That's the thing, it's not like it's a one off going for a mid in the top 10 instead of a KPF, it's basically happened four times in the past four years.
Ramsay (I know he's not a mid or top 10) over Stewart, Freeman (9) over McCarthy, De Goey (5) over Wright, then arguably Treloar (7 and ?) over Weideman (and ?).
It's hard to argue that we shouldn't have picked up at least one more KPF than we did while we had the currency. Now we essentially have Moore and that's it for the foreseeable future.
Definitely. When undertaking a remodelling of a list the way we did the best approach, IMO, is to work down in height so get your talls in, then your runners and lastly your crumbers. Theory is you work in reverse order so you stagger your list and have your mids and talls peaking at the same time. We did it in 10-11 with the tall portion of our list built 4-5 and 6-7 years earlier.
If we want to be hindsight heroes we got our rucks right, we got the tweeners right (Marsh, Langdon, Oxley and Scharanberg), we got the mids right (Treloar, JDG, Broomhead and Aish) and I'm confident the crumbers will be fixed this off-season when we bring Daicos in to compliment Varcoe.
There's obviously one key ingredient missing and outside Moore we haven't brought in a high level KP talent at either end in a decade (Reid and Brown previously). Substitute Kennedy for O'Brien or Freeman for McCarthy and our list is set, IMO. We can pull it back with clever trading and drafting (I'm almost certain the Reid's will be paired up in 2017), but we missed a trick there. Conversely you won't hear me potting the club for making 3 poor choices across 4 drafts (Maynard over Blakely hurts a bit as well) because overall the recruiting team has built a nice deep list which other areas of the football department have underperforming.
To pre-empt the comments I have no doubt the plan was to have Cloke firing on all cylinders, but that was always long odds given our history with guys over 30 on our list falling off the cliff and a lack of funding for the football department. Either way we've fallen down we just need to own the mistakes and make sure we do everything to fix it.
I believe we tried with Howe, but if we go one step further, get back into the draft and target Battle or trade for one of the players I mentioned earlier we'll be right.