Inner Demon

So the plan being to have as many key forwards simultaneously out of contract as possible???

Liam signed through 2012 already.

A finish between 9th-12th.

Max of 16 uncontracted. Max 1 per club. It should be noted this is a maximum, not also a minimum. GC officials have mentioned in multiple interviews that they are only looking at taking 8 uncontracted players this year. A lot of people seem to consider the GC situation in terms of 'who will they take' rather than 'will they take someone'. This is an error. On topic, great to have these two signed up. Particularly Watts for 3. I like it.

In fact, you predicted we wouldn't win a game until the exhibition match in China and that we wouldn't get 30,000 members.

There's been no indication at any time whatsoever that Frawley is a leader around the Club. I can't imagine that someone who the playing group didn't consider to be part of their leadership group this year would suddenly be considered their captain next year. Fans are often too easily convinced that a good player is the same as a good leader.

David Neitz has exactly the right attitude when it comes to this question, something he's repeated often since retiring. The Club owes the player nothing. The player owes the Club everything. It is the Club who has given the player the opportunity to have such an amazing career. But on your comment, don't you see that by retiring Junior now, he will never get to that "Brad Johnson" stage where all of a sudden it seems the game has passed him by and he's a shadow of his former self?? No players retire of their own accord. They are either pushed by their club or they are told by their surgeon that they have to retire. That's the hard, cold facts of it.

Transparent player vote. They elect a leadership group and then vote again on a captain from within that group. No input from Board, Coach or Executive and rightfully so. The Captain isn't leading any of those people, he is leading the players. It is for this reason that I would suggest Cam Bruce is a very good chance considering he's been voted as Vice Captain the last several years. Personally, I'd like it to be Green or Moloney.

But enough of that circular argument. Now, back closer to the topic at hand. Anybody with even a passing interest in the mechanics of list management, in this case how the 'frontloading' of contracts works in regards to paying a certain proportion of the salary cap absolutely must go to the MFC website and check out this week's Whiteboard Wednesday presented by Tim Harrington. Very eductional.

Well which is it?? Does Bartram just kick the ball short to uncontested situations or does he chronically turn it over with bad kicking??? Nobody is trying to label him as some kind of playmaking laser boot. But to suggest that his spot on the list would be under threat due to some kind of atrociously high level of poor kicking would be wrong.

Well this is precisely what I'm talking about. While the statistics which are not influenced by any preconceived bias that any one player is any better than another tell us that Clint Bartram average 0.7 kicks to opponents per game, it will not be believed that he is less guilty of kicking the ball straight to the other team than Colin Sylvia who does it 1.7 times per game. I can go all day on stats which clearly illustrate that Bartam uses the ball quite competently, but there are those of you who if told that one day he had 50 touches at 100% with 10 goals straight would still insist he's a bad kick.

Well I'm yet to see someone suggest a player who deserves a spot in our side ahead of our current group of forwards. Do you have anybody in mind??

Considering Clint is actually 23rd in our "skill errors per game" stat and 27th in our "critical errors per game" stat, I'd say he's going OK in that area. This is yet another example of people making up their minds on a player's deficiencies despite the situation changing or evidence to the contrary.

You think their strategy might be to let go of their Top 10 picks to secure the services of players that aren't good quality??? I still don't see how it is you're hoping we might significantly improve our draft position without losing quality players.

Well how else would we get our hands on low draft picks without trading quality players??? As has been well covered in countless other threads, the other Clubs aren't fools who will just accept a heaping pile of our trash in return for their precious low draft picks. If you look through the history of trades, there are precious few Top 10 draft picks that change hands, and they only ever move in exchange for high quality players.

Quite the opposite. If we give games to a player we bring in to 'cover' for our young players for a short time knowing that he's ultimately not as good as those young players, then we are seriously retarding our development.

If only we'd had someone for the last 11 seasons who fits this exact description but isn't a totally self-obsessed [censored] with no appetite for a physical contest and also moves up the ground to win his own ball. Just imagine, this player might even have kicked 50+ goals for us this year and been in the Top 6 in the competition for marks. Who are people planning to knock out of our forward line to give a spot to Anthony/Lynch/McKinley??? I sure as hell wouldn't be playing any of them ahead of Jurrah, Watts, Green, Petterd, Dunn or Bate.

You're completely right. What I'm trying to get at is using that Player X will be traded or Player Y will be GC poached as a bail-out option for not making a decision on how you feel should be delisted doesn't add much to the discussion. It's wishful thinking. If we were actually in a List Management meeting at the Club, the first thing to be decided would be what moves will we make if we lose nobody to GC and receive no interest in any trades. There would then obviously be any number of contingencies planned for in the event either of these things happen. I suppose what I'm saying is that if someone includes making trades or having someone go to GC in their post, it would be worth their while also considering a scenario where our list moves are purely delistings as a way of challenging their thoughts on the structure of the list and value of the players.

All rookies are on 1 year contracts. Martin is 2011. We could lose the last two matches?? We have our fill of high draft picks now. Cutting loose quality players just to go chase yet another low draft pick won't see us progress. The drafting phase of the rebuild is done, now comes the development of players.

We won't have to wait even that long I wouldn't have thought. In 2 weeks time once half the comp is recovering from Mad Monday and preparing for B&F nights the dominoes will start to drop. Having said that, there's only expected to be 8 'poachings'. We've already had 1 and surely they won't all come from Bottom 8 teams so we may only get 3 or 4 more in a couple of weeks time and the others will be announced as their teams drop out of September. GC is naturally a complete and utter unknown in terms of our little discussion here, so for the sake of the exercise I find it better to omit it. We know there has to be delistings, but GC poaching and trading is entirely reliant on third parties so not as realistic to propose in this context.

Head on over to the List Management Thread.

I'd like 2 or 3 draftees and 6 new rookies. Best available.

I think it is highly unlikely that we would consider spending draft picks/players on bringing across a 22yr old ruckman who is currently 4th in line at his own club to 'cover for' our own crop of 20-22yr old ruckmen. These kids need games and they need to be given as much responsibility as practical in those games. Which is to say, if there is a need for a ruckman to play a bit-part role in the AFL as a #2 ruckman, they need those opportunities for their development. In the weeks this isn't necessary, they need to be shouldering the load as the #1 ruckman (or at least in a tandem set-up) at VFL level.

Sam Jacobs was reportedly beaten (or at the very least matched) by Jack Fitzpatrick last weekend. Is that a bit of 'grass is greener' syndrome creeping in?? The way I see it, the best way to "fast track" any/all of our young and promising ruckmen is to get AFL gametime into them as a #2 ruck before we have to rely upon them to carry a #1 load. The best way to achieve that is playing them alongside Jamar so in the event he goes down and they have the be "the man" it's not completely new to them.

Under the rules he could. But we had to convince him to turn down an offer to join the senior list at Adelaide after last season (presumably) with the promise that he would be rewarded with a promotion to our senior list at the end of this year. Frankly, quite a spectacular piece of player/list management from Harrington/Connolly/Bailey which allowed us to retain a very talented and valuable piece of the midfield puzzle as well as acquire both Fitzpatrick & Macdonald (rather than just one of them). Jordie is being elevated to the senior list this year, you can take that as read.