I agree that the start of this trend coincided with the start of Knights’ coaching tenure, but I don’t believe it’s fair to blame him.
Afaik Sheedy held tight to recruiting and a lot of other functions that are not owned by the head coach in modern footy, and once he was gone the club leapt at the opportunity to decentralise these functions, give the recruiting team more autonomy from the coach etc.
I don’t think Knights had much say over drafting at all.
I wish we had a lot more indigenous players on our list. Is it a conscious decision by the club? I very much doubt it
Interesting comment.
You seem to be suggesting the club has say 2 names in front of them: one Indigenous, one not. We identify their racial background and chose the non-Indigenous player.
An extraordinary claim to be making.
What EFC need to do is, put money, time and resources into places like the Tiwi Islands.
The EFC need a full-time presence there, it has to be much more than once a year for a big trip with players. Although the kids and even the adults enjoy these times.
This will take patience, time and a genuine roll your hands up and getting into hard work, getting down and getting dirty attitude and it won’t go unappreciated.
As others have noted it’s likely coming down to our potential draftee rating system. Which a big factor is risk aversion.
We may often rate an indigenous player & expect them to get to be at our 4th rounder but they get taken by others as a 3rd rounder. And we valued other players higher at our 3rd at the time.
That’s fair enough at top picks.
But what’s not happening it seems is that risk aversion isn’t being discounted at back end of draft or via rookie selections where it should be.
Which is where we as a club supposedly at forefront of indigenous players in the AFL are no longer seemingly taking those risks.
We finally tried again with Eades after a long time not doing so, who’d actually done more than most in moving interstate and it failed.
As an example and I might be wrong I see very little difference between Guelfi and Mynott. The list managers even noted they were going to pick Mynott at Guelfi’s spot as well.
Not only did we go for a really safe bet with that rookie selection but a similar type player in which we just picked up.
Why not take a risk there? We should be doing so.
Our pacy outside mid depth, or even smaller fwd depth is so bad we retained Jerrett another year.
North took Gordon Narrier at rookie pick 20. Electric pace. Beautiful skills. Kicks goals.
I agree with Benfti completely for spitting dummy on it even if Mynott becomes a good player.
The Narrier type selection as a rookie should be what the club entertains often IMO
I agree with completely with that last point. I reckon we should just about be taking one every year and certainly should have this year
I may be on my own here, but I think trading for an existing player who has shown they can handle the AFL lifestyle is different than drafting a kid who hasn’t been exposed to it, particularly one who isn’t coming through the TAC (or similar interstate program). If anything, our willingness to trade for indigenous players who are already in the system would seem to add to the impression that the reason we are not drafting many is because of concerns over their ability to adapt to AFL due to cultural, family or some other criteria.
If you look at our Eades, Long and Walla selections the only one of those that came from a “risky” background was Eades, but he also moved interstate and played TAC cup after those days which seems to be what got him over the line. Long and Walla are well publicised, so don’t think I need to go into detail there to further the point :). To be honest it seems that even Lavender would fit into this criteria given the interactions we’ve had with his (I think step?) father on these boards and the fact that he was in various cricket pathway programs.
I really don’t think anyone in this thread is suggesting the club is deliberately not drafting players who are indigenous because they are indigenous. The argument being made is that the club’s criteria and way of rating potential draftees is structured in such a way as to make it very hard for draftees of indigenous heritage to be rated high enough for us to draft them. There may be very valid reasons for this, such as us believing coming from a stable and structured family life makes it more likely a draftee will successfully adhere to the requirements of being an AFL player from a lifestyle point of view and thus be more likely to get the best out of themselves, or other similar such reasons. It doesn’t change the fact that it would seem those criteria exist.
The long and short of it is that we do not draft a lot of indigenous players, presumably because we rate them lower than other clubs and thus they are gone by the time the pick we are willing to spend on them comes around.
that’s just so completely wrong- If Mynott becomes a good player then it pretty much vindicates the clubs selection.
I agree that there is a long term systemic issue. I wrote a pretty detailed post earlier on where I see this issue has come from. I completely support Ben in raising this. This draft hit him really hard on a personal level, which is completely understandable.
What I’m pointing out is it does make the point harder to make if the club has actually done a good job this year. We didn’t grab guys off the benfti list, but it looks like we did find some. The club should get some credit if this turns out to be the case.
On the drafting. I imagine it’s not even as simple as “background”, but a combination of about 10 things that rules out a large percentage of indigenous kids as an unintentional by product.
If you give additional weighting in your models to height and weight and being in the system, and mark down outside players or small forwards or whatever, you start to limit your chances of drafting an indigenous player before you start to consider anything else.
Just moving the conversation a couple of degrees.
This discussion has been entirely related to recruiting practices & and how these practices arnt inclusive of indigenous young people, but I think we can do much more inside the club as a whole.
It’s been mentioned that we will have a seat on the board at Tiwi Bombers. I think we also need to have a seat on the board at Essendon for an indigenous person. Whether this is an aditional seat or a current seat. Obviously Michael Long is the man we want, but it’s vital that if we are moving forward and championing opportunities for indigenous people… we must have indigenous leadership as a representative at board level.
It would be great to have that at a coaching level, but if we want to be the best club (which we say we are) at supporting & advocating for indigenous people, then there should be representation on the board.
get an Indigenous person to run for a seat and ill vote them in like any other person if their policies/ ideas are good.
In my head, whilst a love the romaticism of an X factor, come from nowhere, highly skilled aboriginal draftee.
I do get the policy of stability, but then I question our overt marketing of being such a supporter of getting the boys that have all the skill in the world, without the support networks available to most of us.
The regime of an AFL player is just so ■■■■■■ serious now, that again- as stated previously.
IF a requirement of a potential draftee is stability off field, it just removes the consideration for highly skilled aboriginal players with unstable backgrounds.
It removes the consideration for ANY player with unstable backgrounds, indigenous or not.
And this, I think, is the truth.
Ironically - could the implementation of a segregated Indigenous category that forces clubs to have a specified number of indigenous players outside the official list be the answer?
You know clubs would fill it with guys from “elite private schools”
Or appoint an indigenous person to the board as a non-elected director because they have skills the club needs. Just like any other non-elected director.
YES!
Fixed.