Well, call me a trend setter!In a series of developments The Age understands:
■St Kilda coach Ross Lyon, who has been pushing to split with Sandringham in favour of a Saints reserves team, appears to have been thwarted with the club's existing agreement with Sandringham in place until the end of 2013.
■Carlton is negotiating with its VFL-aligned club the Northern Bullants to change its name to the Northern Blues and its club colours to navy and white from next season with the VFL team's jumper expected to closely resemble that of Carlton's.
■Melbourne, despite falling out with Casey over the Brendan Fevola debacle at the start of this season, has been persuaded to continue its cautious alignment.
■Richmond has unofficially chosen to make the redevelopment of Punt Road its priority, pushing back any plans for a stand-alone VFL team for three years.
Collingwood and Geelong go stand alone, get mocked for doing do, generate some success in the AFL by going VFL stand alone, and now the rest of the herd want to follow suit! But then again, that's Essendon for you: biggest bunch of bandwagoners in football.
Although it shouldn't really come as a shock: poor Bendigo has been Bendigo in name-only, ever since Essendon took them over. Hope we can pump these maggots in the future...
And then there's Carlton doing what Essendon tried to do to old Preston a decade ago: stripping them for parts and tearing away the old identity. I really do hope the Bullants tell the Scum where to go!
Thoughts, ladies and gentlemen?
). Or maybe a system of conferences (eg: the new NEAFL), either organised by origin (all the old VFA teams in one conference and all the AFL stand alone sides in the other) or by random (all scrambled up?)
