Take Richo out of the team and what is our average then?
Waste of time really - we know we are young and inexperienced with a few older players which skews our average.
Carlton would be very comparitive to ourselves in terms of kids while Hawthorn has very few 'older' players but a fair few mid range players which makes them appear similiar to ourselves. This is why many experts rave about how well the Hawks kids are progressing and attribute much of lasts years success to them when in reality it is because of their mid-age players and the support they are giving to the younger players.
I know a few Bluebagger supporters who were celebrating Murphies 'progress' in the first few games of last year and how he had come on far faster than Lids who was playing a similiar position. What do you know - when Stevens went down and Murphy suddenly started to get the No 1 tagger like Lids had had then his form dropped off dramatically.
It is exactly the same for the Hawks younger players. If they did not have the more experienced/capable players ahead of them that the opposition coaches had to focus on before them then they wouldn't seem anywhere near as good. Unfortunately for our rising stars such as Lids, Axel, Bling and co. they will always have the best defenders/taggers to worry about but because of this our next wave of young players will seem all that more the better because they will have the freedom that our current crop never was afforded.
In 2/3 years when our 2004 crop are ready we will all of a sudden come out of the darkness and everyone will be touting how fantastic our young players are and poor Lids, Axel etc will never get the recognition that they probably deserve in absorbing much of the pressure, responsibility and opposition focus to that point.
Stripes
Good, sensible conclusion Stripes. To back up your point here is a post I did to another forum in Sept after Hawthorn were eliminated from the finals. It compared the teams of both clubs in their respective last games for the season.
"With all the debate about our recruiting and the constant comparisons
between ourselves and Hawthorn (who supposedly started off from the
same place list-wise as us at the same time as us), I thought I would
have a comparitive look at the team they fielded last night vs our
team for the last game vs Saints.
Players 21 and under - Haw 5, Rich 9
Players 22 to 27 - Haw 13, Rich 8
Players 28 and over - Haw 4, Rich 5
Digging a bit deeper, Hawthorn's 13 'mid range' age group average 88
games per player, Richmond's 8 average 69. And of Richmond's 8, 2 of
them are recently promoted rookies (Axel and Kingy)!
Kinda makes folly of the comparison doesn't it. Their kids are fewer
in number and have the support of a much larger core of more
experienced players on the field. I'll bet Lids, McGuane, Thursty,
Bling, Raines et al would look like different players in a side that
offered them this much more protection and support.
Thats why I keep subscribing to the positive outlook and patience
theory. We are getting games into kids that will become our solid
core over the next few years. We musn't make the mistake of judging
our recent draft outcomes based on our performance in the last couple
of years. Our list was a train wreck 4 years ago and it was never
going to be fixed in a year or 2."
