Garbo

Wakefield come on down, hopefully he’s ready to go after missing last season himself

Hopefully not a sign of things to come, this is one season we can’t afford to lose players if we want to be somewhat competitive

Says 6 months, which basically takes us May/June

These average age profiles are to superficial, what’s probably more important is the age of your best 22 and even more importantly your best 4 or 5, even those can be skewed by a couple of older players. Going over my own best 22 for next year 11 of the players were under 25, 8 30 and over and 3 25-29 which is when players are in there prime and that’s probably the more concerning thing about our our list and why expecting a bounce back next year is unrealistic. If you did similar analysis of other best 22 for each team I'm willing to bet we have more than most in that under 25 age bracket.

Re being only a midfielder, think it was put to Olivier that if that continued to be the case then he likely spend time in the vfl, maybe that was just the pitch to get him to go or maybe that also applies to Steele to

Funny the media have the narrative that we need to trade him all year but when we do he is the pick up of all time

Last year was the proof the game had gone past him, you can excuse 2024 given he didn’t train all preseason at the club got banged up and was still getting his life back on track. But last year he had a full preseason, didn’t get any major injuries and still looked a mile off his best, another year or five isn’t going to get him back to his All Australian / b and f years. At best it’s going to be more of the same as 2025. 25 touches but no damage and gets exposed by the opposition team without the ball.

Damage is already done, keeping it going longer will only make it worse. Sure a few clubs got a massive benefit like Suns and Lions, likely why the AFL has only stepped in now that lions went back to back and suns look like they will have a period of dominance to but before everyone else gets the same benefit and nullifies it.

Supposedly afl looked at demographics and tried to even it all out between the vic clubs, taking into account population and number of immigrants and indigenous people that would be eligible. Knowing the AFL they screwed the pooch and we got the short end, us and the hawks were the only 2 sides to lose zones and get nothing back while cats and saints appear big winners both gaining zones while losing nothing. Everyone else got shuffled round. Not sure why the afl even persists with these club run academies at all, it just seems to distort the entire draft for minimal benefits. We went through this prior to having the draft and the whole competition become a pay to win and luck of what zone you had.

Basically they have recently broken contracts with other sports rather than continuing to over pay, word is they are also not happy with the AFL deal and the story speculated they could potentially try the same thing, big caveat is they had clauses in those deals allowing them to pay a contract break fee to get out, unless the AFL was stupid enough to include one then it’s probably not a comparable situation. My opinion if came down to it there is basically 3 scenarios AFL bend the knee and renegotiate the deal in some fashion in order to keep good relations going fwd, much like what happened during Covid AFL hold them to the contract potentially damaging that relationship to AFLs detriment next time tv rights come up. If the AFL play hard ball the new Foxtel owners DAZN pull AFL from the service and stop payment and it all ends up in court, not very likely imo

Shows how much they know

Never understand these ratings immediately after draft, who is to know who was a fail and who is a steal at this point, seem purely going off some fantasy draft order vs the reality and calling any sliders a win and marking anyone down who took a player earlier than they expected

Just to add anything under 3 seconds is considered elite

Lions don’t have a good key fwd and it didn’t stop them going back to back, a top end key fwd is not a requirement for flags, small and mid size fwd are however and that is something we are trying to address in this draft

Think that’s another player, the one week took is a small fwd 171 cm