dunkley, flakey Lachie Neale and Brownlow Patty Cripps for all doing way less than they needed too for their coaches and carrying their respective big costs and high hopes straight to the gutter.  Cripps score of 84 actually looks OK-ish on paper but when you take an entire quarter off and during the rest of the game you chase as hard without the ball as Roaming Brian used too when he carried that large arse and bigger stache out on the G then you get a look in for the DoW, but not yet for Crippa.

And so, with many contenders, in the words of The Highlander, there can be only one.  In the special mentions above we’ve breezed past this performance a couple of times and I don’t think anyone will be surprised today by his winning this weeks DoW.  Had I mentioned him last week as a potential winner, Warnie would never have taken another email from me, but here we are, from the Penthouse to the DoW House.  Commiserations to Rory Laird and the circa 41,000 coaches who ignored the “value, value, value” call and instead went with the sure thing gut feel, perma-C man we all hoped for.  Rory, you are the inaugural DT Talk DT Dick of the Week.  Infamy of being DoW-1 will always be yours.

When you whack a C on Rory you expect a 114, but you expect it when they’re eating oranges at half time, not when they’re doing the press conferences after the game!  57!  He had that in some quarters last year I think…or am I actually just making it up and going with it?  The big reason we went with the magnificently square jaw of C-man Rory was because possies aren’t his whole caper.  Sure Pipes, you can put some work in to him we thought but he’ll just wrap up 20 tackles and we’ll be fine.  Even Selby said so!  Now to be fair, Moreira’s Magician has been consistent all pre-season by also saying don’t pick him or anyone priced over 115 but he also said if we were looking at him, the impending tag shouldn’t deter us.  And it didn’t.  Mid-week he was at 26% ownership, He went in at 30% by bouncedown because the tag and the work Pipes was doing would NOT MATTER!  Or so we thought if we’d picked him.

Like hell it didn’t.  57 points total and just 2 Tackles!  2!  My Mum is 75yrs old, moves around as well as I would if I’d copped that Pickett hit, is currently on a houseboat on the Murray River so was nowhere near the ground and she only had 2 less tackles than Rory Laird.  2 less tackles than an absolute premo gun who had 77% ToG%.  He was there the whole game whilst the other team was getting plenty of ball.  He was as close to the ball or to those who had it as anyone else was for the whole journey.

You know who else had 2 tackles.  Noah Long.  Now please Mrs Long don’t get upset, I’m not having a crack at your boy here but the truth is he weighs about 30kgs, was playing his first game and spent only slightly more than half of it out on the ground.  With all that working against him, he matched the output of last year’s numero uno Fantasy player in terms of tackles and was barely behind him in overall scores.  So well done Noah, but Rory Laird, shame on you.

With the first DoW now awarded there comes the other little segment of this weekly wrap-up – what to do with our Dick?  There’s an argument saying 57 is bad enough that if you have everything else looking OK, or even if you don’t, you should go sideways and just grab Rory back again in minus $100k time a week or so from now.  He’s already dropped $50k and more will follow, so you could join the Angry Pirate Calvin and jump off.  The counter argument to that is that when we grabbed Rory, it was for better or for worse.  He wasn’t a short-term hire, he was for keeps so keep him you should.  That’s my verdict for the week.  Keep Rory.  He’ll bounce back and you’ll be loving him again in no time at all.  This is the only section of the Dick of the Week where past performance matters, and Rory’s past is top shelf.  So keep this Dick, he’ll be your main man again soon enough.  Then again, Short’s job on Cripps could give us another pause and make Calvin’s move the way to go.  As always, I know nothing for sure.

Now with Rory taking home the DoW this week, I thought I’d add some scope for the Fantasy League devotees amongst you, those of us who are more keen for a League win than a Hat.  I am one of those and me and my mates have a very competitive league that’s been going on since we had to mail in the teams to The Australian newspaper – true story.  Anyway, like most leagues I’d imagine, its competitive in it’s shit talking and rivalries if not in the actual scoring the coaches do.  For a long time now I’ve done a league email weekly for these clowns with one of them most weeks doing something that earns them a reward.  A Dick of the Week award.  In our league, my man Wombat (also known as Fatty, 4D and the Prince) absolutely owns this award and his list of dumbarse moves is legendary amongst the combatants.  I figure we cannot be alone in that regard and there must be plenty of Wombat’s out there in your leagues.

So if you see one of your guys in your league doing something very DT Dick-ish, then flick me an email at dicksofDT@gmail.com and at the end of the year the biggest League Dick will receive, via me, a subscription to Selby’s Moreira’s Magic page.  As Selby donates his subs from that page to The Starlight Children’s Foundation which is a charity also dear to my heart, rather than ask him for it the winner for the year WILL win the subscription but it’ll be paid for by me so Starlight still get the coin to help the kids they do via Selby’s generous and amazing work.

Nominate away your potential League Dick and I’ll give a quick rundown of any weekly winner if there is one and I’ll pick the main winner come season’s end.

In the past in our league our man Wombat has denied the existence of the VC loophole for over 2 seasons, he’s then used it but not put the E on the looped player.  All worthy wins.  This year, our league is off to a strong Dick start but it’s not by Wombat, he was beaten this week by one of the young punks in the league who sledged 66% of other people’s picks throughout the very first league draft event we held last week before going ahead and clicking on the great Patrick Lipinski as his F2.  Nice work by the gobby young man we all call SOTSA.  He wins it for us this week.  If you have a league mate in Draft or Classic who can beat SOTSA let me know and they’ll get you in the running.

Cheers Fantasy Freaks, have yourselves a great week, avoid the rages and trade well.  See you next week.