That’s not quite true. Gold Coast’s drafting decisions bewildered me and a significant number of others in the recruiting circles I was hanging out with at the time.
Swallow and Bennell were no-brainers and we’re only derailed by injury and off-field issues, no arguments there. But Day was a reach, Caddy over Heppell was laughable, I didn’t particularly rate Gorringe, and Tape was clearly too small at afl level to play the kpd role that was really all he could play. They were extraordinarily fortunate that Richmond whiffed their pick and took Conca, leaving Lynch to fall into the Suns’s lap at 10 or so, even tho he was clearly the best kpp in the pool.
What you’ve got to remember with draft coverage in the media is that it’s a feedback loop. Very few journos or commentators watch u18 games. So they get their opinions from club recruiters. Then the media hype builds around players and more people start watching them more closely, and so it goes, into a snowballing mound of groupthink. It’s worse online than it is in actual club-land, but it still happens there a bit. Everyone keeps hearing people raving about player X who they don’t rate,and it’s human stuff to wonder ‘everyone else likes him, what am I missing about this bloke?’
And that goes double for the GC/GWS drafts, where really only the recruiters from those two teams mattered, so they were the people journos spoke to. Guys like Gorringe got hyped up cos GCs recruiters liked him.
Gorringe must have shown enough through the junior pathways to get his opportunity for the SA under 18’s - The way Gorringe portrays himself is as some ‘hick’ who stumbled into footy - His portrayal of his ability is to make dollars.
The AwFuL basically sent them to a camp, you are the young talent in football, go and make this club great, you need money, no worries have some, just stay there.
Soul sucking waste of what football is about, if you want good football keep it to the roots.
Dan played 9 or 10 games that year in Norwood’s league side and was impressive in several of those. He needed to bulk up quite a bit so don’t think he was ready to be thrust into AFL straight away
Injuries have been Swallow’s real issue, not development or coaching or anything like that. Not helped by having to carry far too heavy a load in the Suns’ midfield as an 18yo, I suspect.
Swallow’s one of those guys who was good enough not to need coaching or development particularly. He was dominant at VFL level as an 18yo even before he was officially drafted. But his injuries cost him speed and explosiveness and change of direction and consistency of football.
I would listen to Humble on this, he had been, at that time, an avid watcher of the U18’s and drafting. He knows what he is talking about.
I agree that some players may have developed better at a better club but that wasn’t Swallows issues, he was a good player who had a ,lot of injuries. However did the injuries come because he was carrying a soft midfield against big bodies too early, or was it because he was injury prone. Chicken and the egg.