Devo

Giving up the first rounder in 2016 says to me that the club is backing itself in to be competitive next year. After so many years of being in the doldrums, it's nice to see the club being confident about its prospects. Hopefully it rubs off onto the players and it turns into more wins.

Stoked. Well done everyone

Ever seen The Exorcist? Something like that.

A great tagger for sure, but he is not what we need. I think I'd vomit if he came to the club.

What you're advocating for is a trade, not a free agent acquisition. Free agency isn't about getting a fair return for any clubs or ensuring a win-win outcome. It's not about equalisation either. The league has other measures for achieving equalisation (you can debate how effective they are, but that's getting off topic). FA is about freeing up player movement and a spur to the poorly run clubs to sort themselves out, that's all it is. If clubs want to get a return before losing a free agent, they should trade the player a year out from FA eligibility. Roosy himself has talked about this being the way of the future in the AFL.

Agree. Trade the contract rather than the player and things will open right up. I think the AFLPA will object to it, but they will need to grow up and accept it as part of being in a professional sporting competition.

The only FA scenario in which the receiving club should give up anything is when a player is a restricted free agent and the initial offer is matched by the club that owns the restricted free agent, which then forces a trade negotiation. This is the Dangerfield situation. Adelaide still had a limited form of ownership over Dangerfield, so working out a trade is fine in that scenario. If the receiving club has to give up something in any other FA scenario, then we don't have true free agency. Free agents by definition don't belong to any club. Why should a club losing a free agent be compensated for something that they no longer own? It makes no sense. Either the club does everything it can to bring that player back on a new contract before FA becomes an issue, or they lose the player to FA and try to lure another free agent to replace them. You win some and you lose some. Compensation of any sort for losing free agents is a joke. What we have now in the AFL is a half-arsed bastardised version of FA that just distorts the player market. It distorts the national draft order if compensation picks are given to clubs losing FAs, all that does is push 17 other clubs down the draft order. Yes the MFC was a major beneficiary of this system with the Frawley compo, but we would never have got that pick if the AFL had a proper FA system. The trade market is distorted if teams don't want to make trades for fear of jeopardising their compensation pick. FA is supposed to increase player movement, not restrict it! The worst thing is that the incentives for free agents are totally skewed towards joining the stronger clubs at a given time due to the way the AFL has implemented FA. Putting arbitrary limitations on the length of time a player can serve with their club before a player can become a FA (I think it's 10 years currently before they reach unrestricted FA, I might be wrong there) just means that players will be incentivised to join the current contenders so that they can have a better chance of winning a flag in the couple of years they have left before retirement. The sooner the the AFL and the Players Association take the clamps off FA and let the clubs fend for themselves, the better. We either have it in an undiluted form (ie a player is eligible for FA as soon as they are out of contract, no compensation for FA loss, restricted FA can still have a place) or we don't have it at all. FA should be the ultimate incentive for clubs to get their act together on and off field, otherwise they will be left behind. The clubs should really be left to sink or swim in the FA sea, but the way the system is currently set up, there will be only be a few big clubs doing the swimming. Some people will disagree with that, and that's fine. Feel free. All I'm saying is that the AFL shouldn't half-bake FA because it throws up other consequences for player movement and it increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Do it properly or don't do it.

Very high on Anderson. I'd love to see him in red and blue. Would add something to the side, no doubt. He has class.

Do not want.

I think he is a good prospect and would be worth looking into. Great size and a good tackler. Not sure why he didn't get a run once Campo took the reins, he was pretty good until then. Some knowledgeable Adelaide fans I know rate him highly.

Really hoping he can make it through the preseason, string some games together and resurrect his career. He's absolutely best 22 when fit. Can't wait for him to kick his first goal in 2016 and see the entire team get around him.

Eagles by 18 points Priddis for Norm Smith Mitchell to get 35+ possessions in a losing cause Bruce to hyperventilate about Cyril several times, I'll put the over/under at 3.5

We can't complain about Melksham when our depth has been so pitiful for so long. He has his limitations obviously, but he is still an improvement on the likes of Bail, M Jones, McKenzie etc. The best teams are defined by their depth as much as they are by their top end talent. We also can't complain about paying overs to get players in. Melbourne is absolutely not a destination club and we don't have A-grade players begging to wear the red and blue. That's not to take away from the club's ambition to become a destination club, we'd all love Melbourne to become an attractive place for players to come. We become attractive by winning lots of games. Like most other people, I'd prefer we weren't offering Melksham 4 years (and Dawes before him), but it's a product of where the club is currently at. We will have to continue paying overs for players until the club becomes a proper top 8 contender and we have something tangible to offer. What we can ask questions about, as poita pointed out, is why the deal had to be done now. The market for him was not red-hot. The only reason I can see is if Essendon had put a contract in front of him and he was on the verge of signing it.

He didn't do a full preseason last year from memory. He should benefit a lot from getting in a full training load over summer and hopefully some more midfield time will come his way.

You're making too much sense, binman