To be fair injuries and circumstance to the likes of dusty Prestia and lambert are playing a huge role in our demise. Should we be so reliant on dusty Prestia and lambert ? Probably not but that’s another discussion. I would think this year we start to see how our future midfield is going to look. RCD, sonsie, Bolton, Dow maybe ross if he can turn it around.
Gotta be in the market for a big fish midfielder this off season. Tom green come on down !
I agree injuries dont help especially to our two best clearance and contested ball players. Agree again the reliance on the two has been huge.
The gaps in the list are easy to see they are easy to see in all clubs lists. imo we have ignored them to a large degree.
Key fwds big ball winning mids quality inside out mids, to a lesser degree of urgency key defenders and goal kicking small/med/tall fwds.
For me the last draft was the back breaker in these areas. We did very little to address the most glaring ones.
How fortunate that Sonsie actually slipped all the way to us clearly he was not on their radar until he fell into their lap.
One big problem we have, ignoring this years crop which just makes the problem bigger anyway, is the disconnect between games played from the 21 and unders juniors, flowing thru to the 22 to 24 age group development players, to the mature players 24 to 28yrs and the vets 29plus.Failing to get games into the blokes who have been there now for 2 to 5 years just exacerbates this.
RCD falls into this area of concern.
Also the quality and small number of players in the 25 to 28 group mature players in their prime is a huge worry.
We have just 9 players in this group amongst them Aarts, Parker, Castagna, McIntosh who lets be honest you could take or leave em imo they are players we need to upgrade on even if its a small upgrade on each of them.
It only leaves broady at 28yrs, Nankervis, Vlastuin ,Soldo who imo is servicable but wanting in areas. And Short who is servicable but purely outside and i would lump him with the other 4 in the fact that we could look for an upgrade find someone a bit more rounded.
Now that the older heads are struggling this is really the group that should be stepping up and leading the way. Imo only Broad and nank have come to the party and Vlastuin has been injured. Imo this group is small in number and with too many ordinary players is not going to lead us to another flag. here lies one of the real problems.
While winning games made it difficult to play the younger group i dont think we did it well enough. We persevered with players who were obvious candidates for upgrade and it is biting us.
Now that we are sure we won't win the flag and are indeed in decline there are no more excuses to not start playing younger options. It has become super important to start the changing of the guard. Its become super important to close that games played gap from the juniors development players to the rest
We were always a very good team at winning the ball back getting it fwd and locking it in. Have long held the belief of how much better would we have been if we didnt have to win it back so much and how much easier for us it would have been. Lots of things have transpired now that makes hands on ball first paramount and we have never been right up there in this. Losing Prestia is a blow but we really should of had players available to cover the inside role other than Ross who imo may not make it and Collier-Dawkins.That is one shallow basket.
The other criticism is even well before 2017 our succession planning has not been great in key areas. this is really coming home to roost after a successful period.
I actually believe the thinking has been rather than take the bigger punt on bigger players that take longer to develop anyway, we take the safer punt on small player who will develop a hell of a lot quicker and is more likely to offer something especially early. Imo this is what we have done with RCD and continue to do, we have found reasons not to play him which has allowed Hardwick to stick with a pile of ordinary players. Its now laughable that we continue to play Aarts in particular rather than give RCD a decent block of games with decent game time to try and address inside issues.
Why play a bigger bloke who offers little when you can play a small who will give something and compete. Nothing wrong with that at all especially if the bigger blokes have shown they are not up to it.
Thats what we did in 2017 none of the tall fwds we had were ready or good enough not that we had many so went with players like Townsend Caddy Rioli Castagna and Butler with just Jack.
It was never going to be sustainable hence we got Lynch but from 2017 did we even look at a GENUINE tall fwd only Balta and even then we hedged our bets imo. Before Balta you had to go all the way back to 2014 to find a key forward we actually took in the nd that was McKenzie with pick 77 thats some investment in key forwards not.
Imo we failed to a large degree to develop or even take bigger players across all parts of the ground with decent picks imo. Putting too few eggs in too few baskets. I think RCD and Ross are evidence of this they took the two in 2018 the only two big mids we have drafted for yrs and said to themselves we now have it covered and put the que in the rack.
