Adrian Dodoro - Flankers into Mids since 2000 (Part 1)

It’s possible (sorry for the nightmare scenario) that none of the 5 players I listed will succeed. But it is not appropriate to assess the recruiting team’s performance whilst ignoring the 2016 batch. All we can do is judge 2016 on what they have achieved so far.
If we said to other clubs - we will swap all of our 2016 intake for yours, my guess is that 17 clubs would jump at the opportunity of having andymc & co on their lists.

I think its one thing to draft players, and I think Dodoro and his recruiting team have done a great job over the last few years. Every draft analyser in the past few years have rated our recruiting at the highest end of the draft.
However it is then the clubs responsibility to develop and build these players to get them ready to play AFL, and I think this is where we have failed.
Last year the club were forced into playing the young guys and we found Fantasia, Tippa, Parish, Langford, Laverde, Redmand and Francis.
This year there wasn’t much of this happening, and I wonder just how much work they do with developing these young guys.

This is not Dodoros fault, and those calling to move him on cause we haven’t won a final are misguided.

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Yes you are right in saying it isn’t just Dodoro making all the decisions. I asked the question because I take tanking to mean losing games on purpose rather than trading out ones best players.

I definitely wouldn’t propose that kind of tanking. We wouldn’t be the next Richmond we’d be the next Melbourne.

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Only if you for some reason think that both he is the only element in determining if we can win a final, and that he hasn’t had his hands tied a lot.

McGrath aside, we don’t know if any of those players will make good AFL players, let alone players who will make us finals competitive. The most recent draft is always a fruitful if you ask most supporters. Players are all future champions until they definitively prove otherwise.

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You mean apart from that two year period I mentioned (in this thread, months ago) where two seasons back to back we were top 4 in the league for I50’s? Mid-table for points against/Rebound 50s (does anyone know where to get D50 entries stats?). So our midfield seems to have been pretty good then. Especially when you consider both years got wrecked, one by injuries and the other by events near the end. Both of which would have effected those above stats.

And of course, the period directly after that two year period was wrecked by this little thing we call the Saga.

Does anyone know when the board finally got rid of the direction that we were aiming to play finals every year? My memory of it was that it was after we’d missed a few finals, so probably around 2008.

Does anyone think Dodoro was the one who decided that we would give all the saga players a free pass to return to the club?

Does anyone think Dodoro is the one to say we do not trade out top players and rebuild from the bottom 4?

Because we know the top one came from the board, and I’d be surprised if the direction on the other two weren’t board driven as well (any clues @Catherine_Lio if this direction is board level? ) . We know for years the recruiting team was underfunded, and that it was a part-time job for Dodoro. Saying carte blanche that the fact that we’ve missed finals for 13 years is all Dodoro’s fault without taking elements such as these into consideration is not being fair or rational.

I’m of the view that recruiting has been better than average. My concern is the general philosophy of EFC to list building, and I do think Dodoro hasn’t been great with the low cost trades. The first I suspect/believe is probably from higher up the food chain than Jacket sits in.

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Can you show me where anyone at any stage has said its all Dodoro’s fault? What you seem ignorant to is the fact that 1 of the very few constants through the years of failure has been Dodoro. You also seem to never quantify what level you think a list manager should assume & simply deflect all criticism with irrelevant excuses. IF Dodoro isn’t going to the board & coach every year with trade scenarios he can achieve then he has failed his job. If he’s actually doing this & being ignored every year then again we need a better list manager who is able to do his job rather than be the mushroom you like to paint him as. Again, the guy has been at the club longer than just about anyone, at some point of some year he simply must assume some level of responsibility for the list - he’s the friggin list manager. You seem eager to attribute any & all draft & trade successes to Dodoro but none of the failures.

IF you or anyone can at the very least give us the name of this person or person’s who’ve been preventing Dodoro from getting trades done & who’ve been forcing him to draft project talls & flankers who we hope will become mids, then I’ll join you in calling for them to be sacked. Do you have some names or are you actually oblivious to there being an issue? You say you believe we’ve drafted better than average so surely that means our coaching for 15 years has been well below average (or do you have some other explanation for continued failure). Funny I’ve not seen you in the “sack the coach” threads. At least we can say we’ve tried to fix that problem but strangely no change in fortunes. Is there any point in that time you believe our list might have been some factor in our ladder position? Do you think any clubs list management has played any part in their success & failures? For somebody who spends so much time defending Dodoro you don’t seem to place much importance on his role - do you not see even a little conundrum there? If it doesn’t matter who he is because others are actually responsible for the state of the list or the state of this list isn’t a major factor in success, then why not replace him?

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Anyone else finding the Dodoro thread repetitive and boring?

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Anyone else finding the Dodoro thread repetitive and boring?

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I actually think it’s a bit niave to blame Dodorro for not getting trades done.

Yes he’s responsible for nutting out the details with the player manager. But do we think it was the Hawthorn list manager that attracted all those players to their club. It’s as much a factor of the coach, president, CEO, directors, coteries etc who convince players to join.

Imagine being a top line player who wants a career in the media and you meet with Eddie and he says I can help you with that if you come to Collingwood. That’s going to crap on anything Dodorro can do.

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Truth is we’ve been in that sweet spot where we’ve been bad but not that bad.

We’ve had a single pick 1 (McGrath), a single pick 2 (Gumb), and then pick 5 (Hurls) and up from there. A heap of pick 8-12 sorta picks which can be a bit of a nowhere zone in a lot of drafts: go a riskier kid who might be a top pick or settle on someone who’s a bit of a boring solid citizen.

It’s also a lot harder to build through the draft now, what with the 2 extra teams, and the zillion compo picks, and academy random pick re-ordering. We have done the overall strategy much worse than the actual talent selection IMO.

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Not really.

But I do think he’s had 14 years to build a midfield, and he didn’t draft Cyril, and Myers is a truck, and we have too many HBF’ers, and Steinberg isn’t as good as Parker, and it’s time for a change, and Francis isn’t fit, and we never land a big fish, and why did we draft Goddard!, and why didn’t he draft my fav non-Essendon player, and Stringer played for Bendigo so we missed that one too, and we need big bodies, and Disco has been here too long, and we have too many HBF’ers.

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Bud Dodoro just had these installed in his office!

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Our midfield was good when Watson (a father son selection) was among the top 5 players in the league and the best center square player going around.

We have been kissed on the ■■■■ with regard to father son. Arguably our best player from this decade (Joe), last decade (Jobe) and the one before (Fletch) have been father-son selections, though you could argue Hird (whose drafting was influenced by his parentage) was a better player than Fletch.

I am not sure you would need to argue much about that at all.

No doubt in my mind that Hire was a better player. But considering Fletch played about 150 more games, comparing their contributions as players isn’t that simple.

I maintain Jackets is good at his job, it’s been particularly hard the last 5 years, actually probably more when you factor in all the compromised drafts during the expansion years

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That’s not quite accurate, if you consider ‘found’ as ‘succeeded with’. Only the 1st 3 are regular players. And of those, Walla was with us for a few years, and Parish was a #5 pick and always going to make it.

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