At the end of 2014, we brought in Ryder as another forward and to give Lobbe a chopout in the ruck - to basically play a forward line of Schulz/Ryder/Westhoff - which is what you wanted, remember? A third tall? Ryder > Butcher as a forward. It didn't work because Lobbe was only ever as good as the effort the midfield put in around him - as soon as he got a five year deal on the back of their hard work they were all 'The ****?' and stopped giving a shit when he was in the ruck. Why get beat up so someone else can get paid? Add to that the loss of our one true linebreaker in Polec for the year, and it was just a cluster**** of getting ahead of ourselves and not wanting to go again.
Fine, says Hinkley, and goes out to get Dixon to replace Ryder in the forward line, and puts Ryder in the ruck. 2016 rolls around, and we get zero, repeat, zero games with our prime combination because Ryder gets suspended and Schulz goes down and is never the same, leaving us with a forward line of Dixon and Westhoff and a Lobbe that no one wants to play with (and I say this with absolute certainty after seeing the stark change in performance as soon as Lobbe went into ruck against Richmond in the JLT). He get injured anyway and we are forced to ruck Trengove (who improves our performance not because he's a better ruck than Lobbe but because the players actually respect him).
Anyone who compares 2015 to 2016 is crazy. They are completely and utterly unrelated.
2017 will be the FIRST year we've had the forward line and structure that Hinkley has craved since his time here, with Eddy playing the Schulz role, Dixon playing the Ryder role and Trengove playing the Westhoff role...freeing up Ryder to ruck and Westhoff to basically move to where he is needed most. It will be the first year we have adequate depth in the Magpies through the likes of Snelling, Drew, Atley, Bonner, Lienert, Palmer, Austin, Frampton etc. that isn't just treading development water but actively and aggressively pushing for selection each and every week.
Ken said many times during the year to Chad Cornes to tell the Magpies boys to put in a good performance because we needed to make changes - but none of them managed to do so consistently enough that we could drop an established player and actually expect improvement. His methodology as a coach is that you get selected based on your own form, not on the loss of form of others. Say what you want about guys like Newton and Moore, but they put in consistent performances every single week in the SANFL - it's no surprise to me that our best period for the midfield coincided when there was adequate pressure from underneath to keep producing good performances. That's why we went all out and sacrificed our first round draft pick this year to get more depth through the mid - so our starting midfield would feel that same pressure from the reserves that they did in 2013/2014.
The only major change we are rolling with that is different from 2015 is Westhoff instead of White on the wing and a more mobile defensive unit to cope with the tendency for scores to be based on turnover in the modern game.
I'm still expecting top four. Unlike St.Kilda, our forward line is three dimensional - instead of three forwards that pretty much do the same thing, we've got guys like Dixon (contested mark/pack crashing specialist), Eddy (lead up specialist), Trengove/Ryder (athletic resting ruck), Wingard/Gray (opportunist small forward) and Young (balanced medium forward). Unfortunately for us, during the JLT we played two games in horrendous conditions against Richmond and Hawthorn and the other against an aggressively defensive minded team in St Kilda, so the opportunity to show any improvement in skill was greatly diminished - but I believe that our skills have improved and by quite a bit - 70% DE against Hawthorn in that wind proves that for mine.
There are no adjustments made by the coaches. That would imply that they instructed our players not to lower their eyes and kick the ball to someone other than Dixon or Wingard with long bombs, which is so ludicrous I can't even begin to contemplate the idiocy of anyone who actually believes it was part of the game plan.