Blue Vain wrote:
Adam Chatfield wrote:
Basically we need to make a decision to stop delisting 10-15 a year and expecting some SOS trickery to lead us to the promised land. I am thinking that the plan has been to stabilize from this year on.
Mind you replacing list cloggers with other list cloggers in O’Shea Mullett and Shaw makes no sense. Are we to believe these are better because they are SOS’a chosen list cloggers.
Basically it’s smoke and mirrors, just work with what we have and work to get better players in and make the best with what we have, rather than thinking the grass is always greener with a new player traded in or a new shiny draft pick.
So what you're saying is the club should continue the path it has repeatedly said it would.
Turn the list over for 3 drafts then stabilise the list.
Yep. The club has been transparent about that being its strategy.
I do think we cut a fraction too deep at the end of last season though. O’Shea, Mullett & Shaw were never going to improve our list. I understand the desire to add some players in their mid 20s - and with AFL experience - to our list profile, but they were never going to be upgrades on similar players we let go; eg. Smedts, Boekhorst, Buckley, Sumner & Palmer.
It’s not going to make a difference in the long term, but in the short term I think it would have slightly reduced the lack of synergy/cohesion we’ve seen early this season if we’d retained a couple of those guys instead of picking up O’Shea, Mullett and/or Shaw.
Drafting O’Shea was mystifying. He showed the same attributes that he is showing now in the AFL (hard worker, turnover merchant) in our VFL side last year. Mullett hasn’t stunk the team up quite as much, but what value was their ever going to be in giving 2 spots on our list to players (Mullett & Shaw) delisted by bottom 4 teams?
Keeping 2 or 3 of Smedts, Sumner etc (instead of getting O’Shea, Mullett and/or Shaw) might not have changed the quality of our list - but it might have reduced some of the short term lack of synergy because those guys already knew our system and their teammates.