He would have held one of Butters or Rozee though, that big strong body in those conditions would have held up well in the early onslaught
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Me neither. Couldnāt we play all 3?
Iām hoping in 6 weeks we can get setters supposed 3 week recovery time down to 2 weeks
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Come on now Wilbur, enough is enough
We need you back!
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We must be getting painfully close to sending him for season ending surgery.
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that heās leaving such an enormous hole says so so much about our list.
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Last night certainly showed how much this bloke is needed in our midfield mix.
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Certainly agree with this comment.
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Yeah it says against teams who have their best mid group on the park we canāt cope without our two biggest bodied inside mids fit and firing + our big powerful ruck missing
Magnified when majority of our other contested ball players donāt fire a shot - Parish was ok. Caldwell and Hobbs had minimal impact.
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Whatās the point in him, weād only play him on the wings anyway.
yeah fair but stringer isnāt a long term solution and the imbalance of the midfield group is still glaring.
my point though was this, if weāre missing a guy we picked up in an after thought trade for a third round pick this badly something has gone seriously wrong with the list build.
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Thatās a bit of a glass half empty view of the Setterfield trade, to be fair. We clearly identified a weakness, targeted a guy to address it, got him very cheap, and he addressed a desperate need and became an integral part of our midfield very fast.
Everyone with eyes has known for some years that we needed to add size to the midfield. And weāve tried to do it repeatedly, but without success. Stringer hasnāt been able to be consistently fit, Perkins so far hasnāt been able to step up from cameo hff guy to regularly impacting midfield guy, and blokes like Martin and Tsatas at this stage are still just too young and skinny.
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yeah thatās fair.
but weāve also targeted and spent good draft capital on guys who have exacerbated our problems - small midfield - smith, caldwell and shiel didnāt change our mix, stringer was always a long shot as a mid lets face it. the balance of those targets considering the players we already had was terrible
setterfield was a good acquisition no doubt
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Iād be getting in Brodie on the cheap. You canāt rely on only setterfield he is always injured. Need two bbmās.
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We are in serious trouble if we are banking our midfield hopes on him even when he was playing i wasnt impresed seems just another plodder Myers mk2
Not a player that makes you sit there and go āwow how good is heā
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He doesnāt have to be impressive. And i donāt see why we shouldnāt be eager to have him back. He clearly provides some much needed size and was playing good footy.
Heās actually a crucial component to our midfield until we can get some ā ā ā ā ā ā ā size in there and stop recruiting twigs and midgets.
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There were a few games early in the season where hes gone missing
Heās not alone there but the guy adds MUCH needed size and we were playing better with him in the squad.
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I love the āweāre in serious trouble ifā¦ā takes.
Weāre in serious trouble for 2023. We knew that. The consensus here was we were well in the hunt for the Harley Reid cup. Anyone who suggested we were a top 8 possibility with a good run of luck was shot down as being mad.
Weāve performed better than expected in 2023, but no one really expected us to be contending for a flag. As the season went on and the younger guys who have been good have tired, is it a shock that we canāt compete with teams with mature, experienced midfielder. Especially with our heart and soul ruckman missing?
Our midfield unit needs more time. And to get Tsatas in there. In time itās going to be competitive with the best. At times this season it has looked to be very competitive even now. And weāve mostly moved on from Shiel being an integral part of it as well.
We still have list gaps, obviously. A quick look around this site suggests that at times this year we have thought we are missing a BBM, a KPD, a running HBF, a KPF and a small forward. Or multiple of all of that list. As the year has gone on weāve been happier with our small forward stocks, but they still need time. The rest Iād suggest could be in a similar position over the next little while as some of our younger guys start to put together a larger body of work that suggests long term improvement.
Are we in serious trouble anywhere on the list? I donāt think so. Do we have to continue to improve right across the list of we want to take the step from a 7-15 team to a 3-6 team and then a 1-2 team. Yes. Most of that improvement has to come from within though. If thereās one thing we really should have learned from the last decade itās āthere arenāt easy fixesā. We need 100 games into the core of our next flag. Weāre starting to build that, but thereās still a bunch that that have a while to go. From the top of ānext flag team candidatesā itās Merrett (201), Parish (145), McGrath (129) and down. Guys like Perkins and Draper are just past 50 games, while guys like Durham and Martin are barely 40.
We need to keep building and improving, but we also need patience (still!). I think this year is different from 2021, 2019, 2017 in terms of the players that are taking us forward. I hope anyway ā¦
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Thatās true i just think with where we were sitting and looking a lock for 5th or 6th that our expectations should have changed to what it was as the start of tthe year.
But that dosent matter now accepting mediorce is our dna
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