#12 Will Setterfield

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. Couldn’t we play all 3?

I’m 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 he’s 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 can’t 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 don’t fire a shot - Parish was ok. Caldwell and Hobbs had minimal impact.

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What’s the point in him, we’d only play him on the wings anyway.

yeah fair but stringer isn’t a long term solution and the imbalance of the midfield group is still glaring.

my point though was this, if we’re 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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That’s 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 we’ve tried to do it repeatedly, but without success. Stringer hasn’t been able to be consistently fit, Perkins so far hasn’t 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 that’s fair.

but we’ve also targeted and spent good draft capital on guys who have exacerbated our problems - small midfield - smith, caldwell and shiel didn’t 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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I’d be getting in Brodie on the cheap. You can’t rely on only setterfield he is always injured. Need two bbm’s.

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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 ā€œwow how good is heā€

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He doesn’t have to be impressive. And i don’t see why we shouldn’t be eager to have him back. He clearly provides some much needed size and was playing good footy.
He’s 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

He’s 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 ā€œwe’re in serious trouble ifā€¦ā€ takes.

We’re 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.

We’ve 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 can’t 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 it’s going to be competitive with the best. At times this season it has looked to be very competitive even now. And we’ve 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 we’ve been happier with our small forward stocks, but they still need time. The rest I’d 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 don’t 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 there’s one thing we really should have learned from the last decade it’s ā€œthere aren’t easy fixesā€. We need 100 games into the core of our next flag. We’re starting to build that, but there’s still a bunch that that have a while to go. From the top of ā€œnext flag team candidatesā€ it’s 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 …

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That’s 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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