Did anyone catch SEN a couple of nights ago around 9-10pm when one of their summer fill-ins decided to blame our past 10 years of failure on us holding onto Richo too long and not trading him after 2001 or 2002? No mention of anyone else at the RFC and he even claimed it would of been a good time to do it because we had Ottens around then .
Might have been a few other people thinking the same thing at the time And the only reason i thought that was because he was injury prone, a head case, rapidly ageing and he wasn't bringing us any premierships. He would have still remained a tiger in my heart, but I thought at the time we needed to rebuild a list not just based on one individual. And he's still here and, bless him, but we still have no premierships or finals appearances.
There's nothing wrong with that line of thinking IMO as people are just taking their heart out of the equation and being realistic about Richo's faults and what he offers to the side and looking towards the future asking themselves will Richo still be around when we are seriously able to challenge for a flag unlike 95 and 2001. The problem I had with this guy the other night was putting the sole blame for our mediocrity onto us holding onto Richo too long with no mention of past coaching, recruiting and admin "efforts". It's a team game and if a club sucks at recruiting then it wouldn't matter if JC was at FF. We still would have traded away good picks for duds; we still wouldn't play finals and midfield passes would still be flying over his head or bouncing 6 feet in front of him.
This guy would say stupid things like we could of tried to trade Richo for say a young Pavlich after 2001 when we all know we could have had both Pavlich and Richo to begin with instead of Fiora
. If we had tried to trade Richo back in 2001-2002 we still probably would have ended up with another Hudson or Houlihan given the mindset of those running the club at that time. It ain't Richo's fault that we traded away our first round pick in the 2001 superdraft because we paid teammates like Holland $$$ after only one good year resulting in Gale having to retire and us having to chase after another ready-made ruckman
.
Then there's the recruiter's knowledge of when a draft is strong or weak. Imagine trading Richo to the Saints for their number 1 pick at the end of 2002 and ending up with Goddard in return!
It was just a totally ridiculous and overly-simplistic attitude this idiot had to the RFC's woes over the past 10 years.