Everyone starts at the bottom.
I'm a fan of Hartley and think he is a valuable asset to the club.
im a fan of the process im not so keen on hartley. we can do much better than what we have done. hartley has taken a plethora of deficient players. a lot of the players he has bought to the club probably has been an upgrade in some sort of way or other. i call it value adding and just my opinion the vast majority odf mature recruits he has bought to the club have themselves needed to be value added. the club seems to fail in almost all cases to recognise that this is the case. we take an ordinary or average player and improve an area and that seems to be good enough when the need is there to upograde that player.
sean grigg at the time was a good get but ffs we were always going to have to upgrade on him down the track. the simple reason for this is he has too many weaknesses in his game. houli is another. been a good get served a purpose and improved marginally an area we were poor in. its time to look for the upgrade.
imo harley has just two really good gets and they are maric and morris.
On one hand you say was Grigg was a good get at the time, then you say Maric and Morris are his only good gets. Like I keep saying, if Dimma wants to keep playing him, then it's on him. We would all be ok if Grigg and Houli were depth players only getting a game when we had a few injuries or young guys are out of form.
You cannot blame BH for this. He has more than done his job during a horrible time of trying to get our list competitive with compromised drafts.
It's funny how a bad start to the season can all of a sudden mean we have a bad list. We won 15 games last year with generally the same list.
I lean towards this thinking.
besides I reckon Hardwick is already on his way to upgrading on a few of these mature bandaid players now that the younger players are ready to come through. It's happening right now even if some don't see it..
reckon your pretty well aware i was very critical of the list last yr despite winning 15 games.
let me rephrase it for you. grigg was a good get in the sense he cost nothing and he was an upgrade on players we had. he is not a long term keeper or should not be. in that sense he was not a good get. a short term fix if you like. mate you or i could target decent short term upgrades it really isnt a hard thing to do.
grigg and houli were both good gets at the time because they were actually improvements on players we had. my argument has always been we at some point would need to upgrade the upgrades because of the obvious defociencies in their game. blair keeps on taking players who clearly are not long term keepers and have glaring weaknesses .imo both can be replaced fairly easily if your half decent at your job and should have been by now.
maric quite simply put is irreplaceable and apert from carrying injury has given very good service. hes given heaps more than any ruckman on our list even when injured and is always competetive. .morris performs his primary role very well and will be kept as he should be. in taking him we filled a huge hole he stops players well enough that he wont be replaced.
i did a list of mature picks taken in hartleys time late last yr, and the list is large yet the quality and long term success rate is deplorable. the only thing defenders of him wanted to debate was how long hes been at the club and blame jackson for the failures. its always someone elses fault with our supporters.
if we cant do better than what has been recruited you can look forward to many more yrs in the wilderness, we simply have to do better. and that is the bottom line and is all im saying.
