Flag_in_2014

If I had to nominate what made the Daniher sides pretty consistently competitive, and often capable of going deep into final series, I would nominate: 1) A visionery coach promoting a relentless running gameplan based on long kicking and possession football 2) A first class, mobile ruckman (Geoff White) 3) A tough-as-nails full forward and captain, as well a providing a talented high marking target up forward, and well as a classy second tall in Robbo 4) An A-grader mid-fielder in Travis Johnstone, together with Brad Green and Cameron Bruce 5) A first class crumbing forward in Jeff Farmer (at least in the early days) 6) A very hard tackling and hard chasing Backline What of these features is missing in the new look side. Clearly the biggest hole in my view is the classy mobile ruckman. We have no better than adequate ruckman on our list - certainly nothing of the White class, though ironically we may have been able to get one if we had have been prepared to trade for Jolly. The second major gap is the high marking forward, although the combination of Jarrah and Watts may prove ultimately to be even more leathal. Thirdly, and most importantly, the so called Bailey gameplan based around short passing possession and low balls into the forward line is neither anything like as spectacular nor in my view as effective as the Daniher long game. It will be interesting to see if this un-ambitious approach changes when we have our full forward set-up in place.

Given Ball's reluctance, Russell Robertson is almost the bestleft in the PSD. We may even pick him up as a rookie!!! Given we will have next year a very in-experienced, but potentially brilliant forward set up, an experienced head like Robbo could well make the difference between mid ladder and finals next year. I know he will not be around any more than a couple of years, but he would have to be better than an injury riddled Smith, and a mediocre mid fielder like Tivendale. Thoughts?