Nasher

I worry that his poor kicking is terminal, and he gives away a lot of free kicks, though statistically he wasn't the worst this year (McKenzie won that dubious prize by a street). However Neeld's treatment of him post concussion - i.e. straight back in to the side even after missing three weeks, was instructive I thought. The coach is obviously a massive fan.

HG is well connected, there's not much more you need to know. There aren't many on this forum I'd believe almost unconditionally, but he is one.

How many midfielders can you play at once? Our midfield might've been poor, but I think adding two first class players changes the dynamic of it more than you think. It's not as if every single player in our midfield is a spud - I think swapping, say, Moloney for Viney and Magner for Pick 4 (assuming he is ready made), it's already a very different look and I'm not sure how many more 18 year olds you'll squeeze in there. I'm not suggesting we don't need any more midfielders at all, just saying that adding class is more important than flooding the list with young midfielders. Quality over quantity and all that.

Pick 13 was also a Scully "consolation" pick as well and we traded that.

I was trying pretty hard to forget them, actually.

I think with the addition of Viney and hopefully another gun mid with pick 4, it's less critical to pick another mid with pick 20 now.

Indeed - Hogan only needs to be okay for us to have achieved parity. If Hogan becomes the gun we're hoping for and 20 and Barry amount to anything at all, we're a long way ahead.

Or it displays 50 posts per page where this one displays 25. That said I reckon thread length is just proportional to the number of active posters. As you'd have noticed, it's not 15 pages of to-ing and fro-ing usually, it's 15 pages of individual posts from people splatting the contents of their brains on to virtual paper.

I have a lot of sympathy for both views actually. The selections of players like Watts, Scully and even Morton were more or less universally agreed on by every expert and qualified amateur in the industry, so it's rich for supporters to jump on here and slam the picks. At the same time, our list in the last few years has looked and played like complete dung and we've missed a lot of opportunities to draft gun players that our opposition have lapped up, and we've fallen a long way behind as a result. Both the "it's an inexact science!" and the "these guys are paid the big bucks to get it right!" crowds have equally valid points. There's no benefit in hindcasting anyway. We've got a whole new regime this year that is heavier resourced than the last few mobs, so the slate is clean. Let's just forget past effups and just get it bloody right this time. After the turn of events in the last week I believe we're already half way there, and for no real reason at all I'm feeling confident we'll nail our off season list changes this year. Edit: hmm, not really the thread for this tbh. Sorry to hijack your thread, OP. However it took me about seven valuable minutes of my life to write it, so I'm not removing it. ;p

Do we need both? I think in terms of role it probably is a choice between the two. My answer to the question: a player who has (say) 60%* probably of a being a star, vs a player who you know will never be one? I'd have thought that the downside risk with Hogan is that he turns out to be a similar player to Dawes, and the upside is that he becomes so much better. If choosing between the two it's a no-brainer for me. II say all this without ever having seen Hogan play, not that I think that matters. * Just an arbitrary number. I make no claim that this is the actual probability of Hogan becoming a star. I'm using an arbitrary number to make a point. I don't know the actual real probability of Hogan becoming a star.

Having pick 20 in our hand makes Dawes look a lot more attractive a proposition to me.

I'm hoping to post a 10.15am Thank God The Server Stayed Up thread.

This kind of logic gives me the sheets. Star players come from high picks. Yes there's exceptions, but the talent is at the pointy end of the draft, it's that simple. Yes, we've shanked our early picks before, but that doesn't mean we will forever. Spending your early picks on players who are "okay" is consigning yourself to be in the middle of the ladder forever.

No. They don't want Tippett badly enough to turf out Lewis Jetta, to trade Parker the deal would have to be very sweet and still they'd um and arr, and Morton adds negatively to the trade, not positively. Jetta kicked more goals this year from the midfield than Tippett did as a key forward!

I agree BD. I have a few friends who have been down the medical degree and the workload is insane. Someone made the comparison with Martin et al doing Law degrees, but Law is in a different league for workload. As far as juggling medicine with full time football goes, the odd person in the professional era may have pulled it off - Ben Holland was a podiatrist IIRC and someone above mentioned Liptak - but I sure as hell wouldn't want to be juggling both. Good luck to the guy.

West Coast stuffing their pick doesn't mean we got ours right, it just means they stuffed theirs. (I'm also not saying we did stuff our pick, just saying that the two things are independent.)

Swans delegate stands up from table and walks off without answering.

I agree; the other thing is that the Swans have a reputation in the industry for being very easy to deal with; they pick their target and put their best reasonable offer forward first up (hence the Jolly, Mumford deals etc). If Tippett had picked Essendon, on the other hand, I'd absolutely despair if I were an Adelaide fan.

It's just words, wyl. Him saying he wants to go to the Swans doesn't make it so. If the Swans can't engineer an outcome using the functions provided by the AFL, Tippett won't get there. Remember how Nick Stevens desperately wanted to play for Collingwood?

Sounds like Mitch Clark Wants To Go To Freo to me. Great in theory, but how?

Genius! What could possibly go wrong with this plan? Ignoring that little thing about it not being at all how the system works, of course.

At 27? My money's on a year of wild ups and downs, where the theme around here lurches between, "lazy, OUT OUT OUT" to "Sylvia: has the penny finally dropped?", he'll come about seventh in the best and fairest, and next year we'll have the same discussions all over again. Just a hunch.

Not a fan at all and don't see what he'd add to the side.

Yes at 28 he ought to get the walking stick out. He's less than a year older than the current Brownlow medalist. He hardly missed any games this year through injury apparently, and is about to do Kokoda so I'm assuming he'll do a full pre-season. Regulation injuries pending, he won't touch a Casey jumper next year.

I thought it was straight out of the Eddie encyclopedia of ridiculously OTT hyperbole.