It might be a coincidence that we have lost three young 10 year key position players while other clubs haven't.
Tippett I can stomach losing. I don't mean the fall out but obviously we did all we could there to keep him, and then some...
With Davis and Gunston though, I think at key times when these players should have been falling in love with the club, becoming part of the furniture and deciding that they wanted to be Adelaide footballers for life they were instead yoyo-ing in and out of a losing team
The downside of having a pitiful year is, clearly, the pitiful year. The upside is that you get to invest games in the future more heavily. Because obviously the present doesn't matter. Instead we worried ONLY about the present. Obsessed by it. Fixated only on the next weekend. Davis dropped after a rising star nomination so that Scott Stevens could play in a season where we were out of the top eight... If you deliberately tried to come up with the stupidest, most club destroying, backwards, blatant sabotage of a club you'd be hard pressed to come up with something better than that.
The list of names we had playing ahead of Davis and Gunston in 2010/2011 makes for some embarrassing reading. I know Davis ended up getting injured but that only highlights the missed opportunity. Oh... and you were just about to become a regular player too. Just typical Adelaide speak - when we don't have to back it up with actions we're fine. Next season they'll get plenty of games. All he knew was that when he was available he didn't play.