Coaching

[Belnakor]

And remember when the fitness coach did try to push the guys hard, the players famously revolted, headed up by one P.Bell.

it also sounds to me like we really hammered the "skills under fatigue" during the preseason... i dunno, doing that much running and work at HITT makes me think it would be very hard for a guy to bulk up with that kind of training. But thats just with novice knowledge.

 

[yakamoto]

I would hazard a guess that lack of physical bulk comes in at about No 100 on the list of reasons as to why we're a rubbish team.

 

[Clay Davis]

I would hazard a guess that lack of physical bulk comes in at about No 100 on the list of reasons as to why we're a rubbish team.

That's not the argument being made at all.

 

[theGav56]

I'm not so sure. Polak was a highly rated young KPP in 2001 - pretty much as the best in the country at that point - in a draft that yielded two Brownlow medallists, Gary Ablett, three Norm Smiths and a couple of premiership captains. And Nick Dal Santo. It was almost a no-brainer to draft him. At the time, everyone knew 2001 was a superdraft, and Polak was the only KPP rated in the top five. At that point, we probably had poorer KPP depth than we did midfield depth.

That list of players who we could have had if we made a decent selection makes me weep, but you somehow seem to have found it reassuring, and a "no-brainer" to select the one who was destined to become the biggest dud???

We had just traded for Croad and MacPharlin and had Pavlich and Brown on the list. A KPP should not have been a massive priority, but the real failure was to not recognise that he really only had marking as a skill; poor pace, and an awkward kicking style. That is poor recruiting.

Dunn and Murphy made sense at the time - medium sized mid and a forward KPP. Certainly aimed to address issues we had at the end of 2003, and in hindsight only looks bad because the players didn't come on, but we're not the only ones who screwed that draft. Only one of the top 5 have taken it to the next level (Cooney) and even Kepler was drafted at 6.

Browne was a fourth round pick, so not that much lost there.

If you have such a poor hit-rate with your first round selections that we have had, then you are going to struggle as a team.
It isn't Browne who's selection hurt us, it was Brown, who at best was/is a journeyman "lug", but who we selected in the top 5, and traded away a few years later because we suddenly had too many KPP's and he couldn't get a game.

If there were not players in the first round who the club rated then trade the pick as happened in the year we got Collard....hmmmmm. Actually, that draft was different in that we rated 3rd round players as almost the equivalant of earlier picks, so traded the picks.

I'm not saying drafting isn't something that shouldn't be improved, but on the face of it, there is much less wrong there than elsewhere at the club.

I just do not agree with this. If we had a a goal to goal line of Murphy, Pavlich, Dunn, Brown and Polak performing at what their draft position expectations were we would not even be discussing a lot of the questions here. And there are plenty of spare failures to have in reserve along the lines of Campbell, Drum, Collard etc. All high draft picks. Whether that is development or n poor selection is a moot point when you consider the lack of pace and depth of skills of Brown, Polak and Murphy. The collective failure of those players is mind blowing.

This is just supposition - I'm not trying to absolve Connolly or Harvey of their responsibilities as coaches. But it's a curious situation - as you've said before, we have only been able to get rookie coaches. Is that because no senior coach wants to come to our club, or another reason? Does the board actively choose rookie coaches, because they will be more compliant to the culture of the club than one who has already done work elsewhere? Is it because a rookie coach will do what the club says, or because a rookie coach means fan expectations are smaller?

The Boards processes are bemusing in this regard I think. I liked Neesham, but to give him as much power and responsibility and so little support really stuffed us up for many years. A structure that covered his flakey recruiting ideas should have been mandatory, and a half decent General Manager should have been found. I think the processes for the appointments of both Connolly and Harvey were wrong; both with too much internal influence on their appointments. Drum was simply a poor selection.

But now, I think we could use someone with a lot of experience to come in and establish better processes for things like the drafting of players, trading, player development, development of coaching staff, fitness. The whole shebang. If not in the Senior Coach role then in a Director of Coaching role.

 

[loopa]

I agree that the development of our draftees in the past has been quite poor.
I think the club knows that & know that they have to get this current crop of kids to develop into capable AFL players if we are to ever have a crack at the flag.

I remember just after draft day last year Harves had an interview with each of the new draftees and mentioned a few times that they overhauled their fitness & conditioning staff and have created a development acadamy. I'll try to find a link..

I have full confidence in Harves and think we are still on the right track.

 

[jinxd]

"Off with their heads!!"

Seriously though... Harvey & Co. have been trialling and training players in different positions all year (incl. WAFL.) This is to see if players, who are borderline players, can fit into another position (so that we don't need to trade/delist them). Guys like McPharlin have been displaced because of this and therefore have lost confidence/form. This doesn't mean McPharlin is a bad player cos we've seen in the past how good he can be. (Note: I think he was injured as well, so that doesn't help)

Mundy has had a poor season IMO (to the point where I wanted him delisted), but his last game was a big improvement on previous games.

Next year, the experimentation might not happen as much and I reckon we'll improve a lot from this year. The new kids will get a full pre-season together, so that should help a bit. We just need to be patient and hope we don't get too many injuries.

 

[theGav56]

I don't believe we've ever had a premiership contender list. That was a fallacy.

If it was a fallacy it was clearly one that Harvey believed in and was demonstrated by his team selections in his first game as coach and his drafting of mature players instead of entering into a rebuilding phase and cutting the deadwood. It is supported by the club's Board in appointing Harvey effectively as coach-in-waiting and then as senior coach, ensuring the club had someone at the helm who was already intimate with the list and their strengths and weaknesses. In doing so they ensured the smoothest possible transition so that they club would not miss a beat in it's quest for the glory a hard-man coach would certainly bring.

 

[jinxd]

I agree that the development of our draftees in the past has been quite poor.
I think the club knows that & know that they have to get this current crop of kids to develop into capable AFL players if we are to ever have a crack at the flag.

I remember just after draft day last year Harves had an interview with each of the new draftees and mentioned a few times that they overhauled their fitness & conditioning staff and have created a development academy. I'll try to find a link..

I have full confidence in Harves and think we are still on the right track.

Yup, completely agree!
Development of young players is important. You could possibly draft the next Judd, Ablett, Reiwoldt, etc. etc. but you still need to coach them to make sure they improve on their talent.

We need coaches that motivate these players. They can have all the talent in the world, but they need the right motivation to help them improve. I think they are now choosing players with the right mindset.

 

[jinxd]

Just thinking back... Do you think Harvey took the helm at the end of the 2006 season? I know Connelly was still "Senior Coach" but we went from being pretty poor to winning 9 games in a row. Maybe he was given a trial run by the club?

 

[yakamoto]

Sorry Gravy, but I distintly remember some posters on this thread being critical of players such as Johnson, McPharlin and Murphy for their lack of muscular development.

 

[Clay Davis]

That list of players who we could have had if we made a decent selection makes me weep, but you somehow seem to have found it reassuring, and a "no-brainer" to select the one who was destined to become the biggest dud???

We had just traded for Croad and MacPharlin and had Pavlich and Brown on the list. A KPP should not have been a massive priority, but the real failure was to not recognise that he really only had marking as a skill; poor pace, and an awkward kicking style. That is poor recruiting.

I haven't found it reassuring at all. What I am saying is that Polak was highly rated prior to the draft by many watchers of young football talent. It wasn't as if we took a bloke expected to go late 3rd-4th round at pick 4. We took a highly rated young player early in the draft in a draft brimming with talent. He was rated as good as guys like Judd/Hodge pre-draft. Retrospectively, that seems ridiculous, but it's true:

http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19610

If you have such a poor hit-rate with your first round selections that we have had, then you are going to struggle as a team.
It isn't Browne who's selection hurt us, it was Brown, who at best was/is a journeyman "lug", but who we selected in the top 5, and traded away a few years later because we suddenly had too many KPP's and he couldn't get a game.

True, forgot about Leigh. Has been so long. Dropped the ball there, but then again, it's the same draft as Pav and Hase and Brown's clocked up 200 games, which is better than a lot of top 10 draftees. So whether we muffed the talent selection or just the development might be the issue. Nevertheless, we drafted three players who will probably end up playing at least 600 games between them, especially if Hase goes another year.

If there were not players in the first round who the club rated then trade the pick as happened in the year we got Collard....hmmmmm. Actually, that draft was different in that we rated 3rd round players as almost the equivalant of earlier picks, so traded the picks.

Not sure what you mean here.

I just do not agree with this. If we had a a goal to goal line of Murphy, Pavlich, Dunn, Brown and Polak performing at what their draft position expectations were we would not even be discussing a lot of the questions here. And there are plenty of spare failures to have in reserve along the lines of Campbell, Drum, Collard etc. All high draft picks. Whether that is development or n poor selection is a moot point when you consider the lack of pace and depth of skills of Brown, Polak and Murphy. The collective failure of those players is mind blowing.

Quite true, but is the collective failure a result of poor drafting or poor development?

The same guys who do the ND recruitment do the RD and the PSD. We've had a lot of wins via the RD and a lot of failures via the ND. The difference is that RD players spend more time at the WAFL clubs while the ND players are almost exclusively trained at Freo. If our drafting was the sole source of why we're so poor, then surely the RD players (taken later and not rated highly by anyone) should be even poorer?

As an analogy, coming into a club as a ND player would be pretty similar to enetering a large company via their graduate programs. A RD player is like the data entry kid studying IT at TAFE on casual hours. When you enter a grad program at a large company, they introduce you to the career path you need to take to become a leader of the company. They train you up, and you follow what needs to be done. The data entry kid might get a full time job there eventually, and the better ones might get to middle management.

At our club, it's completely backwards. Our better players this year are bloody Paul Duffield and Greg Broughton, meanwhile players at similar ages to them rot. It's like the kids who go to TAFE doing better in their careers than uni grads at a company like BHP or Woolworths.

The Boards processes are bemusing in this regard I think. I liked Neesham, but to give him as much power and responsibility and so little support really stuffed us up for many years. A structure that covered his flakey recruiting ideas should have been mandatory, and a half decent General Manager should have been found. I think the processes for the appointments of both Connolly and Harvey were wrong; both with too much internal influence on their appointments. Drum was simply a poor selection.

But now, I think we could use someone with a lot of experience to come in and establish better processes for things like the drafting of players, trading, player development, development of coaching staff, fitness. The whole shebang. If not in the Senior Coach role then in a Director of Coaching role.

Who knows? Frankly, I'd like all previous player and staff associations to be broken. In my opinion, there's a rot at the club that goes deeper than the prominent personnel changes that get made. Something between a Blight-type takeover and the Barassi revolution at Sydney needs to happen. This "ooh, new coach" and "ooh, new fitness regime" is just a shell game.

 

[Clay Davis]

Sorry Gravy, but I distintly remember some posters on this thread being critical of players such as Johnson, McPharlin and Murphy for their lack of muscular development.

The criticism is that this reflects their work ethic, and the expectations the club has for them to be at the peak of their performance.

Our problem isn't that our players are too slight, it's that they have terrible work ethic when required, and the fact that many go years without building a solid frame for AFL footy is reflective of that.

 

[Clay Davis]

If it was a fallacy it was clearly one that Harvey believed in and was demonstrated by his team selections in his first game as coach and his drafting of mature players instead of entering into a rebuilding phase and cutting the deadwood. It is supported by the club's Board in appointing Harvey effectively as coach-in-waiting and then as senior coach, ensuring the club had someone at the helm who was already intimate with the list and their strengths and weaknesses. In doing so they ensured the smoothest possible transition so that they club would not miss a beat in it's quest for the glory a hard-man coach would certainly bring.

I agree with that.

2007 was a weak draft, so going deep in the rebuild was probably not possible at the time for someone like Harvey. A tougher coach, with experience and nous, probably would have embarked on trading away players still in their prime for high picks in the top 20. Richmond traded pick 19 for a crab like Jordan McMahon, we could have comparatively r*ped them selling a guy like Murphy, who at the moment has zero trade value.

 

[theGav56]

Not sure what you mean here.

I guess my point is that I think it is fine to trade draft picks, and that it is a part of the role of the recruiting staff to make an assessment on whether the draft pick is going to get good value, or whether it is better to look at trading it. A good example is the J Carr trade, which in the end did not nett PA anywhere near as much value as I had thought they were getting when the trade went through. Letting the picks go for a proven player with plenty of years still to play may have been the best option. (just an example and I don't really want to get into a debate about Carr).

Polak being highly rated is not that relevant. It is our recruiting staff's job to go a little bit deeper than that. I am not saying that there can't be failures, and in fact I see it as just part of the draft, but the planning was clearly there for what would make up the core of our future team, and it failed spectacularly. layer development as you quite rightly point out is part and parcel of it, and so far under Harvey I have seen little change, although it is too early to make that judgement. If Mundy, Johnson and MacPharlin were performing near their potential we would be a far better side.

Quite true, but is the collective failure a result of poor drafting or poor development?

I think your comments re where we get our good players from is interesting, and I don't have strong opinions about whether you are right or wrong. But high draft failures are an absolute killer. Gems late in the draft/rd cannot replace them, and are usually no more than "good" players (Grover) rather than match-winners (Pavlich).

 

[Clay Davis]

I think your comments re where we get our good players from is interesting, and I don't have strong opinions about whether you are right or wrong. But high draft failures are an absolute killer. Gems late in the draft/rd cannot replace them, and are usually no more than "good" players (Grover) rather than match-winners (Pavlich).

Failing on the high draft picks is most certainly a killer, and I would not disagree that we have failed more often than we've won.

However, I would say our failures are throughout the national draft, not just the higher draft picks. For every Leigh Brown or Graham Polak, we have many, many more Brett Doswells and Toby Striblings.

Late ND players and RD kids probably have an equivalent chance on the scale of who's going to make it in the big leagues, but we have many more RD players in our best 22 than guys who were taken beyond round three by us in the ND.

Just by what we had on the weekend, you can see - three players taken beyond the second round in our squad (although one was Kepler, an AFL ready player, and the other was a F/S), seven from the rookie list. Take out those two exclusions, and we have one player in our squad who is a true, fresh in the system later pick - Chris Mayne. The following is rated by projected ability based on where taken in the draft.

Hasleby - top 10 pick
Hill - top 10 pick
Pavlich - top 10 pick
Drum - top 10 pick

Headland - trade
Tarrant - trade
McPharlin - trade
Solomon - trade

Schammer - first round pick

Mundy - 2nd round pick
Suban - 2nd round pick
Ibbotson - 2nd round pick

Mayne - 3rd round pick

Peake - F/S

Bradley - 5th round pick

Sandilands - RD
Broughton - RD
Duffield - RD
Grover - RD
de Boer - RD
Dodd - RD
Van Berlo - RD

(Missing from best 22: Palmer [top 10], Hayden [RD], Johnson [PSD], Crowley [ND/RD hodgepodge])

This suggests to me that when we're picking up the speculative late picks in the draft, it's the ones who spend more time at WAFL clubs who become more AFL capable in the long run.

 

[Winky]

Failing on the high draft picks is most certainly a killer, and I would not disagree that we have failed more often than we've won.

However, I would say our failures are throughout the national draft, not just the higher draft picks. For every Leigh Brown or Graham Polak, we have many, many more Brett Doswells and Toby Striblings.

Late ND players and RD kids probably have an equivalent chance on the scale of who's going to make it in the big leagues, but we have many more RD players in our best 22 than guys who were taken beyond round three by us in the ND.

Just by what we had on the weekend, you can see - three players taken beyond the second round in our squad (although one was Kepler, an AFL ready player, and the other was a F/S), seven from the rookie list. Take out those two exclusions, and we have one player in our squad who is a true, fresh in the system later pick - Chris Mayne. The following is rated by projected ability based on where taken in the draft.

Hasleby - top 10 pick
Hill - top 10 pick
Pavlich - top 10 pick
Drum - top 10 pick

Headland - trade
Tarrant - trade
McPharlin - trade
Solomon - trade

Schammer - first round pick

Mundy - 2nd round pick
Suban - 2nd round pick
Ibbotson - 2nd round pick

Mayne - 3rd round pick

Peake - F/S

Bradley - 5th round pick

Sandilands - RD
Broughton - RD
Duffield - RD
Grover - RD
de Boer - RD
Dodd - RD
Van Berlo - RD

(Missing from best 22: Palmer [top 10], Hayden [RD], Johnson [PSD], Crowley [ND/RD hodgepodge])

This suggests to me that when we're picking up the speculative late picks in the draft, it's the ones who spend more time at WAFL clubs who become more AFL capable in the long run.

I don't usually get on to the Freo thread but have been interested this year in Freo as I think this is the best crop of kids and consequently the best recruitment year for Freo since they started. You cleaned out a lot of senior players last year some of whom were very good players in their time and it will take a while for the club to overcome such a big turnover. I must admit though that you have been much better than I thought and this is due to the quick development of these kids. This is contrary to the Connelly days when kids just weren't given a decent go and were only thrown in when there was no choice.

A key to the development of kids IMO is that they have good players around them and unfortunately at Freo, some of the players who have been there were more interested in themselves than developing kids. I think that is almost over now and only a couple of those remain. You have a good nucleus now and will win finals with these kids. Hopefully the clun will recruit by working on depth over the next few years in their recruitment. I can't see you blowing your early picks this year and kids are given development opportunities now.

 

[yakamoto]

Good presentation Gravy. What is noticeable from this is that there are no interstate rookies(apart from Crowley) who have ever made a worthwhile contribution to our squad and nor have we been well served by players picked up late in the national draft. On the other hand most of the players we have traded in have been good value. Would we have done better if we'd kept all our draft picks? Who knows?