Akum

It's simple - Watts fits Port's game style better than ours. Classic win-win - he'll play better with Port (and they'll play better with him); we'll play better without him. Should be an interesting GF!

Fair enough. But it looked to me more like the posture meeting, the theatre meeting. ... in which the jilted lover melodramatically declares his anguish and his thirst for reparation to his audience, and hastily departs the scene in high dudgeon ... It never at any stage looked like the meeting at which the deal was going to be made.

As much as I'm reluctant to take down the sense of theatre, which may be the most important part of trade week ... The clubs haven't been able to even start negotiating yet, not until tomorrow. All they can do is just to state and restate their opening gambits, with a lot of mayo thrown around by Adelaide, who after all are giving up a player they don't want to give up - like someone said, imagine if Petracca was in Lever's position. Adelaide have generally been good with trading players out, once they accept that said player is gone. Over recent years they've been forced to let some very good players go, and have been mature & pragmatic in not pushing things to the limit. They were very good with Bock & Davis, for example - they made a lot of noise then too, and had good cause to, but once they accepted the inevitable, they worked out some quite reasonable deals from memory. They only stumbled when they came across a Carlton who absolutely refused to budge on their opening bid of 2 first rounders for Gibbs. It's very unusual for a club who refuse to move from their opening bid, but considering what Gibbs contributes to Carlton these days, it's not too difficult to understand why they did it. I'd be very surprised if the two clubs didn't reach a deal fairly early, they're really not that far apart. Unless their chief negotiator is now Brett Burton where it wasn't before. The rest is all theatre - to involve The Crowd.

I get your point, but I think there's a big case for saying three trades won the Tiges the flag. Thought they played massive overs for Prestia & Caddy, but those two allowed them to use Dusty & Cotchin to much more damaging effect. And Nankervis did just what they wanted him to do, not just at stoppages but around the ground too. He got to so many aerial contests. If Jake lets us structure our defence much better, it allows the likes of Hibberd & Salem to play further up the ground. And as others have said, it allows T-Mac to play forward, and he suits our bomb-it-to-30m-from-goal forward game plan better than Watts or Weid or even Hogan.

That truly is a load of bollocks. Talia was worst on the ground by a mile, but "can't really fault" him? That's probably because he rarely got to any contests so you could say he didn't make any mistakes with the ball. He threw the whole defence out because he couldn't keep up with Riewoldt and was useless on anybody else. I like Talia in general but I've never seen a worse defensive game in a granny, he played like he was as stoned as the hack who wrote this. Also overrates Brown & underrates Kelly & Lever.

Notice too that Rance plays on the weakest link - Jenkins. Talia had an absolute stinker, so Lever & Hartigan had to do a lot more than usual. Lever had to take Riewoldt far more than he'd like to.

We're probably paying overs for 2018. For 2022, maybe not so much.

Agree. In 3-4 years at current rates of growth, $900K will be ho-hum.

Who will be our largest vote winner, Clarrie or Lever?

... you can almost touch it

Yeah it's so close ...

And my fear is that if we rid ourselves of skilful players and become fully focussed on contested ball, the Neeld days is exactly where we'll end up. Like Neeld did, do our current coaches undervalue uncontested possessions?

Funny how every year it's always next year that's the "superdraft".

Many good posts on this thread. Last night was the first time I'd really looked at Lever closely, and I would have rated his game about a 5 too. But at the same time, it was very impressive nonetheless. Just as Adelaide were determined to pressure Tuohy at every opportunity to stop Geelong moving the ball too easily out of defence,, Geelong had definitely worked out that they needed to try to stop Lever from coming in 3rd man up, and from peeling off into space to attack. So Lever was the one Crow that Geelong and their cunning umpire-conning coach felt they set up a specific plan against. They weren't hard-tagging him by any means, but they were undoubtedly trying to keep him away from aerial contests and to stop him breaking into space when Adelaide won a turnover or a contested ball in defence. Fair to say he struggled to get near it in the first quarter, and I wasn't much impressed, and wondered whether he could work his way into the game. He just did this really well. He didn't panic, he didn't try to do anything spectacular, he didn't get frustrated, he just kept working not harder but smarter. He seems to be able to avoid the guy who's trying to block him out while at the same time focussing his attention on the flight of the ball so that he times his run to perfection. He just worked away in an unobtrusive fashion, didn't do anything wrong, was there when he needed to be, didn't try anything too flash, just "kept his head". This was an incredibly mature way of going about it for a 21-year-old. On the other hand, I thought Geelong gave Laird & Seedsman much too much latitude, and being so "Lever-conscious" may well have played a part in this. So in a way he was prepared to play "just-a-game" in order that his team benefits overall. Of course, this reflects Adelaide's team-based approach to coaching. So a 5/10 game, but very impressive nevertheless. My two cents.

Steve, while I'm not sure I agree with your final conclusion, I like the way you're looking beyond the individual ("Clarry-as-a-player vs. three early-first-rounders-as-players") factors here and looking more broadly at the overall composition of our midfield and our list, and the influence of the improved infrastructure around the footy dept & the club. There's not nearly enough of this. We tend to look too much at players as individuals, rather than the overall composition of the team and the list. For what it's worth, I'd like us to take a good look at the slight but very significant changes Richmond has made to Dusty's role (with the addition of Prestia & Caddy) this season and look for us to do the same with Oliver next season. Make him less of an extractor and more of a break-away-from-stoppages player, while others do the extraction. The fact that Dusty is so much more effective this year isn't an accident, it has been brilliantly brought about by a combination of list management and midfield strategy. Even though Oliver is our best extractor (like Dusty is Richmond's best extractor), I think he'd be much more effective in the "Dusty-2017" role. Then "Oliver-vs-3-high-first-rounders" would be easy to determine.