The Tyrant wrote:
Mav wrote:
The Tyrant wrote:
You should always develop internally and through the draft before you look outside.
Yeah, why on earth did they go and recruit old players like Diesel, Spalding, Rice, and Clape rather than 18 year olds? As though those guys could have their pictures hung at Princes' Park ...
All those guys walked into strong Carlton teams though, with Kernahan, Bradley, Silvagni, Dean etc etc (Carlton greats) around them.... It was a great era and they fitted in seamlessly.
Thats the era we're facing, for 5 years at least, until Walker et.al get a sniff of silver polish
My comment was mostly in fun. But I think you might be underestimating just how low we went in 1989 to 1991. We really struggled. This was despite the presence of Kernahan, Bradley, Dean and Silvagni. We had a lot of retirements, and very much like recently Parkin tried to bring in some honest toilers from the VFL like Verbeek and Reinets, and recycled players like Athorn to give us a more mature edge. None of that worked greatly, until we had the good luck to snaffle a disaffected Spalding from Melbourne and then in 1992 Diesel came and changed things dramatically.
Which is not to suggest that we can do the same again this time. Occasionally clubs will bungle like Melbourne did and let a very good player fall into our laps (like Port did with Nick Stevens). But you get one of those a decade, I guess. And we can't really pull the sorts of tricks we did with recruiting Diesel (2 contracts, paper bags etc.). To snaffle a star these days you have to mortgage your future.
But it is nice to dream
