He’s advising Hinkley
Expect Batchelor to find a CUB, though I worry about Hartung.
With apologies to Peos.
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I don’t rate Ports trade period as highly as ours. As others have said, Motlop can be BOG but also can go MIA not just for periods but for games, months and sometimes seasons… Also is in the absolute twilight of his career. Rockliff is a great player, and I would have been more than happy with him at EFC, but again he is in the last 2-3 years of his career and has serious question marks over his ability to be ‘the man’ in the middle.
Watts is another that I actually think can play footy but got stuck in a bad position at Melbourne… but again very inconsistent and also will be 27 next season.
So its still a positive trade period but I compare that to our bunch and I don’t think it stacks up at all. We have Smith who is younger and with more upside than Motlop. Smith has had two years ruined by injury but I have full faith we will get him fit and this guy was considered up there with guys like Kelly, Cogniglo, Green et al… Supremely talented and still under 24.
We also got stringer who can play forward or hopefully mid. AA level player still under 24 with plenty left to prove. Would easily have the same output as Rockcliff and has far more upside.
You then would say that Watts was most valuable as a floating HB sweeper… a role that Saad can play or alternatively he takes a defensive post and allows Hurley to play that role. Add the fact that he is still young and has guts, heart and pure commitment to the contest and he beats Watts by a long way.
Not to mention they had to lose Lobbe for practically nothing… a very handy ruckman and classy back up player to Ryder. They also lost Trengrove, a highly rated key positional player… impey and ah chee as well… who were the ‘smalls’ expected to deliver the x-factor… and suddenly it starts to feel like they just moved deck chairs imho.
As much as it hurts, I think the real competition was FC… who did quite nicely in the background and the trade of the year (perhaps decade) has to be that Freo deal for weller… one trade to rule them all… unbelievable stuff.
I am absolutely biased but there is no doubt in my mind that we had the ‘best’ trade period this year bar none. 3 ready best 22 players… all young and with plenty of time to develop further. A week later and I’m still smiling.
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That ■■■■■■ auto correct on my phone.
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Wasn’t ever really available,… everyone knew it.
Can we say props to Dodoro for one or more of the 3 taken late in such a “shallow” draft ? Alternatively will he be **** canned if they are a bust ?
Assuming the team will be in the 8 for at least 2-3 years its going to be hard for even 2015, 2016 and moreso 2017 draftees to make it for years, if they last that long.
He nailed trade period though. 3 ready made young guns. If any of the draftees picked this year are pushing for selection, id say weve done well with our draft position
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can GAGF
I’m still wondering what this is/was…
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Get one of the 4 players selected to hit a 100 games and then it’s been a massive success.
As I understand, it is still happening but it is a little while off being announced for reasons I’m not fully across.
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assuming its a player - do we even have any spots on the list left?
maybe the ‘big recruiting news’ isnt an incoming player?
I’m intrigued.
A rioli?
Me to.
But seriously wondering what big recruiting news could possibly still be coming. Short of a cat B that you wouldn’t think will be making a difference any time soon I can’t see what it could be, or how it could be “big”.
For the Rioli men, it is a rite of passage that irrevocably leads to this one day.
When they are just boys, they are sent thousands of kilometres away from their Melville Island home. By the time they are young men, they are running onto the MCG on grand final day, ready to paint their unique family story on football’s broadest canvas.
Maurice, Dean, Cyril and now Daniel, the young Tigers forward whose four goals a week ago helped put Richmond into today’s grand final against Adelaide. They were all teenagers when they travelled south to seek their football fortune and there are still more on the way.
Maurice Jr, the 15-year-old son of the late South Fremantle and Richmond champion, will board next year at Scotch College, the Melbourne school where Cyril lived and studied before he joined Hawthorn. Brayden Rioli, Daniel’s younger brother, also plans to play football in Melbourne next winter.
“It’s the age where, if you really want to make it, you have to get adjusted to city life,’’ says Dean Rioli, who followed Maurice to South Fremantle and played for Essendon in the 2001 grand final. “We have been fortunate really; four Riolis have gotten to play in a grand final. It is a special day.’’
Throughout Richmond’s finals run, Daniel Rioli has regularly sought the company of Dean and Cyril, his family and footballing elders. Although they are technically cousins, Daniel calls both men uncle. They meet at Cyril’s place, where Dean and his brother Sabbo are staying. Football is often on the TV but rarely part of the conversation.
Daniel is just 20, playing in his first finals series. Cyril is an established star of the game. Daniel says that at the start of September, Cyril told him what to expect. “He said it was going to be gut running and scrappy and all about our forward pressure, our blitz pressure around the footy.’’ Beyond that, neither Cyril nor Dean tell Daniel how to play. “We understand that when you are
in the bubble, you have your instructions from the coaches,’’ Dean says. “We respect that.
Really, we sit on the couch and watch the footy together and enjoy each other’s company.’’
Throughout Daniel’s teenage years away from home, time spent with Cyril kept him chasing his football dream. When Daniel first came to Victoria from Melville Island, he was 14. His parents had enrolled him to board at St Patrick’s College in Ballarat. He arrived in the middle of a typically bleak winter.
Rioli remembers his first day at his new school. “We got to the boarding house late and it was cold,’’ he tells The Weekend Australian. “I didn’t even know where Ballarat was. I thought I was going to go to school in nice weather. Then I found out it was 11 degrees.
“I’d never gone to school with that many people or had so much work and homework to do. I remember ringing my mum and telling her ‘I don’t feel like doing this, it is too much.’’’
Belinda Rioli told her son that Cyril — Junior as Daniel calls him — lived close by in Melbourne.
“Every weekend I got the chance I’d go to Junior’s place and stay over. Dad told me that Cyril went through the same thing when he went to boarding school. He wanted to go home and he stuck it out. I ended up sticking it out as well. I couldn’t be more thankful for that.’’
Since joining Richmond, Rioli has developed a unique relationship with the Tigers’ coach, Damien Hardwick. At the end of school, Rioli needed a place to live. Without a host family to billet with, he moved in with the Hardwicks; Damien and Danielle and their three children, Benjamin, Isabelle and Imogen. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement but after a few months, Danielle Hardwick asked if he’d like to stay on.
“It was nerve-racking living with the coach — pretty frightening,’’ Rioli says. “But I took the hit and said ‘no worries, I’ll stay.’ ’’
Two years later, Daniel has no plans to move out and the Hardwicks would be distraught if he did. He and BJ are good mates and on Monday night he escorted 17-year-old Issy to the Brownlow.
Damien Hardwick says having Daniel around has made for a happier home. “He came in and he gets on well with all my kids, my wife loves him and he has actually bought my family closer together,’’ he said earlier this year.
Every night before a match, the Hardwicks and Daniel Rioli dine at the same Italian restaurant. Their regular table was expanded last night to include Daniel’s parents, Dean Rioli and his daughter, and Maurice Jnr.
Sue Leadan, and Helena Kalippa Rioli.
Sue Leadan, and Helena Kalippa Rioli.
Dean Rioli was teammates with Hardwick at Essendon. On the field, Hardwick was renowned as a ferociously competitive, flint-hard defender. Off the field, he is one of the more convivial figures in the game. “The Damien you get at home is not the Damien I knew on the footy field,’’ Dean Rioli says. “The Hardwick family are a beautiful family. They have warmed to Daniel and Daniel brings a lot to their family.’’
As with his uncles, Daniel Rioli doesn’t talk about football when he’s home with the coach. Instead, they talk about movies and binge on episodes of Friday Night Lights, a US television series about a high school coach and team in a football obsessed Texas town.
Hardwick likes to talk about fishing and life on the Tiwi Islands. Daniel has promised to take him there the first chance they get. “He wants to know everything about home.
“We talk about how to get mud crabs and fishing and shooting. He wants to come up. I’ll take him over and show him around a different environment.’’
It will be a different environment for every player tomorrow. No one on either team has played in an AFL grand final. Each will have been told what to expect but nobody knows for sure.
There are certain things, however, that every Rioli knows.
In 1982, Maurice Rioli played in a grand final for Richmond and won the Norm Smith, the medal awarded to the best player on the ground. That day, he wore number 17 on his back, the same number that Daniel will wear today.
In 1993, Michael Long, another Melville Islander and part of the extended Rioli clan, won the Norm Smith playing in a premiership for Essendon. Two years ago, Cyril won the medal and played in his fourth premiership for Hawthorn.
The Riolis and Long all come from Pirlangimpi, a former mission on the west coast of Melville Island. That’s a total of eight AFL grand finals, six premierships and three Norm Smiths from a community with a population of about 370 people.
Plus whatever Daniel and his Tigers can do today.
Could these boys be in our NGA Academy?
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Maybe one of the staff???
yeah could be - is that really ‘big recruitment’ news though?
Yeah could be!!!