#3 Darcy "Darcy Parish" Parish - Shiel can play forward pocket instead

It’ll be ignored again, but there’s another reason Parish wasn’t played as a pure mid in 2017 & 2018.
He wasn’t fit enough.

Sources- numerous interviews with Darcy himself.
Shiel at the the start of this year saying “ the penny has finally dropped for Parish” in terms of the work required.

I know this doesn’t suit the whinging “I told you so” narrative, but hey, when did facts ever stop a Blitz opinion?

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If only we had some sort of panel of football experts, perhaps working with specialist fitness staff that are also employed by the club, who could ensure that a kid who grew up playing midfield and collected more than 20 disposals 16 times out of twenty games in his first year…was somehow fit enough to play midfield in his third year.

Oh, well. I guess we can but dream.

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Assuming we continue to play Darcy onball, which is far from a certainty, I predict that we’ll be having very similar discussions regarding Andy McGrath being played out of position in the back half of 2019 and going into 2020

I’m also interested in @CJohns comments on the podcast about learnings for Parish after the Richmond game. Obviously there is a lot that goes on that we don’t see.

Every chance the club has known that Parish is an inside mid, but that there were parts of his game, even in that role that needed work for him to go from a VFL inside mid, to an AFL inside mid.

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i think you’re looking for the goodbye woosha thread.

we tried that in 2012 and it didn’t go well

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I think you’ll find we’ve tried that every year for a long time.
Results vary.

indeed they do

I can’t believe he hasn’t signed up yet. I don’t want him to leave :frowning:

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Why sign now if you have a whole season to improve your value at Essendon (and for trading if it came to that). I like Darcy and see a lot of upside to him and want him to stay. No reason why he wouldn’t stay if can see he has excellent opportunities to be in a lock in 22. We are a destination club.

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I think Darcy started off the tombstone nickname for cal twomey. They seemed like good buddies in his draft year. And cal would have loved he ended up at essendon.

What a difference a few games make.end of last year Parish was stagnating, not really getting over 20 possies. And Francis was dominating in the backline at full flight.

Now there’s no spot in defence for Francis so he is playing/Working on being a utility up forward with less impact and Parish is killing it in the midfield

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He wont leave. All just part of the process.

I won’t believe he’s leaving until Reboot says it wouldn’t hurt us much.

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I’ll start off by saying that I hope he stays.

But regardless, we are in a better position now than what we were a few weeks ago, where if he did leave we would have gotten a second round pick at best. His value has gone up significantly the last 2 weeks.

But I hope he stays as he is part of a bright midfield future for the EFC.

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Errmm

Yeah, it should serve as a warning for all those on blitz wavering on McGrath.

Are some people genuinely wavering on McGrath? That’s weird.

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Blitz is a weird place.

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Only people with zero football intelligence

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I’m pretty happy with Darcy’s progress and what the coaches have done with him. Yeah there’s a question mark on why he didn’t play more inside earlier THIS YEAR. But overall he’s clearly rounded out his game with his experiences over the previous 2 seasons while also building a body size and an engine that his natural high intensity inside mid game requires. Not only are we seeing his elite handballs and clearance ability. He’s now showing some pretty nice open field uncontested chain work as well as popping up and kicking goals.

I think he still needs to sharpen up his decision making and execution with some of his field kicking (some of those crazy high risk cross-field kicks)…are they just simply a rush of blood/adrenaline? Dunno. But overall, he’s still made huge improvement in that area and it wasn’t until about mid last season that we actually started noticing he could be very damaging with his field kicking. I’ll put that down to playing and focusing more on HF/wing skills rather than just inside mid specific skills. It’s coming along.

Mid-way through his 4th season he’s now showing some A-grade level performances. As a top 10 draft pick you couldn’t expect much more. Some players don’t come on as quick as Zac Merrett (2nd & 3rd seasons) or Oliver (2nd)…they are rare players. Looking forward to see what kind of roll Darcy can get on this year.

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