Midfield Woes: Instant fix

Lets just do what collingwood do. Draft and trade in nothing but mids. That worked well! Ants is 100% correct. We are a couple of good inside mids short, but have players developing for that role. Yes, we need to look at midfielders in the draft/trade, but its long way off train wreck you are making it out to be.

1 Like

Essendon: Josh Kelly & Anthony Miles
GWS: Essendon 2017 & 2018 first round picks
Richmond: Essendon 2017 third round pick

1 Like

fixed :sunglasses:

3 Likes

If we gave up 2 first round picks for Kelly i’d be pushing for a second round back - like Collingwood got in the Treloar trade.
Then they can have that and another second back for Hopper.

2 Likes

Do you mean we get both Kelly and Hopper in that scenario?

Yeah. Ambitious?
Effectively
Two firsts for Kelly with a second back.
Two seconds for Hopper.

I don’t know what the GWS academy looks like next year but a mid table second round and an end of second round pick equates to pick 13 - which would be fair for Hopper.

It won’t happen, but I would be in permanent climax mode if it did.

1 Like

It won’t, but these are the pages for dreams.
The maths on the picks works. If you could convince the players it might suit them to come together it would be great.
I’d be happy to give up three top picks to solve our midfield issues for the next 10 years.

Not sure how it works giving up 2 firsts and a second with the rules.

1 Like

I would certainly be offering Kelly over a million a year and GWS 2 first round picks for him, in my opinion he is going to be the best player in the league in the next couple of years.

Yep agree.
As a fall back option I’d offer up our first and second for Hopper and Devon Smith

Random thing I discovered the other day looking through team lists for players we might target: Devon Smith is the only giants player under 181.

We have 12.

2 Likes

Team name checks out

12 Likes

So you are saying we have interest in Miles?

4 Likes

Haha, I meant to go hunt this down earlier.

Hoisted.

Interesting that last night outside of Goddard, we didn’t have any midfielder over 28 out there. Midfield still has to be the off-season priority, but it might not be quite as desperate as it seemed. I also think if Watson retires Bird may get a stay of execution.

2 Likes

This is a crazy idea. Why not put Begley up forward and move James Stewart into the midfield. He has speed and agility and who knows…

1 Like

It’s not that crazy, though it won’t happen. I did have this thought also, last night. He’d be the biggest midfield ever, lol. But …nah…one swallow a Summer does not make. (nor a pregnancy)

4-5 better midfielders than we currently have to make up our best-22, before we can be a great team? How do you figure that? And how do you figure we’d go about achieving that?

1 Like

Personally im quite happy with a midfield core of hep, merrett, parish and mcgrath for the next 5 years…all can be or will be elite. Not many midfields kicking around with more than 4 elite mids.
Depth potential coming from mutch, clarke, laverde, langford, fantsia, tippa, redman. Myers and bird provide some more depth for a couple years too
Yes we need some more, ideally inside mids but its hardly panic stations

I did write that on the back of the brisbane loss and I’m generally glass half empty these days too, but I still think it’s true. To be clear, I’m not saying we need 4-5 Martin/Kelly quality players, that Merrett needs to be our 5th best midfielder.

My fundamental argument is that generally when a team has thought they were just missing one really good player, the truth has been that they were missing more than that. Maybe we’re different, maybe not. Anyway, here’s my reasoning:

First, I didn’t say 4-5 midfielders to our best 22, which is an important distinction. I think our depth needs improving, and a lot of our current depth is likely to be gone next year (Bird, Howlett, Stanton, Hocking).

Second, related to the first, our injury record in the midfield this year has been excellent. We’ve lost very few games from our first choice midfielders to injury. I’m not saying we should plan on crippling injuries, but at the same time it would be foolhardy to assume a better than average injury run.

Third, we will need to replace some good/very good players over the next 1-2 years, and replacing those players only keeps us level, it doesn’t improve us. For example to keep our best 22 as good as it is for next year, we need someone as good as Watson’s current form. That’s not his peak form for sure, but it’s still decent. Goddard is near the end too, even though he’s playing on next year.

Fourth, as I’ve discussed ad nauseum in other threads, I think we have some issues with over-specialization in our midfield and the only solution to that is to bring in some all-round players. That’s a structural issue which by definition cannot be fixed by a single player.

Now, obviously we have a bunch of young players in the VFL, but until they’re actually playing regular senior football you can’t just assume they’re going to be good players. If Laverde, Mutch, Begley, Langford all establish themselves as first choice midfielders then, yup, one more really good player will probably take us over the top.

As for how we got about achieving it, it’s really difficult, and if I was put in charge I’d make a hash of it. I’d maybe try trading down the order a bit for multiple picks. Lower chance of getting a good player than using a decent first round pick, infinitely higher chance of getting multiple good players. I’d definitely look more at trading a pick for a player than multiple picks for a player.

2 Likes