steve wrote:
Dukes wrote:
The club is on record in the past few weeks as saying:
1. Wayne Hughes is in charge of drafting
2. We won't trade away our picks
3. They'll only trade for an experienced player after 'due consideration'
4. We are pretty bad and don't have much depth or talent yet the youngsters are looking good ... a situation exacerbated by the salary cap penalties
5. We will draft the best player available (and don't be fooled by the likes of Mike Sheahan and Jon Anderson that Leunberger will go number 1 becuase its total made-up bullsh!t).
Unfortunately 'due consideration' for this board means flipping a coin

And THATS my motivation for the thread..... how often have we heard Smorgon talk about youth policy, and then winning games to lift membership in the same sentence? The 2 aren't mutually exclusive, but they're not exactly easy bedfellows.
SA Blue and others: how can Pagan take credit for Murphy or Jordan Russell??? Did he pick them?? I'm talking about the trades for players he DID select, or draft picks wasted on re-treads... who picked them? Shane O'Sullivan? Wayne Hughes??
Football, and list management has evolved beyond the ubiquity of the senior coach. We are STILL suffering for list decisions made by Parko 10 years ago. There has to be someone that sits outside the coaching group who is ultimately looking at a 5 and 10 year list strategy.
Can I remind you all that this isn't some new fangled idea I just made up. Richmond did (and maybe still do) it with Greg Miller and Frawley. Hawthorn have a bloke who is ostensibly a list manager and all the scouts and Buckenara report to him.
Its the way the sport is going. Teams that lack any long-term list planning are destined to crash and burn when the cycle starts working against them.
Take this example:
SCENARIO 1: 2003: Pagan recruits a range of re-treads from other clubs, and 1 teenager in the National draft. Thus we have the list we do now.
SCENARIO 2: 2003: Pagan trades Beaumont, McKernan etc for a couple of bigger bodies, but takes 5 teenagers in the national draft.
OUTCOME 1: We finish a long way off the finals, we finish last, we finish last. 90% of Pagan's retreads have been delisted.
OUTCOME 2: We couldn't really be WORSE performed on the field over the 3 years, and we have potentially 5 young players who would have played probably 20 games by now and might have a future.
Outcome 2 is BY FAR the better. Even if all 5 of the kids turned out shit, we've broken even on outcome 1.
So, Pagan's planning in 2003..... where was it? And now we're picking mostly kids... is that because that was always part of a 5 year list management plan, or has he "changed" his approach and strategy since 2003?????