Um yes...

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus.”
Turkish Proverb

Um yes...

See what you mean but it also tells us where the real problem is. Tells me someone is not getting best out of our team.

Interesting thread, all in all we are probably where I expected us to be.

In a positive sense - we have been more competitive this year and certain players have improved - (Particularly Walker & Simpson) and some players have got a start - Russell, Murphy, Kennedy, O'hAilpin.

The key next year will be how many of the following can become bona fide footballers:

Russell
Gibbs (I expect him to be no 4 next year)
Kennedy
Blackwell
O'hAilpin
Bower
Betts (on a consistent basis)
Hartlett
Raso
Edwards
Smith
Flint
Jackson

Compared with last year, we have played some decent footy this year, but we struggle to do it for more than a half.

The negatives this year are that we have had only 1 NAB rising star and that we haven't seen a whole lot of improvement in more players.

In the past few years some of our top B & F performers have either retired straight away (Silvagni, Bradley, Mckay) or lost form pretty quickly (McKernan, Teague). That is unlikely to happen next year.

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Get comfortable being uncomfortable

I commend Carlton for placing Setanta and Aisake on the rookie list but they cost us nothing more than the last two places on our extended list. As for Bryan, although it's not his fault, I class him more as part of the problem than the cure - a mature age ruckman for the sake of having a mature age ruckmen. I agree with the thinking behind Raso and Edwards and I hope they make it, I think they are products of a new recruiter bringing fresh ideas to the club.

And Effes, yes I was talking about the 2003 draft but also three or four other players I won’t mention.

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Just because I'm offended, doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Some good comments in here, not so down anymore but it could be because I've had a good catch-up sleep in between.

I know we can be happy that we do have some good kids, great kids really, coming through, which I acknowledged at the start, but the bigger question is...

Are there enough given we've been crap for 5 years?

Some have referred to the late 2003 picks but why did we only have 4 picks last year? Why did we only really have 4 the year before + betts (excluding Bryan as a mature aged pick)? Given we

I can understand why we (apparently) overestimated the quality of the list at the end of 2004 given the apparent upsurge in end-of-season form which can be seen either as luck or we got some teams on down days, but why since then haven't we cut more of the players that are currently clogging our VFL team?

You will know in a few months.

If there is a big cull and the club uses 8+ picks in the National Draft (on youth) then you know they held back a few from last year for this year to pick the eyes out of the 'superdraft'.

If there isn't a big cull then the club has been far too conservative and dumb.

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They don't play the young players anyway!

Jarusa said:


Can I put in my vote for conservative and dumb right now?

Can I put in a vote for having players on 2 or 3 year contracts and not being able to pay them all out? So they kept them and introduced a few youngsters at a time to the club.

Second!

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