You know what makes this harder to take.
Seeing the Lions develop week by week. Their premiership window shut in 2004, but you can already see them building something special.
We need tall defenders and there was an article not so long ago about how hard they are to find and how clubs will go all out this draft - but the Lions have picked up Jason Roe and Patfull, who look like they will be top class modern defenders.
Then they have Drummond, Stiller, Rischitelli, Sherman, Adcock, Clark, Fixter most of whom will develop into very solid players. Brennan, McGrath, Hooper add a dash of unpredictablilty and class.
There are three big differences.
1) A senior core.
2) Jonathon Brown.
3) A coach who knows how to make players better, won't accept second best from senior players and more importantly knows how to build a team. Last season Robbie Copeland was a negating tagger now he is a small forward and kicking goals every week.
I'm not convinced based on the last two and a half seasons that Terry is any good at developing individual players and formualting a game plan. I'm sure that the absence of a senior core has something to do with it, but is that everything? Why didn't we commit fully to rebuilding ala Hawthorn if we knew our senior core was weak?
Even if you say that Hawthorn got the jump on us by a couple of years in the drafting process, they comitted fully to it and generally their young players have improved greatly. A few of our boys have stagnated, others havent even left the ground.
What was Wallace's record with at the Bulldogs re. developing youngsters? I am more than happy to be proven wrong and don't have the time to do the research, but I get the feeling he inherited a tough core and added very little to it while he was there.
