EFC: We’re reviewing the entire operations of the club, including list management.
Dodoro: The list is good. These are good players. There’s a problem with coaching and development.
EFC: (nods head) There’s a problem with coaching and development.
Fans: (nod heads) There’s a problem with coaching and development.
Dodoro: (to himself) That was easy.
Preach mate.
Every year we are not big, strong or fit enough. It’s not about finding players with talent for Dodoro, it’s continually picking players who struggle with the physical accepts of senior football.
Until Dodoro and the recruitment team are gone, it will be the same story.
You can say that this list is packed with highly talented youth and very exciting, you can say that Dodoro is terrible at his job and should be fired out of a cannon, but just want to point out that anyone saying both is being a tad contradictory.
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You can have the wrong fix of talented players to be successful
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Exactly…we all know talent alone isn’t enough.
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Not really contradictory at all. The whole system is designed to gift bad teams talented players through the draft
Are GC an example of a good list management team? I think we’d all say they’re one of the worst. But are they stocked with talent? Yes
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So 8 new kids a year, probably a touch higher than standard. Lots of later picks due to playing finals. There were certainly a few stuff ups in there (Harvey), but it wasn’t helped by two incredibly weak drafts (2002, 2003). The 48 also presumably includes drafted top-ups (or re-draftees) such as Haynes, Salmon, Camporeale, Zantuck, Alessio (2002), Davies (again, 2004) and Heffernan (2005). And those 48 picks had to cover the loss of Hardwick, Heffernan, Moorcroft, Blumfield, Jacobs due to salary cap screw-ups by Jackson.
Still, we also got Winderlich, Welsh, Ryder, Dempsey, Monfries, NLM, Lovett, Stanton, Dyson, Watson and Hocking. So a number of major contributors to the team in 2012, and a few who should have been.
Agree on Cripps. Have no memory of us being linked to him.
The most likely results in 2013 would have been taking Merrett earlier, and then Lobb with the Merrett pick who we were strongly linked to. The real question for that year is what we’d have done with our second round pick, and would we have chased Edwards & Aylett without the draft sanctions. If we keep those 2nd and 3rd round picks, there was a lot of quality that we might also have got.
That wasn’t list balance. That was:
a) Bad luck that a number of our promising KP forwards careers ended due to injury (Gumby, D Daniher)
b) A failure on the coaches behalf. If they’d correctly identified that Hooker was the right forward (who played forward at U18 level) we’d have had a 10 year forward 40 odd goals a year to build around. They chose the wrong players.
Its also a myth that you need a perfectly balanced list to win premierships. Hawthorn had no “BBM” when Hodge moved to the backline. Richmond (2017) & Bulldogs desperately needed more tall forwards. And often the period they’re balanced is very short; WCE had a ‘perfectly’ balanced list for about a 2 year window in which they won their premiership. And many of the premiership lists got topped up for flaws shortly before their premierships, but after getting close. The Saga took that opportunity away from us.
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Why would it be the coaches’ failure to move an AA key defender out of defence? The only reason we had to do it was because we didn’t have any key forwards on the list, and too many key defenders (which has been a common thing for us)
I’m surprised Melbourne haven’t thought about moving May into attack given their lack of key forwards
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Yep, poor Adrian has just had 20 years of bad luck.
Perhaps if we throw him into a volcano it might appease the footy gods and bring us good luck
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I’m a Dodoro fan, but I think the volcano idea has merit.
Anything to get rid of the curse of the footy gods.
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Do we have faith in RFK stepping up or do we need to target one of the best in the business ?
Step 1: Locate Kinnear Beatson’s address
Step 2:
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Adrian has become a meme. In this industry he is a meme.
Granted he’s on to his 7th coach in 16 years, the club was on the decline, the club then became broken, the club was then on life support, then all the focus was on internal economic recovery, but it still stands to reason that after 20 years he still hasn’t drafted a superstar worthy of kids putting up on the wall, let alone have any tangible success.
Hindsight stands for nothing when there is nothing tangible, he has nothing.
You can’t stay in the same role for 20 years when the rest of your contemporaries are playing for keeps.
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Should Adrian stay on as General Manager - List & Recruiting at Essendon in 2023?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
This thread does my head in. Talking about 2000-2005 drafts as if Dodoro has the same job now as he did then.
Should he go? Possibly, because the place needed a cleanout. But is it critical? Probably not if the review said that the problems were elsewhere.
The stuff about “never recruited a superstar” is garbage. The problem was that the superstars of the last generation lost the best 4 years of their career to the shtshow.
And then the next gen includes guys like Merrett who is every bit a superstar, if the club wasn’t mired in post saga garbage.
Anyway, I don’t have the review. I don’t know what the review said, and neither do most of you, so I don’t know the answer.
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Well said. Good balanced and pragmatic review.
We don’t know what the review said about list management.
Dodoro was asked it, and he dodged the question
Showed great agility.