More than 95% of the league’s players didn’t move clubs Syd.

Most of them are not going to be contending for a flag anytime soon.

A few did move clubs for reasons of their own including financial.

BTW, Callum Ah Chee says hi!

And if you wanted to move to have a shot at a premiership I don’t think St Kilda would be your tenth choice let alone your first.

Ross Lyon had a win rate of 33.33% as a player and never played in a final. He’s now a coach who’s never won a flag and is going into his 17th year of coaching and they’re a club who has gone 59 years since winning their only one ever.

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus.”
Turkish Proverb

Tips over the rails at 199.5?

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"One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds." - Frank Zappa

Do you actually believe we were close to winning a flag?

SOS built an unbalanced list... a glorified mid table list... and bar one season, the results reflected reality.
A "one wood" list that required Cripps to be in Brownlow form to have any chance.

It's too soon to make a call on Austin and he will be judged in time, but I do agree with our decision to revamp the list.

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“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ― Richard Feynman

1 list spot has to be retained for a key position recruit. Whether it is Phillips or whoever, we can't go into the season without another key back or at worst, a 195cm+ swingman.

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Looking forward to seeing our potential realised.

I agree BV and I won't mind if it is Phillips. Has done enough to show he can fill a role if required.

I honestly think that's a pretty good record. Of course, a lot hinges on how Jagga turns out, as the only really high draft pick Austin has had. Out of that list, Binns stands out as a questionable choice especially after selecting Ollie in the same draft; I guess he was under instruction to go for runners that year. Cinc and HOK as SSP were good picks that year.

Comparing to SOS (sorry for ordering: copied from good-bad-ugly piece and I can't access TC on PC where editing posts is feasible)

Charlie Curnow (pick 12, 2015)
Harry McKay (pick 10, 2015)
Zac Fisher (pick 27, 2016)
Sam Walsh (pick 1, 2018)
Jacob Weitering (pick 1, 2015)
Jack Silvagni (pick 53, 2015)
Sam Petrevski-Seton (pick 5, 2016)
PRE-SEASON SELECTION: Michael Gibbons
MID-SEASON DRAFT: Josh Deluca (2019)
Harrison Macreadie (pick 47, 2016)
Cam Polson (pick 59, 2016)
Patrick Kerr (pick 65, 2016)
Angus Schumacher (pick 70, 2017)
Jarrod Garlett (pick 78, 2017)
David Cuningham (pick 23, 2015)
Tom Williamson (Pick 61, 2016)
Paddy Dow (pick 3, 2017)
Lochie O’Brien (pick 10, 2017)
Tom de Koning (pick 30, 2017)
Liam Stocker (Pick 19, 2018)
Finbar O’Dwyer (pick 66, 2018)
Ben Silvagni (pick 70, 2018)
PRE-SEASON SELECTION: Matt Cottrell (2019)

Excellent 2015 Draft I think we can all agree. TDK a great score in 2017. Nice pickup of Cottrell, often missed in the analysis. Gibbons not a bad rookie choice. Late picks all terrible, midfield picks very poor except for #1 Walsh. Then you had all the picks thrown away on GWS duds. Overall I think this list compares badly to Austin's.

Weiters and Walsh were no brainers.
JSOS was always going to be a father son selection.
SOS did well to recruit Charlie and Harry in 2015 but was terrible afterwards.

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'The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it'
H.L. Mencken

Hope so BV . I would like two talls myself . I can only think they have HOK pencilled in as more key forward than ruck .

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All my dangerous friends

Ideally Mick, I suspect a Reidy/HOK ruck forward combo has the most potential. Whether Reidy is ready to step up is the question.

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Looking forward to seeing our potential realised.

I think Wright in one of his public statements in August suggested they saw HOK as a forward rather than a ruck and I presumed they didnt go for another KPF in the trade period despite the likely trade of Charlie because this was the view of HOK
Agree about Reidy/HOK combo having most potential but as you say BV jury well and truly out in relation to Reidy and whether he indeed has capsbility to be first ruck

OK , thanks Frank . That clears it up .

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All my dangerous friends

It’s much easier to be critical but rarely do list managers have a perfectly clean record.
SOS made a bad call to go after all those GWS players but I kind of understand what he was trying. We had nothing in the cupboard and zero trade capital. So he placed a few Hail Mary’s in the hope that we could get 2 or 3 wins instead of 1 mediocre draftee. Unfortunately, not much of that worked out and that’s on him. But at the time, it was pretty dire.
The strategy to build a spine, which takes longer to develop, and then fill in the mids and other gaps around them over time was sound but, again, unfortunately, the mids picked were not good enough, esp the high picks Paddy Dow, SPS, and O’Brien. At least Dow and SPS had their fans at the time. No-one was looking at O’Brien. And the Stocker/Kemp moves were a bit baffling. I’m still hopeful that Kemp will work out. FWIW, I think SOS was trying to be the first to make a move under live trading and probably thought he had nailed it at the time.
I think history does not look kindly on the outcome of SOS’ time at Carlton, apart from 2015 and TDk. But I do understand what he was going for. But it failed.

Personally, I think Austin’s moves this trading period and last year are impressive overall. We couldn’t go on again with Marchbank, Martin and Cunningham. Yes, it screwed us with depth but there is no guarantee any of them would have been available to step in anyway. And, to be honest, it wouldn’t have helped us make finals but without them, Voss was forced to play some kids who we did find out a bit about. And he turned nothing into Jagga Smith last year. I don’t think Houston set the world on fire and would have sucked out big $$.
And we were heading into this draft and trade period with not much to play with. And Harry Dean and Cody Walker on the horizon amidst changing father-son rules.
I am now feeling much better about our spread of talent, having acquired at least 3 players who are upgrades on who they will replace. I am sad to see Charlie go but if I am hard nosed about it, I think he has other priorities higher in his life than football and, rather than waiting another 2 years or more, we have cashed in when he is still hot. GWS did so with Jeremy Cameron and now they are real contenders.
TDK is a big loss …but not worth $1.8m or even $1.2m IMO. Very few players are worth that.
I think Austin has done pretty much as well as any other list manager, given the circumstances. (And if players like Charlie, TDK, JSOS or even Walsh next year want to leave, I don’t think that is on Austin.)

Finally, Graeme Wright has come in and taken a good look around. Clearly, he would have seen massive locker room morale issues and I don’t think he is sad to see Charlie or JSOS leave. (He got rid of Grundy, Treloar, Stephenson, and Ollie Henry. And everyone thought they would be shit after that...).
He would have seen how injuries cruelled our season. And, yes, I’m sure he has concerns about the game plan. His first port of call is to revamp the list, revamp the assistants (and therefore the game plan or the communication of it), replace the head of footy (I can’t tell you how much more confident I am in Davies than I was with Lloyd). He has not extended
Voss contract but has cleared the barnacles and will now be able to get a much clearer idea of whether Voss is the
Boss or he needs to be tossed.

I’m good with that. Adelaide was more disappointing last year than we were this year. Brisbane were just about ready to sack Fagan half way through 2024 with several observers suggesting they had ‘missed their window’ (well, to stamp his papers for an end of year sacking). And then they got rid of their best key forward… and still won the flag! Collingwood was supposedly destined for a bottom four finish after they ditched some of their stars.

We still have a bunch of stars. But now, we also have some 2nd tier class around them. I feel like we are more dynamic. Faster. More skillful. And… we are ready to load up on more high-end talent to support the stars in their prime, noting that Cripps is likely past his prime but still hopefully able to contribute strongly for another few years.

I’m optimistic. I appreciate not everyone is. I think we can rebound quickly, as other teams have done. I think our list is stronger now than it was a few weeks ago, and better positioned for the coming years. I am not 100% sure about Voss but I think we are in a better position to find out. We will see.

Agree mick. One defender, one other that can play both ends.

Apologies to Hollands & White.

The extra spot, the 45th player, has to come from moving O’Farrell to the LTI list.

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"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" - Winston Churchill.

Feel better after reading that 17 th . Thanks for the boost .

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All my dangerous friends

Good post by 17P . It is of course important to consider the context of list management decisions, and I was a bit disingenuous to contextualise the Binns pick but not any of SOS's duds - in my defence I was pursuing a loftier goal: winning the internet.

The counter to the GWS Raid defence is that SOS was too arrogant to admit failure and assumed moving his duds to another club would prove him right. Such thinking may have been dismissible, except that he did it repeatedly, including with the duds he picked for us (Stocker, Carroll). You could be slightly charitable and say it's just that he's attracted to the familiar. You see it all the time in the EPL, like when Moyes took Everton players to Man U and Rodgers took Swansea players to Liverpool: at least when SOS went from GWS to Carlton to St Kilda you can't say he was stepping up a level to any great degree, so the sin of lack of imagination is mitigated. The result is still the same: failure begets failure.

Anyway, I share 17P's optimism that this year's changes could work to our benefit, even though Syd has history on his side when it comes to losing star players for more B-listers. I have to - and do - hope that our particular circumstances - like Charlie being brainless and, lately, conditional; SOS being a sook, and TDK being in preservation mode with life changing bucks on the horizon - make us the exception to the rule. Aside from anything else, there's little to be gained from being miserable for 5 months before a ball is bounced thrown up in earnest.

I also share 17Ps outlook - at the start of the year somewhere I posted I thought Carlton may have seen our list better than we did. In stead of just hanging on and hoping to fluke something, they ditched players who were too often injured and (I think) structured for an influx of talent, Jagga, Dean and Walker that would give us the speed and skill we lacked. This is a far more balanced list than two years ago and a club that may finally be growing up.

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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!

Well written 17

I like what is being done and it seems to be a little more dynamic ie we are just recruiting to maximise what we’ve got now, we are looking to create a much better base line of performance over time enabled by improved depth.

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#DonTheStash

Good positive stuff guys and 17 great post
Im glass half full too

A lot to look forward too hope we can get 3 guns in this trade period one in addition to Dean and Ison
Hopefully gun small forward or KPP with that pick between Dean and Ison

We haven't given TDK and SOS away. They left as FA's for a ridiculous amount of money.
Sad to see us Trade out Charlie, but it was the right decision. It was his decision he need a change, and a top up given he had been front loaded for years. Can easily argue, he and his management wanted to top up their bank accounts (a double dip) incase injury ends his season, or his even his career. That's not on Austin.

Given, after one draft in 2015, we had a spine.
Austin did go out to top up and resolve our well publicised need to support Cripps and Cerra, Saad, Williams, and Hewett were recruited, but, we fell short.
Then we all seemed to agree we needed to find genuine wing players to plug our gap, and Austin topped up with Acres and recruited Hollands and Binns to free up Cottrell to HF.
We fell short by a bees dick, but we all know injury played its hand and we ran out of energy.

We had SOS Charlie and TDK playing for us in 2025 and with them we still fell short.

What became obvious from our last 2 injury ravaged years is that SOS didn't recruit skilled running players, and have been short of those types since. This year Austin did something about our need for speed and foot skills and traded in Hayward, Florent, Chesser and Ainsworth.

Assuming injury isn't our achilles heal as it has for the last 4 years, we will find out if our List is good enough to play Finals.
We wont know till next season.

I have no doubt we are susceptible if we have injuries to our KP. Maybe we may get lucky, or maybe we will have the list next year to challenge with a couple more top ups. We have the salary space and the picks to do something about it. Prior to TDK SOS and Charlie leaving, looking back now, we looked stuck with the same old same old.

I am more confident of success today than I was a few weeks back.

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Everyone looks good in Navy Blue