jbee wrote:
You say Carlton bottomed out in 2002 and similar to Collingwood wasted draft picks. Which draft picks did they have to waste? If we are similar to Collingwood which draft picks did Collingwood lose when they were at the bottom of the ladder?/
Oh
My
God
Jbee, remind me never to hire you.
You are argumentative for the sake of it, when everyone else who read my post could see what was patently obvious.
KK was right... same shit different smell. We had ours taken, Collingwood wasted them.
Secondly, as far as "limitations".... I'd say that Matthew Allan and Justin Murphy, one an All-Australian and the other a top 3 B&F player, both have "limitations" that, compared to McGrath and Bannister, are in a different hemisphere. Allan and Murphy are proven AFL players, if given the right environment. Sheedy took a punt on guys he knew could play, but were down on their fortunes. To accomodate this, he cut 2 guys he knew wouldn't make it.
I'll move onto my "point" in a sec, but jbee, I don't know how old you are, but you've positioned yourself as the anti-Tyrant, and you just hang off my posts trying to pick fault. On this occasion, your antithesis is laughable and you seem dumb. My advise is to pick your battles more wisely.
Now, back to my point.
If we'd invested solely in youth, for successive drafts, it would have extended our run to glory by a couple of years, not killed any chance we had.
We picked 1 kid in the 2003 draft, and 6 in the rookie draft. 2 of those rookies were promoted, and at least 1 (and maybe Plemmo) will be promoted from that lot this year.
Of the other picks:
Mott and Kenna lasted one year.
Bowyer and Bannister will be lucky to survive the cut this year
DeLuca is honest but lacks significant polish. He might come good, and might not. He's, what I'd call, a decentish late pick. The others = hat.
Are we meant to be surprised that Bentick and Carrazzo are half decent? if we'd picked them in the National Draft, would we be disappointed?
The idea is, that late picks, though obviously no guarantee for ANYTHING, can come good. You take a young kid and there's a chance he'll grow and become anything. We already know that Bowyer and Bannister tried once and failed. Whats more, as we were already in the doledrums, what was the harm in just promoting youth for a few years? That puts pressure on blokes like Davies to stand up. In recent years, when we've used our raw kids, we've had some decent success: Fisher, Thornton, et.al. Why he turned from that policy surprises and disappoints me.
There are 3 kinds of AFL footballers:
1) good ones
2) ones that are good in good teams
3) shit ones
Since 2002, we've only had vacancies for type 1s. We should only be looking for type 1s. Blokes like Josh Mahoney try once (or twice) and fail, and come back to play a part in a gun team. Bannister could become an important figure in a Geelong, St.Kilda, West Coast etc. But for us? Just not what we need.
Now, ok, your pick 63 is a bit of a gamble anyway.. there's not a single scrap of certainty that your kid picked with pick 63 will become a type 1 player. But, then again, Bentick and Carrazzo (picked after Bannister), will be around MUCH longer on the list than Jordan. There's no co-incidence in that. Bloody none.
Now we're staring down the barrel of another spoon. And, not because we're TRYING to lose. its just because we're this poor and deserve it.
All we can do is try and salvage something out of this and try and pump some exposure into our kids and leave the blue collar delisting certainties to the footy wasteland where we found them.
and, just finally, I know why we picked Russell and not Egan (well, have a good idea why....), and I'm glad we did. I wasn't implying we should have picked Egan at all. I'm glad we have Russell, and he's exactly the kind of player we need.
The annoying thing for me, is that we're seeing some good signs in Egan, in a team as crap as ours, and we're not getting a chance to see Russell AT ALL.