Well if that is all so positive why did the club give up on Lee as a forward. I will take a guess and say it was because he was unfit, slow and had no defensive skills.
Of course he was unfit (if you mean in 2014), he had had both shoulders reconstructed in the offseason and it was reported that he kept on having ongoing significant issues with them throughout that 2nd season and it was blindly obvious that he was a shadow of the Lee who had been comfortably in our best team at the end of the previous season. (Like how Roberton really struggled in 2014 off the back of his major ankle surgery, after he was likewise very good for much of his first season with us). Lee was also being played in the unsuitable ruck role at times in those 3 games he played in 2013, as he replaced the injured Stanley for those 3 games, who had been playing that forward/ruck role.
At the start of the following year (last year) he struggled up forward, but I'm not surprised, as I think his confidence would have taken a big hit the year before and like happened earlier in his career in the WAFL, I think it probably just took a stint in defence for him to get his confidence back up and that's when I personally would have loved for us to have swung him forward again, to see if he still what he showed us in his first year, plus hopefully a more defensive game.
Apparently in one of our VFL games last year he was swung forward at half time after dominating down back earlier in the game and he kicked something like 2 goals 2 in the 2nd half and gave away a gimme goal as well, which is the sort of thing he wasn't capable of earlier in the year, which is when I would have liked us to strike while the iron was hot and see how he'd go with a longer stint forward (either for Sandy or us). But I think because the club were happy with Membrey and wanted to persist with him, they elected to keep Lee playing down back, where we may have more of a need for him going forward.
There is so much more to footy these days than just kicking goals and that is why a player like Plugger would unfortunately struggle.
That's correct, but the one who he would be replacing in our side is probably Membrey and he has a career average of 1.9 tackles per game, to Lee's 1.7 tackles per game, yet Lee so far averages double the number of goals per game and has so far shown that he is more likely to hit the scoreboard and personally I'd prefer to have someone who is going to kick more goals than someone who will have 0.2 more tackles per game. If Tim was having something like 3 or 4 more tackles per game that would be a different story, but so far that hasn't been the case. If we're going to persist with kicking it long and high into the forward 50 I think that also suits Lee better, as he has that extra 6cm, a longer reach and has a much bigger leap. This is more while Paddy isn't in the team though and Bruce needs more support, not so much if Paddy is in there and doing well and we want more far and wide running from our "3rd-tall".
And didn't Rhys Stanley play at CHF in that period?
Tom's first year was the year Rhys was being playing down back much of the time (looking at Rhys's stats for that year it looks like he was played forward for a few games in the middle of the year, but that was when Lee wasn't playing. Later in the year Rhys played in 5 of the 8 games Lee played, but only had two scoring shots in those 5 games and no inside 50's in the last 3 of them, which suggest he probably wasn't playing forward. The following year Lee was brought in for 3 games when Rhys was injured.