When Spud left we had virtually no youth and had to start from scratch.
Thats not true. Terry dropped pretty much all of the 17 and 18 year olds from the club in his first year. That is why we had an age gap. We had 8-12 young players that Wallace thought had no skill and dropped.
Can you remember who they were tdyen? Where you surprised at the time by any of their departures?
No I can't, but I was surprised at the time, pretty much none of them got a chance to actually prove they could make it at AFL level. Few players really show much in their first two years. It was a bit of a "He's a Frawley era player get rid of him" attitude. Imagine if Paul Roos had taken that attitude at Sydney!
I think Brent Hartigan was one of the few who got kept on for a few seasons.
Wallace had his good points and bad points like anyone.
He ran the media side of footy very well, as well as any coach has. He did understand what was going on on the ground better than Spud.
He also coached average, developed players poorly and probably didn't pick (if he had any influence on this) good medical and fitness people.
And there is the draft picks, but the record here I think has equally as much to do with poor player development as poor selections.
rats my wife has busted me on the richmond boards, gotta go!
Below is our list at the end of Spud's reign. The red names are those who either retired or were offloaded when Wallace arrived.
Of the 23 and unders inherited only Pettifer and Schulz were top 20 picks
. Cogs, Rodan and the speculative Gilmour were the only others inside pick 40. This from a team that missed the finals in 4 of Spud's 5 years and had 14 top 40 picks. The rest were mostly post-pick 50 draft picks. Spud left us with hardly no quality youngsters coming through. At best we got a few solid AFL footballers. Wallace kept all those U22 on. The problem with Plough is after his first draft/trade period he didn't allow us to bottom out and turnover the list quickly so we stagnated in no-man's land (once again). For example Terry while commentating one of our games in 2004 openly said he didn't believe Schulz was up to it yet Schulz in the end out-survived Wallace at Punt Road 5 years later ???.
32: Campbell (vet)
31.
D.Kellaway (vet), Rogers30: Stafford
29: A.Kellaway, Richardson
28: Gaspar,
Marsh27:
Blumfield, Chaffey
26: Brown, Bowden,
Fleming, Fletcher, Houlihan, Johnson
25: Hilton, Tivendale
24: Hall,
Ottens23:
Fiora, Morrison,
Nicholls, Tuck,
Dragicevic#22: Coughlan, Hyde, Newman, Pettifer,
Weller, Zantuck21: Krakouer, Rodan
20: Moore#
19: Hartigan, Roach, Schulz, Foley#
18: Archibald, Gilmour, Jackson, Raines