We should be looking forward but the senior core we should have coming through now doesn't exist and that's all thanks to Spud. 20 year olds don't form your core group. Our list was decimated. If people expected us to turn it around in 2 and a bit years then they are living in fairyland. Not hard to be right about that. It's just going to take 5 years to just get the list back into some sort of balance.
As for Franklin he is very good but he has yet to do anything against a top side. To say he is now better than Jonathan Brown, Riewoldt, Fevola, Lloyd, etc as those in the media are now saying is laughable. Hawthorn's improvement is coming from most of their players who are now entering reaching 22-25 age bracket - Hodge, Mitchell, Bateman, Brown, Clarke, Gilham, Ladson, Sewell, Osbourne, Boyle, Campbell, Taylor, Williams. We don't have that. We are at least 1-2 years behind them in that regard.