If people don’t get this, it is probably a genuine reflection why we are coming up short when it comes to promoting reconciliation.
To be an agent of change you have to have a progressive approach. Not a conservative one.
Not everyone is progressive, and if EFC isn’t, it shouldn’t pretend it is.
Can you say for sure this is a deliberate thing the club is doing?
Rumour leading into the draft was we were into kyron Hayden. Now at pick 48 we paused and ended up taking best available in Houlahan and North picked Hayden before our next pick.
Could it be we’re just missing the indigenous players we want rather than something more sinister?
Ok, i’m going to pick on a lot of arguments made in this thread, and I’m going to start with this post. Mostly cos i don’t think you actually read it very well yourself.
Of the nine players you list here in your omgterrible litany of failure, four have played 100 games or more for EFC, plus Lovett wasn’t far off and Tippa will certianly make it barring injury or other disaster. Four out of nine players reaching 100 games is a staggeringly good drafting strike rate, especially when several of these guys were very late picks. And while you’ve missed a couple - Jetta, Atkinson, other Long - that doesn’t actually change the numbers very much.
Did you consider going through the list of NON-indigenous late-round draftees over the same period? I bet the strike rate would be nothing like as good.
Now, to start picking on other people’s posts, cos some of the lazy mantras being trotted out in this thread to justify a worrying pattern in our drafting is starting to ■■■■ me off…
Let’s talk about ‘best available’ for a moment. What IS ‘best available’?
Best available is NOT ‘played the best as a junior’ or we wouldn’t bother having a draft, we’d just hand out blokes in decreasing order of the number of B&F votes they got at the u18 champs. Best available is also not ‘highest ceiling’ or Dayle Garlett would have been drafted top 3 and Tom Lamb top 5.
Best available varies from time to time and depending on situation, but it’s perhaps most commonly understood in a drafting context as ‘expected value’, the probabilistic concept - the ceiling of a player, modulated by the probability he reaches that ceiling (and then there’s stuff like positional needs which do affect real-life drafting decisions, but we’re talking best available, so I’m going to ignore that for the moment)
I’m sure no clubs actually assign numbers and do that calculation, but the concept holds. You have to estimate the risks of a player not making it. Every player has these risks of one type or another. But it’s up to the club and recruiters what weighting to give various risks in their drafting decisions.
‘Indigenous kid from a remote community who’ll need to adjust’ is a legit risk that you have to take into account when drafting. But so is ‘skinny and not sure how much we can bulk him up’ and ‘pampered private schoolkid who has received the best of the best so far so might not have much improvement left in him’ or ‘bloke who plays as a utility but we want to play midfield’ or ‘history of injury’ or ‘needs to get more of the ball to cash in on his disposal’ or ‘has ratbag mates and likes a cone’ or ‘bad kick’
It looks to me that in the last decade, EFC has simply refused to take risk #1 on that list. Any or all of the others have been fine, but if you’re indigenous and from somewhere remote, do not bother applying. Even tippa and Eades and the Longs had to move to Vic before they got a look in.
As has been extensively pointed out, this trend started WAY earlier than the Saga. Pretty much the moment Sheedy was removed, our indigenous recruitment dropped off a cliff.
Compare and contrast the paths onto the rookie list for Tippa and Ambrose. Both rookied straight from the seconds. Ambrose rookied of one unremarkable season, while Tippa - who was even at VFL level a clearly superior player to Ambrose, and who had consistently out-performed him - had to go around three years running before we even considered him.
This was, in fact, a case where we clearly did NOT go best available, even from our own reserves team.
Exactly.
But we’re also in an era currently, where society is asking the question: are we inclusive of diversity? And; Are our policies discriminating against particular groups of people.
We need to also ask the same question of our club.
So I understand you are saying this is racially specific: if so I disagree
So the real problem is our ‘self-promotion’ as an indigenous advocate?
Finally, we are not doing enough.
(FWIW. I’m glad that this discussion is actually a discussion.)
The club is just coming out of a nightmare the likes of which has not been seen, and is all about “The Comeback” story, rebuilding the club and going for a flag while we have everything going to our favour. Our Indigenous recruiting future lies in the Academy, which is now back high on the agenda.
I have little doubt we’ll be back up with other clubs as far as list numbers go within about 3 years.
There’s just been,… you know…lot’s of “stuff” going on & getting in the way of these things …
It’s already been raised there, and there was a resounding lack of response from any of the board members or candidates other than a “yeah, but it’s not DELIBERATE…” from @Paul_Cousins
This is very much the point
I don’t want a week full of fluffy videos from the top end of players hugging kid and being welcomed to country and talking up how important the top end is to our culture, And then wiff again for the 10th year in a row when it comes to actually building that culture.
Fine, be risk adverse. I don’t agree with it, but I can understand it.
But shut that ■■■■ up. I
Yes, that my real problem right now, is come to terms with our drafting statagies a long time ago.
It’s the promotion that grinds my gears, and it isn’t even that.
Paddy Ryder did quite a few things wrong when he left Essendon (and before) but it was definitely a contributing factor as to why he left and in turn chose Port Adelaide
If you look at one year in isolation, or even a few, yes. But this has been happening for 10 years Yoss
To be fair to the board members,
It’s not usually their place to be commenting on recruitment policies.
But bringing to their attention is important.
Hey guys.
Interesting thread.
I do not wish to speak in secrets, so I won’t, but the amount of time and effort the club is putting into NGA’s in West Arnhem and Tiwi surely will speak for itself. The fact that the club now has a board seat at the Tiwi Bombers surely shows our commitment to growing and creating pathways in the islands. Our entire AFLW proposal was based around creating a pathway for our Tiwi and West Arnhem girls coming to the club.
I can understand frustrations around perceived lack of drafting of indigenous kids, but surely we draft for talent and missing skill at the club? I am sure that everyone hopes that the numbers will start to turn soon. The JHA has recently opened it’s doors to NGA kids also, and I believe there is a fair few indigenous kids in that intake also, as well as multicultural kids.
To say the club is risk adverse in drafting doesn’t take into account Eades, Gach Nyuon and to some extent, even Stringer this year.
There are some big things coming for the NGA program, some included in the plans at Tullamarine that I can’t speak about yet (though Xavier may have mentioned them…)
The club has challenged itself to push for a stretch RAP with really strong commitments to the local and national Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander communities that is currently with Reconciliation Australia for approval (and I’m hoping we get).
I think to suggest there is something deeper going on at the club when it comes to indigenous affairs is pretty unfair, if I’m honest.
Agreed, Walla is the most self motivated individual I have seen at Essendon in 60 years. He saw where his life was headed and did something about it, for a young man to willingly leave home, move to the other end of the country to an unknown culture and lifestyle took an enormous amount of courage and for some clown to claim they had something/anything to do with it is a downright insult.
They clubs been saying its putting effort into those regions and committed for years but we haven’t drafted anyone except a guy that we made jump through about 50 million hoops and eades. or someone from club royalty.
without the benefit of mind-reading tech to uncover the true motivations of the people making the decisions, none of us will ever know whether this is deliberate or not.
But the pattern is there.
Maybe we are just missing out on the indigenous players we want. consistently. year after year after year after year. But maybe that means we consistently rate indigenous players lower than other clubs.
As for Kyron Hayden - well, I saw very little of him tbh so i can’t say much about him as a prospect off my own knowledge. But again, risk profiling. We skipped Haydon because we thought he was less good or more risky or both than Houlahan. Houlahan comes with a bunch of his own risks - skinny, low-possession-getter, blokes whose main athletic attribute is his leap but who we want to turn into a midfielder. We valued these risks as less risky than Haydon’s risks. Were they/ Maybe, maybe not, I dunno. But it seems we ALWAYS rate the risks on indigenous kids higher, or we’d draft more of them.
And all that’s of course assuming we were ever interested in him at all. Clubs have been known to spread disinformation about their drafting intentions in the hope of misleading rivals about their intentions.
So do you think there is some sort of racial ‘slant’ on the way the club is selecting players, and want to expose it?
or
Do you just have an issue with us promoting ourselves as indigenous advocates, when we don’t consistently have a large number of indigenous players?
VPMs gonna VPM…
Whats the big secret? Got something to say then just say it.
Isn’t it interesting then that probably one of the biggest positives to come out of the misery of that period was Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti
More B than A, but both