Adam The God

Don't bait back. Can we stop all this childish rubbish?

Smith has at least one more year left. It wouldn't be big money. He'd be looking at years in terms of security. So he takes a list spot up in year 2 or 3 (yeah, I'd look at a 3rd year trigger), his experience will still be invaluable. I'm with @Patches O’houlihan. I'd be going Gunston too.

You don't call them out. You continually bait. There's a difference.

It's possible we're targeting someone else, but I wonder if we're going for cheaper, serviceable options (Smith, Polec et al) and saving the cash for bumper contract extensions for Oliver and Petracca...

Certainly sounds like Trump.

We need fresh eyes. Pass from me.

So we've got Langdon on one wing. Who are you saying we've got playing on the other wing?

Gotta say, your posts are becoming tiring mate. Stop the bullying and contribute something of use.

I reckon a move like this foreshadows 12+ list changes. Those already gone or seeking an exit and those likely to go from the main list are: Jones, Kolodjashnij, Preuss, Tom McDonald, Oscar McDonald, Neal-Bullen, Jetta, Josh Wagner. You have to wonder about Hannan, one of our our mids (Harmes, Brayshaw or Viney) and Hore (who I don't personally don't rate). Then there are those from the rookie list: Bennell, Chandler, Corey Wagner and Dunkley. We have to be a little careful of have experience drop out the bottom of our list, so whilst Jones should have retired at the end of 2018 IMV and Jetta looks done after this year, we may look to keep one or both on next year. If we can get the currency to make some trades, I'd be looking at Gunston, Breust and Smith from Hawthorn. I'd be looking at Ben Brown, Polec and Higgins from North. I'd be looking at Hurley, Saad and Merrett from Essendon. We need to be able to bring in 4 or 5 players that are going to be immediately best 22 and add them to May, Salem, Harmes (?), Petracca, Jackson, Viney (?), Lever, Brayshaw (?), Gawn, Oliver, Hibberd, Langdon, Melksham, Tomlinson, Rivers, Weideman, Fritsch and Pickett. If we can do that, it'll be a very fruitful offseason.

Interesting development this. Hope we can hold onto to him.

It's a pass from me. In terms of older heads, I'd prefer we looked at Gunston and even Breust before Shaw.

It's a trash position. ? We have the best player in the competition in the position and we have an exciting youngster, a pick 3 no less, that can play the position. If we can improve our list in 2021 by adding a best 22 player and giving up Preuss, it's a no brainer. It tells you he sees himself behind Jackson and given Preuss has demonstrated he's not agile enough to play the second KPF, he's happy to look at his options.

Interesting. My sense is that Lewis' handle on the game, at least from an examination perspective is not that great. This is based on listening to his FOX commentary this year.

Those discussing smothers and shepherds, @Axis of Bob wrote an excellent post in the Jack Viney thread about the blocking that he witnessed when going back over the tapes. I reckon our blocking, shepherding etc is actually okay, we don't notice it, but it's there. It could be better, I'm sure. But how do we maximise our clearance work with the elite clearance mids we have? We went away from setting up too aggressively at centre stoppages after the Richmond game. I think we need to go back to being super aggressive with these set ups and we need to be aggressive for longer, show better forward craft and better ball use out of the contest. With another pre season under the belts of our elite core, I think should revert to the aggressive stoppage set ups, but that the press should remain the three wall set up that we played for much of the season, rather than the 2017-2018 18 man press that inevitably broke down and leaked goals too easily out the back.

But Viney bleeds red and blue, guys. Don't worry, he'll re-sign. ;)

Agreed. He's a much better mark than Oscar too. Still think he's a bit of a Lever clone with slightly better contest to him.

I think you'll find the club is trying to see if there are any takers for Oscar before making a decision one way or the other. And despite what some think, there may be a taker or two.

It probably also depends on what North are willing to pay to get at least a bit of his wage off their books.

Trac is probably the most penetrating out of our mids, yeah. Gus not far behind. We don't kick many goals from centre stoppages though. I can remember that Petracca goal against North. That was brilliant. We need a lot more of that - from all of them. Oliver needs to back himself more when he gets to 50.

This is why I've levelled the blame at Max a lot this year. I think we've been super ordinary due to his predictable tap work in the centre square. Part of this could well be he hasn't been able to get off the ground. It seemed to me that he struggled with this, particularly in the second half of the year. This wouldn't be much of an issue around the ground, but the centre square often has much higher leaping going on. Perhaps this is the reason? This isn't helped by the fact none of our mids are particularly penetrating kicks and we don't really get goals from midfield. This needs to change if we're to take the next step.

I would have thought the opposite. There's less space when your entire team can surround a stoppage, whereas centre bounces, no one's allowed in but the midfield.

I think you might have hit the nail on the head here though when you wrote earlier that we set up not to concede. We're happy to have repeat stoppages around the ground, but the easiest way to score against our set up is a quick well directed centre clearance that doesn't allow our defenders to zone off and intercept. It leaves us in 1v1s. Because we can clog up space around the ground and get more numbers around the clearance, we can afford to go more attacking at these stoppage set ups. We can either have one off the back of the stoppage or the extra at the contest. I think ultimately this plan was shown not to work this year, mostly because we struggled to transition from attack to defence or vice versa well enough. We did it a few times (namely that Collingwood game), the Brisbane game clogged up the opposition and then hit them on the rebound, while St Kilda was a similar story, but our ball use going inside 50 was ordinary. I'm inclined to agree with the theory that we should be playing more aggressive, attacking football. I think better forward craft will help this and better decision making from our mids. If you look at how we still won the around the ground clearances, I think we should just attack from the centre stoppages too. I'd love to know what Jennings thinks we should do with our set up.

The point I was making was if we traded McDonald to North for Polec, both are on good coin, but we'd get North to pay the fee or financial gap above McDonald's contract (there must be an accounting term for this?).

It might depend on how they set up to play. If they go down the GWS route with Cripps as the bull in the middle, those two guys off the back of the square, they could play a run and gun game. They feel like they're a year or so behind us, but I don't think they have the midfield. I like their spine though.

It also suggests Tom McDonald for Polec isn't going to get it done, which means Tom's contract or a vast part of it will stay on our books, despite him wanting to leave. I hope this isn't the deal for Preuss.