Akum

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".

Billy Brownless? Can kick it over a wheat silo.

I'm hearing that there's clubs that would happily pay more for him, but are slowly realising that they might not have to.

Loving it that in a post about GAJ, you just can't pass up the chance to sink the boots into Watts. Even lumping Jack together with GAJ & Stringer: "they just aren't team oriented onfield". Brilliant campaigning.

Well, you have to say one thing. With the "difficult characters" the Dogs have on their list, they've managed to get them all pulling in the same direction long enough to win the ultimate reward. Speaks volumes for the support structures around the club.

I wonder whether the club environment could possibly have anything to do with that? Lynch was ready to give the game away under Ross Lyon at Saints.

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.

For what it's worth, this is highly consistent with what I've been told, but you have more detail about the nature of the problem. My source was a bit more insistent that the club believed that the option with the most potential to deal with the problem was to trade out Stringer, as this was likely to stop them having to trade out others, though this may still have to be done. The nature of the contact with my source meant that it wouldn't have been appropriate to press them further.

Underwhelmed by Lever so far.

Sorry, did you think that post was a report of an actual event?

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.

I understand the point you're making and I agree with it up to a point. But I think Watts also generates a fair amount of positivity around the place (like Gawn, Petracca and I reckon Jones). In those weeks when they've just had a bad loss and it seems they're up against it and the tasks ahead of them look insurmountable, Watts would be one of the main initiators of getting alongside everybody, lifting the mood, getting the team to believe in each other again. While the more intense members of the squad are in their own little bubble, smashing out the reps at the gym, working themselves into a hard ball of determination, it would be the likes of Watts & Gawn who are able to detach from it a bit and bring the squad into a better frame of mind. See, that's the upside of a supposed "lack of intensity". Because the reality is that you need a mix of both. If everyone has to be intense all the time, it can really suck the morale out of the club. We've already been through this once in recent memory and we ended up in a very bad place indeed. And you can't equate "intensity" with "commitment". I agree that Watts would be on the lower end of the list as far as "intensity" is concerned, but his "commitment" during his time at the club would be right up at the top. And in every single game, his "commitment" would also be right at the top, even if he doesn't contribute hugely to the team's "intensity". Which, by the way, is why it's ridiculous to hold him (and Salem) responsible for the team's lack of intensity in the NM2 and GWS games, because he doesn't contribute hugely to it anyway. If the team's intensity is down, it's because the usual "intensity" guys didn't bring it. Watts & Salem bring the finesse, the coolness under pressure, the delivery & execution, and if one or both of them goes, we will be sorely lacking in these areas where all the "intensity" in the world will be of no use whatsoever. And I still can't escape the feeling that Watts's lack of "intensity" is being used as a fig-leaf to cover a number of other deficiencies that showed up in the last 8 or 9 rounds or so, when our average score dropped from 102 points a game to 79 points. I don't think Watts is a "fringe" guy around the cub; I think he's a "heart and soul" guy. And if the club really is nudging Watts out the door, I think we'll be the worse for it.

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

OK, you're perfectly welcome to bag Watts, that's your right. But when you state fiction as fact, that's another thing. Whatever it was that Jack was disciplined for preseason, it wasn't that he was "out of shape" or "acting like a millionaire". The club stated that he wasn't doing some things right at training, and it's still vague about exactly what it was. I have my guesses just like you, but they're guesses. And I can guarantee you that he is absolutely NOT the type of bloke who will be satisfied with ever having done enough. I've become used to him being traded. What concerns me is that the club is pushing a narrative that all that's wrong with the team is a "lack of intensity" and they're starting to connect that with whatever Jack's done. In other words, trying to hide other problems with our lack of skill, inadequacies in our game plan, inability to counter when the other team closes us up. But most of all in the latter part of the season there was a fear to take the game on that definitely wasn't there in the early part of the season when they were so fearless in "taking the game on" and attacking that they were prepared to persist even if it meant they conceded a few easy goals "out the back". I'd like to know where that enterprise, that fearlessness, vanished. It's as if they became scared to make mistakes, so tried to play within themselves in a number of games. But it seems to me too easy to hint at lack of intensity and hint at Watts (and to some extent Salem who was also dropped after our really poor game against GWS) being the problem.

Seems to me that the club wants to avoid putting a large part of its younger fan-base off-side, so they don't want to be seen to be responsible for taking the initiative to show him the door, while making it difficult for him to stay. This is the only way I can explain the bizarre juxtaposition of Watts being "disciplined" with the indiscretions by the younger players before & during the season. The narrative seems to be that we have to be harsh on Watts to guard against our standards slipping, otherwise these other sorts of things can happen. For the first time, I'm now beginning to believe that a significant chunk of the club (or the coaches or footy dept or whatever) want him gone, but want him to take the initiative. For many reasons I certainly think this is unwise from our (MFC) point of view, though for Watts to go elsewhere, it might actually remove the shackles of expectation from him, especially if he goes for a low price. I mean, it's not like we have a history of shooting ourselves in the foot just as things look like they might be getting better.

The other part of this is that Stringer doesn't seem to be even remotely interested in us either. Surely if he had such a great relationship with Macca ...

Yep, we could aim to trade ourselves to a premiership by trading out redundant players like Gawn, Watts & Salem and trade in Lever and another couple of in-and-under mids who will "win the contested ball" and a KPF who will "crash packs". Because you can never have too many of them, can you?

Yeah, fair enough. It's just that "outside mid" is a lot easier to say.

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

When Gawn returned, the umps were also happy for oppo rucks to jump early into him at centre bounces, and to penalise his attempts to stop them doing that.

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.

If you're depending on your outside runners to keep you in the game "when the going gets tough", you're in big big trouble. Cos if you're down because you're getting smashed on the inside, even the best outside runners in the history of the game (whoever they were) ain't gonna save you. In fact, this comment (and the many others like it) encapsulates my major reservation about getting Gaff or someone like him. Over the past 10 years we've burned any potential outside runners we've had, because we are incapable of using their biggest assets so we try to turn them into Jack Viney. If we got somebody with Gaff's combination of high-level aerobic running plus genuine speed, as well as good disposal, we'd only complain because he doesn't win contested ball at the same time. We always seem happier with one-paced contested-ball mids than anybody with outside run or the ability to find space or great disposal skill. We really devalue uncontested-ball skills, then wonder why we keep turning it over.

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

I don't think the Dogs will push their luck too far with the deal. But the buyer will be buying his future not his past, and usually in these circumstances, a player who has gained a bad rep does tend to pull their head in at a second club. And if the second club believe they can keep them under a tight rein, his future value as a player could make him a bargain even at pick 11. Trouble is, I've heard that whatever the problem is, it had built up over a while, not just the one incident. The fact that his form has been ordinary, as you say, for quite a while tends to back this up. So while I think WE should steer clear, he remains an attractive lowish buy for someone willing to take him on. It probably depends on whether more than one club is interested. If they can't set up an auction, the Dogs may well have to settle for a fair bit less.