ball and clarke - great stuff

[StrengthThroughLoyalty]

ball, clarke, dal santo, maguire, montagna and a houlihan, all sound like future champions to me. :D

for brief bios of the players goto http://www.afl.com.au/news/story_258364.htm

obviously we won't be able to judge how well we have drafted for a couple of years but i'm happy with our selections, from the limited amount of knowledge i have of these players.

heard ball interviewed on aw and he sounds like he is a very level headed young man. his stance to continue playing with his school instead of afl footy shows a real strength of character especially when you consider that it probably cost him the chance to go to the hawks, his preferred club. he will still be available to play 10 or 11 games for us in the seniors or the vfl and is available for the finals if something glorius happens during the year ie we start to win games. :D

xavier clarke is obviously highly rated by all the experts as they all had him in their top ten. wouldn't it be great if he could emulate the 'onfield' feats of our last great aboriginal player, maybe lenny will give him no.7.

overall i think they have drafted players who have speed and are highly skilled, two areas where we have been sadly lacking in the last couple of years, with maguire as the key position defender that we need to free up kossi to move to chf in the future.

i hope they don't let our houlihan anywhere near aussie or spider, based on the reputation of his brothers. ;)

we didn't draft any old hacks and stuck with our youth policy, which is fantastic. we have 22 players 22 or under on our list, we are taking a lot of small steps in the right direction, it won't be long until we are marching to success.

[sainter]

Good summary STL!

Good point on Ball. His stance was admirable and if he can emulate the last name player to put his school footy before senior footy, Dustin Fletcher, we'd be very happy.

He played 3 games for Sandringham Dragons and averaged 37 possessions, even kicking 5 goals in one of those from the midfield. Extremely exciting!

Probably the ironic thing in all of this is that 6 weeks ago many of us were disappointed that Hawthorn had received the first pick from Fremantly and hence our chance to get Luke Ball was gone. Since then we had turned our attention to Luke Hodge and were very excited by what we saw in him. Now we have Ball! That's the nature of the draft I suppose.

With so many early selections, the fact that Ball may not play senior footy won't matter too much. Xavier Clarke, Nick Del Santo and Leight Montagna are all skillful midfielders.

I was talking to Savatage before and he regards Maguire as a bit of a smokey. He is younger than the others and only just qualified for the draft, hence doesn't have the profile of the others. At 190cm and 85kg he is off good size and will possibly grow more. A few people have been critical that we didn't address our lack of key defenders. There weren't too many key defenders picked up in the draft at all. I'm sure we'll look a few in the rookie draft as well as looking at a Matthew Collins type in the pre-season draft.

Like you said we won't know now how successful we've been for a few years but I'm very happy and looking forward to a good future. :)

[The Doctor]

Good Luck to Xavier Clarke and well done St Kilda

This will be a name to remember.

[Savatage]

Originally posted by The Doctor
Good Luck to Xavier Clarke and well done St Kilda

This will be a name to remember.


What have you seen of our X-Man???

Impressions?

[killer]

Xavier is a player of the future,
potentially as good as M.Long.

Will be very good in a year or two.

it will be a bit difficult for him coming
straight from the NTFL to the Nat league.