Fascinating how it's the Coach Neeld's fault when we drafted badly under Prendergast in 2011 but we credit the recruiter Viney not the coach Neeld when we recruited well the next year.
I would love to know how much of the recruiting decisions are made by the Coach and how much by the recruiters. Is the coach's input just about what type of players are needed for the game plan or are they out there finding and selecting players. Everyone blames Bailey and Neeld for the disastrous recruiting during their coaching periods but is that correct. Bailey evidently wanted tall players who had stamina to run and carry all day and thus we got a bunch of tall skinny players. The game was changed overnight from non contested, run and carry to contested footy when the bench was changed from 4 to 3. Not necessarily entirely Bailey's fault. Morton was the standout player at pick 4 in his draft. Wasn't entirely Bailey's fault that he ended up the player he did.
Neeld seemed to have a philosophy for big bodies for contested footy. Seems about right for the way footy is heading. Don't know if we can blame him for all the duds that were recruited. He might be responsible for getting the older players to add off field experience but none of them cost anything in picks. On the other hand he seems to have had his hands all over the selection of Dawes and Pedersen.
Clearly in the last draft period all we needed to get was mid fielders. Always a much easier task than finding key position players. Can you credit Roos with finding all the recruits we got for this season or is it the recruiters. I reckon there was an element of luck involved as well. I doubt Adelaide would have let Vince go if they hadn't have had draft picks stripped from them. People are going to keep crediting Roos but is that right. My guess is he says what type of players he wants and the recruiters find them. I wonder if it was him or the Swans recruiters who started looking for players who couldn't get a game like Josh Kennedy and Mattner and poaching them. Now we have Michie. I would say Roos's genius is communicating clearly to those players what their role is and they execute it better than they would have where they were. .