Topkent
Confirmed ITK Drafting King
That's insanely bad that we have 8 blokes who are over 24 who havent played 50 games yetI don’t really know about 3-5 years. As Sylvia Saint posted, you can basically rebuild within that time.
There are obviously limitations to arbitrarily placing players in age, experience and role categories. That said I’d argue that we would like more players in the 24-28 years old with 100 games bracket.
As it stands the list is broken down as:
Age
19-23: 26, 55.3%
24-28: 16, 34.0%
29+:5, 10.7%
Games experience
0-50: 26
51-100: 11
100+: 10
That’s not to say: ooooh we have so many in the 19-23 age bracket & 0-50 games just wait 3 years and voila. For example, Billy Stretch is 22 years old with 46 games experience and nobody would be surprised if he was delisted. In short, young and not up to it is the same as old and not up to it. There are also outliers: only having 35 games experience means far less to 27 year old vandenBerg who is 188cm 93kgs than 31 games experience means for 22 year old Weideman. Also, not all improvement is linear, I still have faith in Viney getting back to his best however he is supposed to be in his prime now whereas he had far more impact as 22-23 year old in the 51-100 games bracket.
For further context here is a breakdown of age and games experience:
19-23 & 0-50: 18
24-28 & 0-50: 8
19-23 & 51-100: 8
24-28 & 51-100: 3
24-28 & 100+: 5
29+ & 100+: 5
24-28 & 100 games is where I think most players will enter their prime. The five who fit that criteria on the list are: Gawn, May, Melksham, T McDonald and Viney. The likes of Brayshaw, Lever, O McDonald, Oliver, Petracca & Salem will join them in the next 2 seasons, injury permitting.
All that said, none of this takes into account intangibles such as morale, confidence, leadership, hunger, work ethic, game plan and the improvement of other clubs. However, doing this exercise has helped me understand that overall the list is still somewhat immature. That doesn’t excuse 17th with 5-17 or mean that this isn’t a wasted year but it also doesn’t mean we’re f’ed and it’s time to rebuild again.