It seems to this "thickhead" it is one thing for a successful club (like Geelong) to be incubating KPPs who are not considered ready for senior football but are hoped to develop into useful KPPs in the future. Such clubs can not only afford to do it (because they are having on field success), because of the salary cap they cannot afford NOT to do it. Secondly, in respect of Mitch Brown, he has suffered very significant injuries for several of those years. Thirdly, if the Geelong BF site is anything to go by Mitch Brown will not be playing many more games for Geelong this year and will be on his bike.What some thick-heads fail to understand and address is that not all players on your list will be getting regular games.
Mitch Brown has been on the Geelong list for 6 years and has played 13 games............13 games.
Why would Geelong retain him? What do they see that others can't?
They must be crazy when they could have traded or de-listed him many times over.
I don't know what the future holds for Watson but for now he's bought into what Mick has laid out for him.....in a similar way to Rowe and White.
He makes sense when playing in the VFL and has a demeanour I thought not possible. He's tough on his team-mates yet also encouraging of them.
He doesn't sulk when thrown forward (as a recently departed player did) and is all about team.
That may ultimately not be enough in the end for the CFC but Watson is playing team-first football and if everyone on the list did the same, we'd be a better team right now.
That said, even lowly clubs like us need to incubate KPPs and ruckmen since so many are not born but developed. Tom Lonergan is a good example of a slow-developing but now very important KPD. Of course there are plenty more Austins, Harletts, Bowers and (to pick on another list) Sellars than there are Lonergans.
But my concern re Watson isn't that he is not getting senior games. Rather my concern is that (subject to revision upon provision of Cringle's "facts") he has not even been vaguelly competitive at senior level in the 2 games he has played. Presumably MM would not have promptly dropped him after each game he has played if MM had thought he had shown "something". It is usual to give young players more than 1 game at the senior level to help them adjust to the change of pace etc.
KPP players born 1992/93 who have gone past Watson