Stick on 2025 Member & it would be a good pack.
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And that is just the starting point.
When it comes to list and drafting, you need to over compensate with talent….. especially when you’ve got as many barriers as us.
Most people think that, just because we’ve got a few talented kids, that’s good enough.
It’s not. We’re competing with 18 other clubs who are better run organisations, have a better culture, and have more talented lists than us.
You must over compensated, to be a top 4 side.
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I think we are right on the precipice of heading this way. We still have some wiser, good, older heads. Once they go, it’s just kids teaching kids. Probably have 2 more seasons before this joint turns into an even bigger hell hole than it currently is.
how many of that group are going to be out and out stars?
Caddy the only one we can see. Marto
the rest end up B grade at best
We’ll never succeed if we’re so scared of failing we never even try.
I think it is harder than ever. Mechanisms to improve this off-season:
FREE AGENCY (we aren’t getting any)
TRADING (maybe we get someone here but we seem reluctant to give up established senior players in the name of making the list better)
DRAFTING (of the picks we have, one will be a guaranteed stuff up, we aren’t going to hit on all of them)
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENT: Improving the players we have takes time. Getting them healthy is now going to take time.
Getting them:
a) all healthy at the same time
b) all in form and playing cohesive football at the same time
Can safely say it has rarely happened.
Hard agree. We had a whole decade or more after the 2000 team fell apart, Sheedys last years included, of being poor.
The Saga set us back, but our underlying culture has been the root cause of our ongoing mediocrity. That started much earlier. The same culture that kept Dodoro at the club for 15 years too long and the same culture that leaks to the media every time we have a bad loss.
Simultaneously, the good clubs get better each year. They set the trends and innovate.
We sit back, look contently at our trophy wall and contemplate bringing back the flash mob….
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wonder if we could help out another club with ‘buying’ salary via highly paid players.
Lachie Whitfield (circa $900,000), Jack Steele (circa $900,000), Rowan Marshall (circa $900,000)
Nobody thinks that.
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I think there’s elements of coaching, development, luck, fitness, etc. In terms of pure list, as you noted the hawks basically brought in a whole new forward line at the end of 2023. Chol, Watson, Gunston, Ginnivan, and Dear weren’t on the list in 2023, and were 5 of the top 7 goal kickers in 2024 and all kicked 25+ goals. Essendon brought in Gresham who didn’t kick 20, and Caddy who didn’t kick 10. So while our forward line was better than theirs in 2023, we didn’t improve it.
Experience wise, we started 2023 with 10 100+ game players on the list and 16 sub twenty game players, the hawks with 7 and 24. Of those inexperienced players the only ones who played double digit games for us were Hobbs, Menzie, and Davey (3). For the hawks it was Bramble, Maginness, Reeves, Meek, Ward, Brockman, Blanck, Greene, Mackenzie, Weddle, and Seamus Mitchell (11). So they were, as they say, “playing the kids”. We played three kids, none of whom you’d say have really come on.
The other interesting thing to me is the bracket of 50-100 game players, we had so many old guys. Of our 10 players in that bracket the only one under 25 was Ridley (the other 9 were Snelling, Setterfield, Weideman, Phillips, Hind, Stewart, Redman, Guelfi, Laverde). Of those players, Stewart played 0, Setterfield played 10, and the rest played most games in 2023. At the end of the year Stewart, Phillips, and Snelling were gone, Weideman was demoted and Setterfield managed 4 games the next year. So you might look at a games played list distribution and see this big chunk of players in the “about to break out” experience bracket, but in reality it’s a lot of mature bodies who for various reasons just hadn’t played that much and didn’t have any more improvement left in them. The hawks by comparison had 6 players in the 50-100 bracket, all of whom were under 25, and all of whom are still playing.
Edit: none of which is to say it was obvious at the time that the hawks would improve as quickly as they have or anything, or that you couldn’t look at other similar lists and get very different outcomes, because the actual players and coaches and everything matter a lot. But that chunk of inexperienced mature guys propping us up in 2023 did annoy me at the time, and it did us no favours in the end.
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I think we’re on the way, provided we nail our picks again this year and get our high performance sorted.
If we can nab a FA like Bailey and draft/trade in another elite talent next year, we’ll have a fair bit to work with heading into 2027.
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Then we have to go out and get washed up hack players like Darling,Caleb Daniel etc becuase no quality senior older players will want to come
In my eyes, the two key differences between hawks and us are:
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Mitchell is a far better, and forward thinking coach than Scott. Better relationship builder too.
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hawks have had a clear unified strategy since 2021. We have had no such thing
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You clearly don’t get on Facebook and Twitter
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Wasnt Rutten a realtionship building coach too how did that work out of us
Rutten might well have been a relationship building coach. Sam Weideman was a key forward. Just because that’s what he was trying to do doesn’t mean he was any ■■■■■■■ good at it.
Where has this narrative that Rutten was a “relationship building coach” came from? Is it another blitz myth
No idea. Doesn’t really matter if it’s true, though. Someone being bad at something doesn’t indicate whether or not it’s the thing they’re best at, or that the thing itself is valuable.
How he was viewd at Richmond
Clarkson also instilled a culture into the organisation, which transcends player turn over.
If the people around the players are stable, understand their roles, and know what the club stands for…. Then you’re one step there.
There is also a culture amongst the playing group, which is about hard work and getting dirty defensively….. that’s a Clarkson culture.
Our culture is every man for himself, take more from the club that it gives to you, and valuing political self interest
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