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Our draft and rookie selections this year indicate a new and clear direction from the club. Gone are the days when we picked skilful skinny players such as Blease, Gysberts and Jurrah. Instead we have landed two big key position footballers from the main draft, plus a big bodied 18yo in Taggart, and another 3 strong bodies in the rookie draft. There is no sign of us planning for ‘development years’; Neeld stated today they picked recruits who are ready to go. With this in mind, I thought I’d go through the list and pick our biggest ‘ready to go’ team. I used the official stats on the MFC website and measured the players across 3 categories: weight, height, and AFL games experience. We have a total of 46 players; 39 footballers on our senior list and 7 on the rookie list. I went through each of the 3 categories and simply gave them a number from one (highest) to 46 (lowest). If they had the same weight or height or number of games, they got the same score (EG; Watts, Cook and Sellar are all listed as 196cm so they all came in 7th in height). I then added their scores in each of the three categories and ended up with a team of 22. B: Rivers, Frawley, J MacDonald HB: Davis, Sellar, T McDonald C: Garland, Sylvia, Morton HF: Watts, Williams, Dunn F: Martin, Clark, Green R: Jamar, Bate, Moloney IC: Petterd, Fitzpatrick, Gawn, Sub. Spencer. You have to admit – it’s a BIG team; a good choice for NBL or NFL; maybe not for AFL. So I have to introduce another condition – that they must have played at least 10 games of AFL. This will remove Davis, T McDonald, Williams, Fitzpatrick, Gawn and Spencer. This team now looks like this: B: Rivers, Frawley, J Macdonald HB: Grimes, Sellar, Trengove C: Garland, Sylvia, Morton HF: Watts, Dunn, Jurrah F: Martin, Clark, Green R: Jamar, Bate, Moloney IC: Petterd, Jones, Gysberts, Sub. Bartram Bartram and McKenzie are both listed as 82kgs and finished with the same total score, so I picked Bartram because of his experience. I picked Garland on the wing in the hope that at least one Demonlander would like my side. The most valuable player – Jamar, and second is Clark. No wonder the club made a big move for him in the draft. Is this the team that will make Melbourne the hardest team to play against in the AFL?