Have North stuffed up by not offering Boomer a year's extension?

My personal view is their timing on Petrie, Firrito and Dal Santo is probably about right from a list management perspective but they should have waited until their season was over before announcing. A pretty horrible PR decision no matter how you look at it.

As for Boomer, he was BOG last week against the league's top of the table Swans. He was probably the difference between our Rnd 3 win/loss which in the end has also proven to be the difference between us making finals this year (along with the notorious Bombers match).

Boomer is also super creative, usually involved in about 30% or more of North's scoring chains and is very accurate in front of goal either on the run or a set shot. That accuracy alone is worth something in today's game, which often sees players (even some of the best rated) missing from 25 or so out, sometimes directly in front, due to fatigue issues or the player just not being that accurate even though he may have decent/excellent skills in other aspects of his game up the field.

In addition this bloke is very hardy, he rarely misses a match. But he is old as footballers go obviously and would need to be 'managed' well. IMO he would need regular 'rest' options throughout the year in order to get the best out of him. Something North failed to do miserably this season IMO, and not just with Boomer. He might need to miss 2 to 3 rounds or so in order to keep him up and about and allow his aging bod some decent recovery time from general soreness.

However, if he is on the park he is usually "on". He rarely has a poor game. He is also an extremely tricky player to try and match up on and not many clubs, including us this year, are able to find a match that will keep him quiet.

How many times have we worked our way off HB this year and through the middle through a hard press/zone only to look up and find no one inside 50 to give it to!? Boomer knows when and where to run and reads the play better than most and would probably be able to take advantage of these situations quite often. No point doing all that good work if you don't get enough chances of scoring up the other end! That's not to say we haven't been successful here, i've seen us kick a number of joe-the-goose goals. But why not add even more firepower and finish?

I have also been harping all year that this list, being the most inexperienced in the AFL every week, was way too skewed towards players under 100/50 games, exposing us to teams who have the edge in tight games (experience wise). IMO we need to balance out our list a little at the top end, where in most weeks we are lucky if we have 3 to 4 players with over 100 games experience. With 430 games experience we automatically gain about one season's worth of games (on average per player) across the team. A huge boost and one that might get us over the line in a few matches eg., against North (5 points!!!). Might be the difference between playing finals next year and not. Also a reasonable insurance policy. What if that one or two games that we needed to win were against a team that picks Boomer up and he makes a significant impact on the day?

It's a big YES from me to a one year contract on moderate coin. What do you guys feel?

Edited August 25, 20169 yr by Rusty Nails

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