Can't play everyone. We need genuine mids who find the ball and run up and down the ground. I know it's impossible to get this level of player, but wouldn't you love to see those final two spots reading something like McLuggage, Parish? We simply need to win the ball more and get it going our way, we need to bolster our midfield stocks especially with part of the core group now ageing, Cotchin being one showing it heavily. Baker is very handy but in the end is mainly just a small back or forward. Perhaps he stays in ahead of one of the Riolis but I really wanna see both in the side, so he just misses out.
EDIT: Just to expand on this, I feel like we have pigeon-holed ourselves into thinking we can rely on smalls and defensive pressure, and we don't care about guys being able to win 30+. I love Graham but he is in the side more as a defensive mid, would love to see him find the ball more instead. Whilst I can't argue with how we've fared - 3 flags in 4 years - I feel that we can still have high ball winners and still be a pressure/tackle side. With the latter dropping off recently and having a shallow midfield that doesn't win a heap of ball or cover a lot of ground, we are being exposed a little.
Look at say, Essendon, yeah they aren't quite there yet but Parish and Merrett get 35+ nearly every game, yet still tackle and apply pressure all over the ground.
The Dogs play a crazy deep midfield, just off the top of my head their best 22 has two rucks then Bontempelli, Macrae, Liberatore, Treloar, Smith, Dunkley, Hunter, and would be playing McLean if he wasn't injured again recently.
Each of those players can win 30+ and, with the exception of perhaps Smith and Treloar, each of them tackles and applies pressure. That is just a super deep midfield and it makes their average-ish defence over-perform because they don't need to work as hard, and their forward line gets more quality supply. Nearly all of those mids can hit the scoreboard too.
Compare to our midfield of Cotchin (gets it 10-20 times a game max now), Martin (20-25 touches, spends half the game sitting forward), Prestia (25-30 but injured a lot), Edwards (20-25), Graham (10-20/25), McIntosh (10-15), Pickett (10-15), Lambert (10-20), Bolton (basically same as Dusty). Very low ball winning numbers and perhaps only a third or half of these guys can regularly hit the scoreboard.
We just simply need more ball winners that cover the ground. If you took just McIntosh and Pickett out of that and replaced with say Dunkley and Treloar, our midfield would suddenly look a whole lot better. No disrespect to McIntosh and Pickett either, for example I always love those "McIntosh moments" where he wins a tough contest near the wing and bursts away, but they just don't do enough overall. A couple of tackling players that find it 25-35 times would massively improve us, and I'm not even talking a Tom Mitchell who isn't damaging, but to be honest I'm now coming around to the idea of having him...
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