Tas
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TheBrownDog
- Dec 23, 2002
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My lunch hour is about over so I can't spend the time poring over the Wikipedia draft pages. If you have the time, can you let me know which mids taken after Garner, McKenzie, Simpkin and Atley would make us better? Ideally within the top 30 to weed out the unforeseeable smokies like Dahlhaus.
2010 Atley was taken at 17, Isaac Smith went #19 and Guthrie #23, although you might argue Guthrie was also a flanker so who knows. Smith would have been closer to the player we were deficient in. In part, I think it forced us to try and turn Harper into a mid when he was a pretty exciting half-forward prospect.
2011 we took McKenzie at 18, given the number of priority picks and father sons taken between 18 and 30 it doesn't give very many candidates in that range, however, someone like a Brad Hill even though he is also technically a flanker still has better attributes to be more of an outside player, Seb Ross also has the capacity imo to be a less mercurial midfielder, but had the potential to be a good accumulator, I think he is averaging about 30 disposals this year. McKenzie had a good boot on him, he just wasn't quick, didn't know how to position himself to win the ball and thus wasn't much of an accumulator.
2012 when we took Garner at 15, I am not against his selection in any way, shape or form, however, we have been compromised because of many of the other picks. I think we were keen on Hrovat prior to the draft, I don't think either are what we needed at the time but that particular year there weren't a lot of good options.
i have no issue with Simpkin either, he shows that he has a lot of X-factor, how we develop him will be critical. He, like Garner, I have doubts that we can turn into a midfielder.
I don't mind if we go for best available with the first round then look to compliment the list with needs in 2nd and 3rd rounds and take a lot more speculative outsiders with X-factor who need a lot of development work, but we picked a lot of plodders in the 2nd & 3rd rounds as well.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the players we have taken individually, but how they all fit together and our team structure has seen it become a significant problem. It is not entirely the fault of the recruiters, when we took players like Cunnington, Ziebell, etc the game laws allowed us to some extent to mitigate their weaknesses through rotation. However, we just lacked the kind of player type like a Wells who provide the team attributes the insiders can not. While we didn't have the picks to take a Wells type in the draft, there were exciting prospects that had flaws to their game that were available later in the draft, we just were too risk averse and took solid plodders more than we took risks on high risk/high return players.
What didn't help us at all were the number of compromised drafts due to the inclusion of GWS and GC. It took a lot of talent out of the available pool and exacerbated our problem because we had neglected it for some time beforehand.