One big thing
Whoever is the boss of their trading has a real complex about playing hardball during negotiations.
The laughable request they made when we wanted Caddy was pick 19 + Hurley, for a kid who’d looked passable in about 10 career games to that point. Rinse and repeat for Gorringe, Prestia, O Meara. Invariably the player is somewhat ambivalent about staying, ends up leaving anyway, the club gets a worse result than was initially offered.
GWS have almost always been accomodating and they’ve gotten some good players back - Dom Tyson got them J Kelly, they dealt out Treloar, McCarthy, Bugg, about a dozen others. The only time they’ve sooked and moaned was T Boyd but they ended up taking an offer for him a few days later.
It’s also not hard to believe that behaviour by GWS building much better working relationships with the other clubs.
That’s a good point.
The President carried on like f-stick over O’Meara last trading period. Publicly refused to trade him to Hawthorn and threatened to send him into the PSD. The only thing that did was to get the easily excited among Essendon supporters to openly hope that he did indeed end up in the PSD so Essendon could take him. Was never going to happen and only resulted in the GC looking foolish. Again.
The club’s best moment thus far was when a rugby league player kicked the winning goal after the siren. There have been very few good moments for their fans. It’s hard to envisage them having much success for the foreseeable future. Will take a special kind of person to get them believing and performing well. It will be a long haul.
Pretty much all comes back to this. He almost had that group into the finals in 2014 but the Ablett injury basically ended up costing them the place, and Bluey his job. They went backwards picking Rodney
That was a bad decision by GC. They were 9-5 at one point in that season then when Ablett went down they lost their way. McKenna had improved them gradually and probably deserved the benefit of the doubt. Eade was sold a lemon though in terms of the cultural problem he encountered. I don’t think anyone else could’ve done a better job inheriting what he did and the injuries they had to key players in his tenure. They have to rebuild and pretty much set a charter of what that club stands for, which they really didn’t do from the start…
Anyone who reckons even 1% of the Suns’ problems are game plan related is off their tree IMO.
There’s fair criticisms to be made that Eade, and the Suns in general, have failed to develop leadership and character over his time there, there’s certainly plenty to be said about choices of recruits, but not gameplan.
Eade has re-invented himself 3-4 times. Sydney’s attacking side of the 90s, almost invented the flood when Sydney’s personnel dropped off, took the Dogs to 3 consecutive prelims with no key forward at all, got a fair bit of credit when he was at the Pies too - and their game plan really went down the ■■■■■■■ when he left. He will find work.