THANK YOU UMPIRES ...

[Demonland 72,217]

THANK YOU UMPIRES ... by Whispering Jack

For the first time since the introduction of drafting, the Melbourne Football Club will not have a selection in the top 30 at next month's AFL National Draft meeting.

The club's head of recruiting, Barry Prendergast will have to sit down and bide his time all the way to selection 36 while all but one of the 17 other AFL clubs nominate their first picks.

The new boys from Greater Western Sydney will have a field day at the meeting. Their man will call out  eleven names well before Prendergast gets half way through considering what to do with his first pick. A few other clubs will already be packing their bags and thinking of heading home by that time.

The Giants need those eleven early selections. They're the new kid on the block and they're already feeling the heat. The Giants' recruiting to date has been a singular and gigantic failure as evidenced by the fact that not a single player in the prime of his career could be enticed into Sheedy's lair despite rules that were stacked in his favour. 

Throughout the past two or three months, I've found myself wondering where are the 25 year olds who  can play the game and who have the hunger to cop huge coin to pioneer its development in the nether regions of Australia's largest city? Is there nobody at all in that age bracket with an old man who can boast an ability to become an overnight sensation at talent spotting? If only Setanta had a father with the necessary skill sets to take on the role of CEO over there at Blacktown, the lad would be a shoe in to win a charcoal and orange monstrosity of a uniform and on his way to a life of fame and ... yes ... fortune.

But I digress.

Meanwhile back at the draft table, only Collingwood will have its chance to name a future star after Melbourne, but the Pies have already snared three players during trade week and, given the state of their list, I don't think there are too many furrows on the brows of the Pies' recruiting staff as a result of their late entry into the fray.

Of course, the Demons themselves scored nicely during the exchange period with that well documented recruiting coup that netted Brisbane tall forward Mitch Clark for draft pick 12 to the Lions.

The irony is that while Melbourne lost its 2009 number one draft pick Tom Scully to a far superior financial offer by Greater Western Sydney, it managed to beat off Fremantle for his replacement and secured a 200cm tall player who most definitely should fill one of the major positional gaps in its line up - one the club has been crying out for so loudly for so long. Whether this becomes a win for the club will be determined in the fulness of time but the story of the recruiting coup against the odds and the manner of its execution was uplifting in the light of the club's dark end to its 2011 playing season.

Even more ironical is the fact that the club should never have been in a superior bargaining position over the Dockers to secure their man in the first place - a fact directly related to the team's poor finish this year. If Melbourne had managed to win that last game - the Round 24 fixture against Port Adelaide at the Adelaide Oval - it would have finished in tenth place for which it would have been entitled to pick number 17 in the draft instead of 12 while Fremantle would have finished two places lower giving it 14. 

The altered draft positions would have given the Dockers the upper hand to secure Clark from Brisbane. The result could well have left the Dees with the higher selection and another trade week might have passed for the club with no big name signings. There could well have been no high profile power forward at the club and nothing to rejoice about in another year's wasted effort at the trade table.

Instead, those who remember that game at the Adelaide Oval might well thank the umpires who appeared to give the home side an armchair ride on that Sunday afternoon. The free kick count was heavily slanted against the Demons and who could ever forget the daylight robbery perpetrated against Jeremy Howe, deprived of a mark of the year nomination dead in front of goal by one of many umpiring howlers on the day?

The cynics among us might even suggest that there was an element of ... er, ahem, tanking with a depleted team that should never have gone close to losing against the lowly Power but whether it was the umpires or a touch of tanking deja vu, the game's outcome almost certainly helped in delivering Melbourne's first big name recruit in almost two decades. 

The absence of even one pick in the top 35 translates in a reduced level of interest towards  what is widely regarded as a shallow draft and this means we will be looking at next month's draft differently this year.

There will be a greater focus on the selections made by Barry Prendergast with what are now picks 36, 52 and 54 but it will be more of a case of looking at those games after the event because only a brave soul could really claim to predict who will be selected in advance of the meeting.

All we can say is that if the Demons' recruiting guru manages to snaffle players of the quality of Howe, Davis and McDonald who were taken in 2010 at similar levels, then it will be a job well done.