The main cultural problem at Richmond for a long time now has been entrenched short-term thinking at the expense and harm of our mid to long term interests. Winning a couple of meaningless games against fellow strugglers at the expense of top 20 draft picks is short-term thinking. These wins will be forgotten as soon as the final siren sounds in round 22.
There's little that can be significantly achieved now with 2009 a write-off apart from playing the kids until the end of the season in readiness for 2010 and beyond which appears to be what we are doing now. The offseason is when key changes are made - delistings, trades, new draftees added, team gameplans modified and tuned, and further resources added. To maximize the effectiveness of these offseason decisions we need as many early picks as available to us to cut as many of those players not up to it and give our recruiting department the best chance to replace them with better quality young footballers. Winning no more than 4 games provides us with these early picks; winning meaningless games against bottom sides deprives us of them.
All that beating bottom sides does is make the club feel good for a week and relieve some pressure on the club until we play a decent side and harsh reality hits home again and knocks the stuffing out of our confidence. It does nothing as far as building a winning club culture because belief and a winning culture comes from winning games that count and matter as much to your opponent as it does to you - when it is do or die.
Once again you confuse the
result of these last 10 games (ie either a win or loss) with the
process of winning. I have not and have never said that it is important that we
win these games to begin create a strong long term culture. What I have said is that it is important that we
prepare the side to win at all costs. These games are only meaningless if we tank, and by tanking I mean not just playing young players, but playing people in strange positions, playing kids that aren't ready, taking off guns at crucial moments etc.
I would argue that ensuring that we don't win more than 4 games, either by playing very weak teams or by actually manufacturing losses, is the epitomy of short-term thinking.
Tell me, out of these 6 people, who do you think are the 3 most important people at Geelong, in terms of winning premierships: Mark Thompson, Brian Cook, Joel Selwood, Frank Costa, Neil Balme, Brad Ottens.
