Firstly
Firstly to compare Acres, who pretty much played 998 per cent of the year as a winger /half forward and was lucky to play maybe 100 minutes total as an inside mid combined to players like Oliver and Cripps is just silly. If you want a fair comparison of clearance ability for guys who have played on the wings
Gaff, Sidebottom etc.
There is a signinficant difference between playing on the ball and playing on the wing. More importantly the way Acres is switched across positions across the ground means that it is more diffuclt to find a consistant high level of clearances. Compared to Cripps who pretty much plays soley as an inside Mid as does Oliver
.
But who's suggesting that he should be finding a "consistently high level of clearances"!?
Do you really think I don't know how much harder it is to win clearances when playing on the wing than it is when playing on the inside?
It's not impossible though, hence Sincs having 39 of them this year, despite spending from what I observed zero minutes playing in the middle.
Yet he still managed to have 6 in one game and 5 in a couple more, which is more than Blake has had in any game in his career- despite having spent considerable time playing midfield in some games and having also played plenty on the wing, like Sincs was.
And of course it would be silly to compare Blake's clearance winning to that if the likes of Bont/Cripps/Oliver from an overall perspective, but that wasn't what I was doing.
What I was doing was pointing out that they had games of high number of clearances (eg. 7, 8, 9, etc) within games of their debut, at 18/19/20yo, whereas Blake hasn't even had a 5 in a game, in four seasons and 44 games.
Surely if he has this natural clearance winning ability that I'm suggesting he doesn't have like those others do he would have snuck in a 6, 7 or 8 game or two somewhere along the line. Like he snuck in some high disposal quarters.
Oliver like I said had an 8 and four 7's within 13 games in his first year, including a 7 in his very first game and again in his 3rd. Within his first 13 games Cripps had had two 9's, two 8's and two 7's, etc. And they did this when they were just unfit "pups". They didn't need to have lots of games there to start showing this ability. It came almost instantly.
If Blake was within cooee of these types when it comes to natural clearance winning ability he would have shown it by now and we'd have had him in there more, because it's not like we've had a Sydney like plethora of inside beasts.
The club would have a better idea of this than any of us and the fact they hardly play him in there speaks volumes to me, as they would have seen how he goes there in training, in the VFL, and the AFL, and if he was better than I'm suggesting he is at it, they'd have surely had him in there more to put it to good use.
Now I'm not saying that he can't or won't get good at it eventually, but at this stage I don't believe it's a strength, which is why it's probably hard to pinpoint his best position at the moment.