Cheer up guys and girls, its almost recruiting season..

we will have another influx top line talent via the draft, and our recent recruits get a year of development behind them..

Ladies and gentlemen ... We are giving up 8 first round picks for O'Meara and changing our uniform to orange socks every game. Rooooned. Should have got ken Hinkley.

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The only way for some people to understand is for them to be on the receiving end

Left wing moralists
In self serving denial
They shit me no end

GWS already have points for academy picks as they have 3 X 1st rd picks and 2 X 2nd rd picks for this years draft??

Actually Trigg said on radio that it was highly unlikely that we'd be giving up an early 1st round pick for anyone. And as far as I'm aware Bolton hasn't said anything about it.

Exactly. MF is putting out usual dribble. Lets see what transpires in this upcoming draft.

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Cripps is the man

Totally agree with Graham and Boek. Although disappointing I thought that Buckley did give a damn.

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"IF YOU FAIL TO PREPARE, YOU'RE PREPARED TO FAIL" - Mark Spitz

Horrible game. Horrible performance. I loved 1aw for his service to the club, but not sure he should have played. He had zero impact as did Thomas. Already two players down at selection as a result.

If this season has taught us anything, we need an injection of players with pace and skill. Todays effort just highlighted that need. St Kilda were far too quick especially through the midfield. It was painful to watch. They had a forward structure that actually delivered while we do not have any forward structure. Whilst our defensive game has been much improved generally this season, it was found wanting today and that was exacerbated by a slow and unaccountable midfield. Simpson and to some degree docherty the exceptions. Weittering is clearly not 100%. I fear the club is killing him already. If managed properly he should be a 10 year gun player but I really worry about how the club is managing his workload. Our midfield has been fairly ordinary except Cripps and Gibbs today. Overall a fairy disappointing effort which emphasizes just how much work needs to be done. Bring on the draft....

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Cripps is the man

We are running on empty right now. Good for draft picks but sad from a team perspective. They are playing like gutted footballers. The end of the year can't come soon enough. Those wins early in the year were a lot like the early Pagan days....a mirage. We are 4 years away from being even close to a top 8 side folks. I hope that the club sticks with Bolts, as no coast could do any better with this lot.

I've enjoyed the two Saints games in the way that I hope our club is taking notes as to how to conduct a rebuild.

Say what you like about Pelchen (I know he's left them now), but he knows how to build a list.

They took tough decisions (McEvoy), targeted likely types from other clubs in areas of need (Bruce and Membrey), and went to the draft with a plan (that onball unit will be something to behold in a few years).

I forget which draft guys like Acres and Dunstan went in, but I remember plenty on here advocating we pick them up. We probably traded away our picks or picked up guys like Menzel.

In the end, what you saw today was the result of ten years of failed Hughes / Rogers drafting, and list management which saw us sign guys like Jamo, Walker, and Jones to long term deals. Case in point on the latter: Matty Kreuzer goes to Collingwood and they say his body is shot, he goes to the Dogs and they say his body is shot. Why on earth then do we sign him to a two year contract rather than one year with an option?

On the drafting, I know this is revisionist, but I really hope someone is or has working / ed out what happened. Because the harsh truth is that a monkey throwing a dart at draftee names on a board would have a good chance of having a better record. If we have just said it is all in the past then I'd be disappointed. Someone needs to pull apart the entrails of that entire period and work out exactly how we failed to find a genuine player in the draft arguably from when we took Fev to when we took Cripps (number one picks overlooked because you should be able to pick a 200 gamer there). That's fifteen years of busts in a draft. Was the network wrong? Was the thinking wrong? Was the coach overly involved? And why on earth did we seem to have absolutely zero idea of list management?

Simmo, Docherty, Tuohy & Cripps accept match payment.......the rest of yous put your hands down.

Accepting payment for that display is a joke.

Deplorable is an understatement.

How many handballs and kicks can be smothered in one professional game, have to be a record.

We played on at every chance to no advantage what so ever, we play on from kick ins only to bomb it to opposition, we get in the clear through the guts and we bomb it to disadvantage!!!!!

Only explanation possible is we were trying to lose.

SOS has plenty of trade bait to lay on the table.

we'd be lucky to get a bag of rusty 5c pieces for half our list

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*(grow - fun - gah)

Yeah but whatabout your whataboutism.

thats the point - if you trade junk you get junk back

Didn't he say 'first' indigenous player to play 200 games for Carlton. He is right ... i doubt there'll be another first. Great commentary

We went for some bloke called Cripps

I watched the second half of the Demons v Hawks game this morning. We had an honourable loss to the hawks the week before, you may recall.
They had a going-away win.
Why?

We played hard and tackled and worried them out of a lot of possesions and made them kick a few behinds they would have normally kicked, even if Rioli had have been playing. We played a stop start, criss-cross type of football with deep press and deep flood and tried to kick our way through the Hawks defence only to turn the footy over at critical moments in the game. We only handballed under pressure and avoied the corridor like a minefield. When we got the ball to the wing we bombed it long to a contest somewhere inside fifty. We allowed their hard nuts to push us around.

Melbourne ran the footy in waves through the middle and down the flanks. They hit targets and entered their F50 with system where they had players to take marks and even convert many of them. They didn't flood too deep so that when they got the footy in the defensive half there were players forward of the footy and players running to space and in support of the ball carrier. They belted Mitchell Hodge and Lewis at every opportunity. They played daring footy. And Max Gawn marked everything he could reach and kicked goals.

Melbourne will stretch us in a couple of weeks if they play like they did this weekend. They play a similar style of footy as St Kilda, running free and hitting targets inside fifty. They seem to have passed us in the rebuild stakes, as has StKilda, which has gone up and down and is climbing back up again in the time we have been languishing in successive mires of inadequacy.

We mock Richmond but they are above us on the ladder and we haven't beaten them for a couple of years.

The game we played against StKilda was pathetic and no amount of window dressing or excuses can disguise it. If they were tired and sluggish, whose fault is that? Who manages their training load? If they run twice in a half of football how can they hope to open up a team?

Yes we are rebuilding but I hope the public face of Bolts is not the face he shows to the players after a pathetic effort like that. We are not playing the style of footy we played early in the year. We are not as good as we were at the half way mark of the season. If Bolts is looking at gradual improvement, I suggest he is not getting it. We peaked three months ago.

I am not looking at wins and losses. I am looking at attitude. Simmo, Cripps, Curnow, Touhy, Kreuzer, Docherty, Weitering, Silvagni, Plowman have attitude. They have a crack, even though their efforts are sometimes not that rewarding. Kreuzer, for example has attitude in spades but he is shot. Now Gibbs, there is a man who should be forced to sit and watch Simpson and Cripps a-la 'A Clockwork Orange'. He is just a show pony who goes when it suits him and does the bare minimum required to look OK. His best and worst are worlds apart, not in terms of stats but in terms of heart. If Kreuzer is the soul of the club, Gibbs is the arsehole of it.
We should piss him off to a place where he will win a flag so he feels fulfilled in his own egoistic mind and we might get someone who will give us what Simpson does.

The rebuild has started but we need to cut hard and deep again this off season.

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Let slip the Blues of war (with apologies to William Shakespeare) (and Sir Francis Bacon, just in case)

As I said Showbag, I wasn't going to go back and look. But at least we got one right. Plenty of other of their prime movers we'd have dealt ourselves out of.

Ok are we done with the Walker Love yet? Can we speak truthfully now?

That game summed up his career. In a crap era he gave us a 2min highlights reel.

Always an elite endurance runner with speed off the mark, he never played midfield- why? Probably because he couldn't win his own ball there.

Walker should have been a midfielder and wasn't because I think earlier on, he called.forward or he was going to leave the club.

Yesterday, more than ever, symbolised the clubs journey with Walker. We needed mids with pace. A lot of his play seemed centred on "one more speccy"

Anyone else not buy the whole "he gave it all" spin by the club? What he should have given was the number 1 jumper to Jack!!

Harsh, but yesterday truly summed up his career in that era. He was both a cause and a symptom.



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Bingo.

In an even deep draft, load up with top 30 picks and worry about trading in a year or two.

Forget prestia, Tomlinson etc and trade out anyone born in the 80s for picks





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You will be relieved to know that Jones is contracted for next year.

Pathetic.
Thanks Walks, sad to see you go.