no polak.we delist him then rookie him knowing we will likely need experience i can understand the logic but a real quality player was available to us in bradshaw.
When was Bradshaw available to us?
He didn't want to live in Melbourne.
ps Polak is not one of the 14 new faces.
bradshaw was available in the psd at pick 2. he nominated his price which sydney met we only had to agree to pay his nominated price and he was ours. the psd is exactly that a draft. if you nominate there is no guarantee you will go where you want.
when richo retired late in the piece someone like bradshaw should have become a priority.
I believe obtaining depth in our ruck department wasn't a high priority in the past given the amount of problems we had all over the field that needed to be rectified first. This is why we recruited midfielders first, then KPP and then ruckmen. In Lids year we tried to find a ruckman in Patto from a very short list. The problem has been for such a long time is that we keep trying to plug holes only to find new ones popping up all the time.
As you know ruckman are notoriously late developers and require years of development and patience. The problem with this though is you wait years and they can still be average to poor. Gus was a rookie, as was Browne so they will take a lot of development because they are starting so far back which has not been a strength of ours as a club to date. Gus still needs a lot of education which I believe will not start to show in earnest for another 2 years. Browne probably 3. Regardless of whether Vickery steps up or not we will need to find another ruckman at least to support him so getting rid of Gus and co at the moment would be counter productive. Until we can trade for another solid ruck or groom on of our own, they are all we have.
In regards to securing Bradshaw when Richo left, this would have been a waste of time. Unless Bradshaw is a teacher, educator and coach in the making like perhaps Cousins is, what's the use of getting Bradshaw in to win us some meaningless games only to leave us with the same hole when he retires. Better to have Polly in there who can quickly step aside when other young forwards step up. I like the idea of having a mature forward to allow the younger forwards time but not at the expense of future development.
Stripes
