l dont understand why people keep blaming danny frawley for all our problems.
he got us into the finals in his second year,now this is when the problems started .
alot of players didnt continue there form from that year,and casey as president didnt get the right people in to help .
Spud isn't the only one to blame. Beck was our recruiter and he was there under Geisch as well which was just a woeful period of recruiting as under Spud. However we have so few players left from the 5 drafts under Spud whereas the Cats, Hawks, Dogs and Pies current sides are made up mostly from the kids they got from these same 5 drafts.
Geisch:
1997: - (Ottens at Geelong)
1998: - (Tivs elevated rookie)
Spud:
1999: - (Fiora at St Kilda)
2000: Petts, Cogs, Newy, Hyde
2001: - (Rodan at Port)
2002: Schulz (Sugar was a trade, Moore rookie)
2003: Jackson, Tuck, Raines (Browny was a trade)
7 drafts worth (56 recruits in total excluding rookies) and all we got out of them were 12 players (15 if you include Ottens, Fiora and D-Rod) and out of those 12 you could cut that number in half by 2009 after ths year's delistings/trades. 2001 was the superdraft and only Rodan is still running around from our picks. There are 4 National drafts which we scored blank
and if Schulz is delisted it'll become 5 total misses in 7 consecutive National drafts that should now our senior core. Mindboggling how people can then turnaround, throw their hands up in the air and gasp how come it's taking so long to rebuild and why do you still bag Frawley, Geisch and Beck. Gee I wonder why
.
The problem then was we traded away our best picks for duds then recruited just a few kids often later in the draft and then hoped and prayed they would all become stars. Of course that's fantasy thinking. Even the best clubs have only a 50% hit rate at best (3 kids make it per year on average). What you need to do instead is bring through a lot of kids and then syphon through them to form your core group for the years to come. That's what we are doing now. Then you build upon that base.
Spud made the finals in 2001 as he still had the core group from 95 - Richo, both Gales, Knighter, Cambo, Brodders, Rogers, Daffy plus earlier recruits picked up 4-5 years before he became coach - Gas, Kellaway, Torney, Bowden, Chaffey and Bourke
and one off years from Otto, Tivs, Hilton, King and of course Leon Cameron via a trade. That '95 core group was nearing the end and wasn't replaced with a whole heap of quality youth hence the massive hole that developed in the mid-age bracket in our list.
