Adam The God

Column A and B, bb. Another thought occurred to me. When Lever was first spoken of around draft time, some people (was Roos included? I doubt it) were talking Lever up as a player who could eventually roll into the midfield. I can't see it personally, but could we have an eye on him for our midfield, as well as our defensive unit?

The Drunk One is hedging his bets. If it doesn't eventuate, he can claim it was only verbal and fell over.

Our glaring weakness is still our midfield, I'm afraid. If we're not winning the ball and are off even a little bit, the opposition mauls us on the rebound, leaving our defence wide open. I've been saying this for a while, but we're still missing 2 further A graders to compliment Oliver, Viney, Tyson, Jones, Petracca, Salem, Brayshaw, Lewis and if I'm being very kind, Bernie Vince. With Vince and Lewis on their last legs (particularly the former), we're really going to need to address this soon. Oscar, Frost, Jetta, Hibberd, Hunt with Lever and TMac as swingman is fine for the moment. The midfield still struggled against weak opposition but reasonable midfields. This says it all for me. When Petracca, Salem and Brayshaw can play longer minutes in the midfield, we'll appear deeper, but we need reinforcements now.

Surely, Vince hangs up the boots? An absolute butcher these days. Not to mention regularly exposed for a lack of pace. He's a liability playing back there and not a smart clearance player in the midfield. I'd be keeping Stretch and Wagner, while also looking for a trade for Kent.

We obviously think his soft tissue history is okay. Big dollars. I'm excited. Seems like it's happening. Then we can turn our attention to continuing to fix our midfield - this was shown up again V Collingwood. We still lack at least 2 B+/A graders. Oliver, Viney, Tyson, Petracca, Brayshaw, Salem, Jones and Lewis is not enough. We need that pace and class everyone talks about and another bull. Collingwood's midfield should not be beating us, particularly when Gawn is winning the majority of taps to advantage.

Kew? Sounds like he's on his way to the MFC then!

Yep, his decision making will continue to improve with more games experience. He is near hopeless when he doesn't take on the game, so I'll forgive one (maybe even two) holding the balls (leave it, bitters), as long as he's trying to take the game on. He's a massive asset when he's the rock in the slingshot.

Last night was simply an imperfect storm of all our defenders (with the except of perhaps Jetta) having absolute shockers. Hibberd, despite getting a heap of it was terrible; Frost probably cost us 5 goals alone; Oscar struggled; and Joel Smith looked completely lost again I reckon Lever's soft issue injury history is a slight concern. How many times has he been injured already this year?

Wow. How is that for a spine? Shivers.

I'm sure the club isn't entertaining a Weideman trade. That's the main thing.

Please tell me where you got this from LT. I want to bait a few Collingwood and Essendon mates on Instagram.

He's finished IMO.

Gee, May is an ordinary player. Struggles to impact contests and for a bloke of his size, he's pretty soft 1v1. Wouldn't pay much for him.

Lever injured again. Third time this year. Would have to be a consideration.

Lever's strength for mine is his intercept marking and ability to read the play, which allows him to leave his man (ala Rance) and create a spoil/2v1 scenario in favour of his team. I wonder how he'd go in our high defensive press. Our defenders are often separated quite a bit, so it may take a tweak to our defensive press to best utilise Lever's strengths.

So how much do we think Adelaide would offer him? And therefore, how high would we go? Incidentally, given we're generally unleakable as a club, I'd say the rumours of us chasing Lever have almost certainly been leaked from Lever's management to up their client's asking figure.

I think you know where I stand on Tyson.

I must admit a midfield of Oliver, Kelly, Salem, Petracca, Viney, Tyson, Jones, Lewis, Vince and hopefully even Brayshaw makes me salivate. That'd be five left footers and five right footers. Unfortunately though, it'll never happen.

Purely hypothetical, but let's say you could convince Jake Lever and Josh Kelly to come to you, but you only had room in the cap for one of them, who do you choose?

Hibberd would have to be one of our greatest trades in the modern era. I know that sounds a little silly, but I can't recall a player that has come in and performed from game 1 at such a high level, consistently. A player in the Hibberd mould would be great, but if he'd played since Round 1, he'd be in AA contention. No doubt about it. So he's playing A grade football at the moment IMO. The circumstances that Hibberd was drawn to Melbourne were also slightly unusual in that Goodwin and his best mate Melksham were already at the club. I don't think we can expect or hope that players like him (and Lewis - a similar story with Todd Viney) fall into our laps again. But, perhaps the wheel will start to turn and good players will look at Melbourne with a desire to play for a club with a young talented list on the rise. Playing finals is obviously a huge part of creating an environment good players will want to come to. I disagree with this. My uninformed view is that Dusty will want to stay at Richmond and it'll take an absolutely insane offer to drag him away from Punt Rd. And even then, he might simply settle for a pay increase at Tigerland.

And gets beaten one-out by small forwards. But he uses his body well.

Aside from Kelly, who would you be targeting, Steve? There aren't exactly an abundance of silky mids on offer in FA.

Little Jeffy Garlett outbodied Steven May today. May went to ground and Jeffy sauntered off and goaled. A clutch moment too. Rocket went berserk. If I was a Gold Coast supporter (are there any?) I would have been absolutely ropable. It was a pathetic effort, but of course you only see good in the opposition and only bad in a Melbourne jumper.

If all it took was our first rounder this year and next to get May or Lever to the club at the end of this year and Peter Wright the following year, I'd happily give up those picks. Besides, Taylor has shown an ability to pick deep into the draft. As long as we have some 2nd, 3rd and 4th round picks to keep turning over areas of our list, I'd be happy with this as our list strategy for the next two draft periods. That said, can you trade two first rounders in consecutive years? Either way, the obvious holes in the list are a ready-to-go KPD, a forward/ruck and a skilful (preferably) pacey outside mid. I think we need to keep adding ball winning ability in our midfield too. Viney, Tyson, Oliver, Petracca, Salem and maybe Brayshaw are great, but when Lewis, Jones and Vince go (two of those will hang up the boots within three years), we'll need midfield reinforcements. We might back ourselves to be an attractive FA destination by the end of those three years, and hope to land a few mids to compliment the guys we already have and take over from the guys who will retire. Then it's about getting more games into our core elite group of Oliver, Petracca, Salem, Brayshaw, Hogan, Weideman, Hunt and even Frost.