Strapping Young Lad
Moderator
- Apr 19, 2006
- 97,444
- 235,988
- AFL Club
- Hawthorn
- Other Teams
- Storm, Spurs, Socceroos
- Moderator
- #101
The context of the list at the time was that we still had a very good core of players under 28 who we knew could perform on the biggest stage like Gunston, Smith, Breust, Frawley, Shiels, Puopolo, Birchall, Stratton, Rioli, Schoe, Duryea, Langford.... all them premiership players, with Sicily and Burton developing.The context of our list at the time was it wasn’t good enough. We ran out of puff in 2016, too many old elite players hitting a wall. Some very good players under them needing to step up. But an absolute lack of young talent ready to step up to the level.
Maybe you’re forgetting we were a game clear on top with only weeks left in the season.
Grabbing Jager and Tom at the end of 2016 with the idea that we would then catapult ourselves straight back into contention and land a free agent like Tom Lynch in the years to come was a very sound strategy at that point in time and I would question anyone who argues that backing in that group of players above to climb the peak again with some new blood was the wrong thing to do.
A fair chunk of the hindsight heroes that want to come along and pretend like we should’ve just cut them all off at the head at 28 because we lost a final by a couple of kicks or that we should have told them we were just going to hit the draft for the next three years and hopefully they might get to see another attempt at a grand final before they all retired, I’m tipping would be made to look like fools if we went back to find their posts at the time.