4thchicken wrote:
Pafloyul wrote:
Well, if you remember that Sticks flagged the idea of trading one of the ruckmen well before the end of that season. Perhaps Jacobs sensed that he was at the back of the pecking order and thought that his best option was to seek greener pastures, so to speak.
To be honest I was in favour of trading him, too, but the fact that it was Jacobs to Adelaide or nothing reeks of plans going awry. We certainly didn't get a chance to trade a surplus ruckmen in a way that favoured us. Perhaps it's Karma for trading for Warnock. I really do believe we went all gung-ho in that instance and overrated him in the process.
We were always going to trade one of the rucks even if sticks hadn't flagged it - all 4 would have been wanting a real opportunity to be #1 and all 4 were of similar ages.
Given jacobs relative cost (rookie pick as opposed to others) it was obvious to everyone that he would be the one that would have to go. Its why most supporters don't have an issue with him deciding to leave the club (as opposed to grigg).
Jacobs knew he had to leave as well - in his last 2 years at the club he was dropped several times in favour of the other ruckmen despite having performed well enough to deserve his spot in the team. He wasn't being given a fair go at the club. Not too surprised he went back to adelaide either.
On warnock - Of the 4 ruckmen, I would have traded him first. Having said that though, I had no issue with having traded for him and what we paid for him. Once we had invested in him though, we should have backed him to succeed and gone with cotchin ahead of kreuzer
On the latter you'd have drafted Kreuzer as planned as he was what we needed at the time (hindsight can be different) or just given given the Eagles pick 1 and kept Kennedy. As good as Cotchin is I'd take Kennedy easily given our needs. How much better would we be.
We got Warnock as well because Kreuzer was still a kid, Hampson wasn't going that well and Jacobs was a still a rookie, who, IIRC, we'd re-rookied after 2 years. So it was right at the time. We needed Kreuzer then and as far as forwards go we had Fev so we thought Kennedy could be traded off easily enough to get Judd. How did we know Fev was going to mix his shoulder medication with alcohol on Brownlow day and go off the rails. We've struggled forward since he's gone. If we had a crystal ball we might have done things differently, had Kennedy (with no Fev), Warnock Jacobs (possibly) and a much improved Hampson rucking rather than pitchforked at FF where he isn't suited, but as I said though, it was right at the time.