Stranger wrote:
We have a game plan that simply doesn't work for us
and mm is to stubborn to change it.
Forget the gameplan. We don't have the cattle to be competitive at AFL. Gameplan is irrelevant.
The question is why we don't have the cattle? Everybody, bar the two coaches (Ratten and Malthouse) and the club could see that our list was not good enough in 2011/2012. We had come back from the 2002-2005 to be competitive again, but there were fundamental deficiencies not addressed, that needed to be addressed via the draft.
Firstly, the loss of Fevola (and Kennedy) left a hole in the forward line (2 holes really), and Ratten's solution were the three amigos- No key forward, no premiership. Ratten realised that too late and went to the 2010 draft (a poor one) and attempted to solve it by drafting watson, mitchell etc. It failed. We also had holes in the key positions in the backline. Bower was a bust. Instead of drafting the obvious like Talia, we went for the likes of Lucas and Davies.... a key mistake made by Ratten.
The other deficiency was not developing Murphy and Gibbs properly. Judd was such a quality player that he alone could carry their deficiencies (lack of defensive pressure and ability to break a tag). They are exposed now.
2011/2012 should have been years of building quality (large bodied mids and talls) through the draft. They would be 21-22 now and would provide us a very good base to be pressing hard in the next few years. Mick was erroneous here, he sold books and thought our premiership window was open. He also devalued valuable players to the point that we got nothing for the likes of Waite, Garlett and Robinson.... argue what theya re worth, but we got nothing for them. The other one is Betts. We were soooo hell bent of getting Thomas, that we got nothing for Betts. Hell, meet his terms under free agency and then trade him on. We got NOTHING for Betts- inexcusable and for that alone, MM should not get a new contract.
Now do we sack MM or let him coach out?
What impact would moving MM on now.
1) I don’t care if he has lost the senior players- they are a lost cause are not part of the future now. The only consideration is if Mick starts dropping players that could command us good/ok draft picks….ie. Garlett, Waite, Robinson.
2) What I do care about is if he has lost younger players that we need to keep and are thinking of moving on. A player like Menzel is a prime example. Yarran too.
Those are the main considerations