http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/ This is a Forum specifically for Members to post their opinions of players. en Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:04:55 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/images/bgold/misc/rss.jpg http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/ http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=12308&goto=newpost Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:10:12 GMT My boy got 13 votes in the Jack...to come equal 33rd...and he wears number 33.

Interestingly, Gourdis and O'Reilly (14 votes) both had more votes than Hislop, Thomo and Polo (i know Polo didnt play much but he only got 2 votes).

Promote my boy Dimma...back to the senior list...he deserves it :)

Some nuff nuff on another site says my boys kicking is bad and ought be traded or delisted - seriously why i bother going to that other site i dont know.

His kicking isnt that bad...awkard style, I grant you but high efficiency rate, takes marks and gives great leg speed coming out of the backline...he burnt off Sarge pretty easily on the weekend...but then had no one to kick it to as we were a little static at that time.

I think he deserves a promotion, but I am biased as I sponsor him...what do the 'neutral' tiger supporters think? ]]> Player Discussion Con65 http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=12308 http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=12161&goto=newpost Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:25:27 GMT *Richmond should re-sign Cousins* http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/richmond-should-resign-cousins-20100810-11y5c.html GREG BAUM August... Richmond should re-sign Cousins

http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-new...810-11y5c.html

GREG BAUM
August 11, 2010

THERE is only one argument for Richmond to keep Ben Cousins next season, but it overpowers all arguments against. Simply, it is that Cousins remains one of the Tigers' best players.

To say otherwise is to make the mistake of judging him against himself five years ago, not the rest of the Richmond list now.

After an injury-blighted start to the season and a bizarre episode involving an overdose of sleeping pills a month ago, Cousins has been very good for the past month. In that time, he has averaged 25 disposals a game - above his career average.

Naturally, his kicking has lacked its penetration of old, but in the modern AFL, it is precision that matters, not length. Understanding this, Cousins this season has tended to handball more than he has kicked.

Challenged about this by coach Damien Hardwick, Cousins last week had 16 kicks and 10 handballs. It is a measure of his football smarts that he could make that adjustment instantly.

Cousins brings other qualities to the Richmond list. Leadership is one, perhaps by word, certainly by example. A young player would have to be either awfully prosaic or awfully conceited not to think that he could learn from Cousins's experience of the game.

From accounts, this sense of assumed responsibility extends to where it would once have not, off-field and out-of-hours. He has an alarming past, but everything about him says that he understands and is grateful for the last chance that Richmond afforded him, and is honouring it.

Of course, Cousins will not play in Richmond's next premiership team. As an argument against his retention, this is simplistic. Football clubs talk constantly and idealistically of rebuilding, but the truth is that all are in a constant state of tension between decay and regrowth. None can afford to jettison all the old and rely entirely on the new (as Gold Coast might learn).

The Tigers' blend is necessarily and gratifyingly young. As such, it needs the tempering of older players as long as they are still worth a game in their own right. Cousins is.

The Tigers appear to be getting their long-decrepit act together at last, but they are not yet travelling so well that they can afford to cut loose a proven footballer with something still to give. Unless they are now administering a seminary instead of a football club, this is all that matters. Seminarians might bring estimable values to a football club, but winning games is still the highest priority (except when draft picks are on offer).

Cousins is 32, an age at which much can change quickly. Injury or a lapse in form would lead to more critical reassessment than for a younger player. A breach of any of the several codes that Cousins knows too well would lead to an abrupt end.

Both club and player appear to be preparing get-out clauses. Cousins, affecting phlegmatism, says he will take things as they come. Richmond has intimated that a cap on interchanges would make it impossible for Cousins. Chris Grant, the find of the season among commentators, believes this is smokescreen, that Cousins was and remains one of the great lung-busting runners, and blaming a cap would be a convenience, devolving responsibility onto a third party.

All of which is intriguing, but ephemeral, or should be. The crucial question, the only question, concerning his future is whether he is one of Richmond's best footballers. Plainly, he is. ]]> Player Discussion RROFO http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=12161 http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=12160&goto=newpost Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:18:22 GMT *Ben comes clean for uni study* http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/ben-comes-clean-for-uni-study-20100810-11y88.html JAKE NIALL August 11,... Ben comes clean for uni study

http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-new...810-11y88.html

JAKE NIALL
August 11, 2010

IN A frank interview for a soon-to-be-published international academic journal, Ben Cousins has told a pair of Melbourne researchers how he had been treated more positively when receiving drug treatment in the US than in Australia.

Cousins has contrasted how Americans were willing to "high five" him during his stay in a drug and alcohol treatment centre with an Australian environment in which his addiction was "looked down upon" by society. But the researchers said that the Brownlow medallist did not "whinge" about his lot and was simply explaining how he viewed his situation.

Cousins, whose future with Richmond is yet to be settled, was interviewed by Monash University academics Dr Kate Seear and Dr Suzanne Fraser for an article that will be published later this year in British-based social science/public health journal Critical Public Health.

The article, which is the second on Cousins by the pair (the first was not based on interview), is expected to be published in September or October. The interview took place late last year.

Cousins also told the academics, who are from the Department of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash:

To deny that he had taken drugs was worse than actually taking them.

He drew a link between his disciplined training regime and his propensity to party - though he did not necessarily "reward" himself for effort.

"He sort of said that the partying side is part and parcel of the ability to discipline yourself to go hard and train hard for weeks on end, and I think he said at one point he went for a month without putting butter on his toast and then he has a kind of [response] to that … control by having a big kind of party, party night or whatever," said Fraser, who has interviewed hundreds of drug users in Sydney and Melbourne.

"It's the prospect of being able to do something different that gets him through the training. It's the kind other side of self-denial. We talked about the fact that taking drugs or partying's not the opposite of self-discipline and focus. For some people, some people who are supremely successful, it can be part of it."

That he considered himself an addict - a self-assessment they believed was genuine. "We were convinced that he genuinely saw himself as an addict. We were very interested in that," Fraser said.

Fraser said of Cousins's American experience: "He talked to us about going to the US and the different treatment of the idea of addiction over there and … finding himself sort of regularly congratulated and lauded as a recovering addict and how that was kind of so different from in Australia where you're just looked down upon.

"So he's sort of drawing a contrast between a culture that rewards admitting addiction and treating it, and a culture that simply wants to kind of discard the addict in his view. He said, 'you walk out and everyone's giving you high fives'."

Cousins was twice admitted to a drug treatment centre in Malibu, California, during 2007. The article examines Cousins's treatment by media and public. Seear said there had been "a series of mixed messages about who Cousins is, what drug addiction or drug use is, [and] how he is expected to behave".

"Certainly a substantial proportion of the media coverage, I would say, in the early days … spoke about him being insufficiently contrite and then not genuinely remorseful for his behaviour and … quite a bit of speculation about the extent to which he really believed himself to be an addict or whether that was a strategic deployment of the term in order to garner favour or whatever."

Fraser doubted Cousins saw himself as having a disease. "He clearly, clearly had a sense of himself as being physically fit and strong and not as harmed by his other activities, including taking drugs. So in a way I find it hard to imagine him going so far as [to say] he had a disease.

"The paper in part talks about his sense of relief, the kind of opening up the issue, because in his mind to proceed as though drug taking was something he never did was much more inauthentic experience than taking drugs. Not being able to to be honest and say, 'yes, I'm a fantastic sportsman and sometimes I party and take drugs', to deny those things went together in his life he said felt like a lie.

"We found interesting … what he was pointing to was that it's more the social opprobrium that forces people to deny what is quite a common thing." ]]> Player Discussion RROFO http://www.yellowandblack.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=12160