Its Time for Another

Agree. Brayshaw and McCartinnnnnnn!!!! That would be Merry Xmas as well. Club clearly stuffed up this year by not getting picks 1,2 & 3. So SNS I gather you would take the P man over McC. I guess if I had the choice I would take him as well but in the long term if McCartin turns into a Roughead then we may well have got the bookends with Frost of a 10yr spine that you can fill in a team around. If we end up with Petracca then we still have to find a key forward. Midfielders are a lot easier to find than key forwards. Having said that I'd salivate at the thought of a midfield with Petracca and Brayshaw. Then we get Jeremy Cameron next year and we're set. I wonder if the Saints are eyeing off possibly getting Cameron next year and deciding on Petracca with that in mind.

It's a bit of a strange one and shows how badly the AFL have invested in the northern markets. Basically the AFL want to address the fact that there are a fraction of players on AFL lists from the biggest state in the country and from Qld. I believe last year there were no players recruited from NSW. I guess it also addresses the go home factor. So for some bizarre reason the AFL has put it on the Northern Clubs to spend their own money to develop junior players throughout Qld and NSW. In return for this significant investment and risk they get access to the players they develop through a father/son bidding system. The problem with the system as I see it is that the AFL should be running the Academies not the teams. But as long as the teams are then they should be entitled to first bid at the players. Sydney have spent millions over about 5 or 6 years investing in their Academy. About 6 years ago they started inviting every Junior footy player in NSW to come in for screenings and have around 500 junior players coming up through the Academy each year. After all that investment and all those players they are about to get the first player, Heeney, and the Eddie McGuires of this world then go beserk about the unfair advantage.

Dom's going to be something special but that was expected. Vince and Cross's output was expected. You could argue Giorgiou, although he had a well known reputation in the SANFL so people had an idea of what to expect. Michie is shaping up very nicely but also had a great season in the WAFL last season so there were expectations. I don't think you could call any of these a "Find". To me a "Find" is a player no one knew about and you find them when you didn't know you had them. Surely on that basis JKH is the find so far. By the end of next year it might well be Jayden Hunt.

afl.com.au article today saying compo picks are staying. So at least if he does go we'll get a very good compo pick. Unless we pick up a free agent but not sure any available would suit us. Mundy is a bit old for our purposes.

There's a lot of talk about compo picks being scrapped for Free Agents and RFA. Knowing our luck that will come in just in time to lose a player like Chip.

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. .

Just had to add an extra post so it is the 7,000th post on this thread. OMG

And this is on this thread because

On a slightly different tack. I thought the decision to play him yesterday was one of the best decisions the Club has made in quite a while. It would have been very logical to drop him after the shocker against the Lions the week before. That potentially could have done a lot of damage to the kid's psyche for a long time. Instead of that they gave him another go and he played one of his better games. Great player management as far as I'm concerned. I am confident he is going to be an absolute gun. His innate ability to know where to run to spread and his composure to pick out best options and then deliver to them accurately can't be taught or developed. He is a player who in Hawthorn, Geelong or Sydney wouldn't have been seen in the firsts this year. He needed a season to get over his surgery and build up his body at Casey. I'm confident this will happen, he's already shown signs of it. But he's shown plenty of the other attributes that will make him a very rare player. Ollie Wines wouldn't have won us any more games than we have won this year. Hopefully we'll recruit a more experienced midfielder next year from another team who will be more ready to go than Wines and then we'll be grateful we've got Toumpas. I'm not knocking Wines by the way. He's had an outstanding season but Toumpas is a rare talent, much rarer than Wines.