Prior to Libba going down i thought 10 to 12 wins minimum as we won 7 out of 15 last year before the wheels fell off.
When Libba went down, yep bottom 4. Then the Collingwood game pre season and was confident of 10 to 12.
Other than griff we lost nothing player wise with the best group of young players getting more experience
I had similar thoughts as you lachy but could see other players coming more important as the year progressed. That Collingwood practice match was a turning point. You could see it in Buckley's demeanour after the match that he knew that he had screwed up and quickly changed Collingwood's game plan in the following weeks to be more like ours. (Buckley is just not clever enough to be a good coach). Our new game plan was just so Hawthorn-like, running with overlaps and dead-eye-dick deliveries.
I thought that Wallis, Libba, Dahl, Bonti, Stringer, Macrae, Wood, Hunter, Smith, Talia and JJ would all be first class players ably supported by Ayce, Roughie, Jong and T Boyd. Going to the practice matches I could see Redpath coming through and I thought that he would kick a bag of goals. I could also see that we recruited well and all of the new recruits would be keepers.
I guess that Ayce, Talia, Jong and T Boyd have not as yet done as well as I expected and Redpath hasn't kicked a bag of goals. Pleasant surprises to me were the continuing good form of M Boyd, Picken, Morris and Murphy. Others to have done well so far are Crameri, Dickson and Stevens.
So I did a ladder predictor and came up with 14 wins. And... a premiership. We might do better than 14 wins. After a bit of a lull in form we are about to pick up and hit peak form. If the Baby-Bombers did it then why can't the Bulldog Pups. Like the Athenian said in a previous post, "Expect the unexpected."