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.

As we did when a bunch of posters got it into their heads that Hogan was off to the west.

Except that for most of us, this would take an enormous amount of work. The media seem to do it effortlessly.

It would also be extremely out of character for Adelaide, who have taken a sensible & pragmatic attitude to their top players who want to leave, to do a Carlton and have their first offer to be their final offer. Adelaide have put their first offer on the table, which is exactly what you'd expect it to be. There's no way anything else will happen to change that situation until they finish their season.

Binman - totally in awe of your Sisyphus-like persistence in trying to explain this stuff. Sadly, just like Sisyphus, you just might have to go on pushing it uphill forever

If by "fair" you mean he didn't do his favourite trick of holding up other deals by dragging them out all the way through trade week. I thought the general opinion here at the time was that we'd given overs for both, especially Melksham, though I suppose we had to go with the picks we had.

Yeah maybe. Trouble is, at this stage of the season with finals still on (in which Lever & Gaff are still playing), nobody at either club can predict (let alone guarantee) the final outcome. Even if this poster had got their info direct from Todd Viney himself, all they can tell us is the current state of play at Week 2 of the finals. It's just too easy to be robotically skeptical about every post like this. To me, the scenario this poster put forward is the most plausible statement of both sides' opening negotiating positions that I've yet read anywhere. If it is true, as well as showing a lot of mutual respect, it shows good faith in that we don't intend to underpay for Lever. But we will work hard to preserve the 2018 R1 pick, perhaps to use on Gaff (for whom we also don't want to underpay). This is consistent with what other posters with a more established record have said, but his post goes further by pointing to how we might actually pull it off without selling the farm. So to me plausible, though of course "plausible" isn't the same as "true". It's possible to take stuff like this at face value and with a grain of salt at the same time - at face value because it fits what we do know, it's plausible and it adds a little bit extra to what we know; and with a grain of salt because it's so early and because it's obvious that there's no way of telling how it will end up. In other words, while I think it's a plausible account of where things might be at this stage, we all know it means little or nothing to the final result (and maybe we will have to sell more of the farm than we'd like to) Can we just express our doubts without needing to take the poster down?

Adelaide's second rounder this year is going to be well into the mid-30s of what by all accounts is a very shallow draft past the first handful. Unless we really want, say, Bayley Fritsch and their end-of-second-rounder is what gives him to us. 2018 is supposed to be a much deeper draft, so perhaps more of a chance of your "Sloanes & Fyffes" next year than this year.

Adelaide's supporters may whine & moan, but I'd say that over a number of years Adelaide has been as pragmatic as a club could possibly have been about trading out top-end talent who want to move. Unlike the AFL, they seem to actually value their integrity.

Great post. Too easy to forget how damn good he was in 2010 & 2011. What struck me about Trengove in his early days was his sheer footy intelligence for such a young player. He so often seemed to be in the right spot at the right time, or was able when in heavy traffic to hit up the teammate in space. This stood out in that game against Port in Darwin where he alone out of all the much more experienced players (& coaches) fully grasped the situation at the end of the game. At a stoppage near goal when scores were level, he went third man up to hit it through for a point (both of which you could do at the time) and got us an unlikely win. There was another game, I think it was against Essendon, where we had been several goals behind but came back in the third quarter and beginning of the last. Watts had the ball on the wing, kicking into a congested forward line and Trengove timed his lead into space perfectly, then drilled a difficult set shot to put our noses in front. I think Essendon seized back the initiative and won in the end, but just that characteristic of being in the right place at the right time and executing a difficult task at a critical point in the game was just so typical of Trengove in his first & second years. I always hoped that maybe this level of footy smarts might overcome the constraints of his injury, but those constraints were too great in the end.

Obviously going into partnership with Max.