Is that you Brad?
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He may suck. If he is recruited and looks to be going well preseason then play him, he might actually do ok. When he played VFL and kicked 5 goals he looked better than 2mp and he gets a game for us. I wouldn’t expect him to suck, but my expectations may differ from yours and you might also feel what we have on the list is going to be better for us, which I don’t.
I don’t expect him to ‘suck’ per se but it’s rare that a tall comes in and plays very well from the first season. Midfielders and some smalls yeah but not KPPs generally. Would love to be proven wrong because we really don’t have many others who can play centre half forward, Jones is too skinny
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Davey will be 21 next year its almost time to plonk him at CHF and kick it up high like we did for his dad.
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Then allow players to be traded wherever the fark a club wants, it’s their to protect clubs that are at the bottom from being constantly routed, which they are, but the equalizer is a club being able to send you to whatever team offers the deal they want for whatever reason you want.
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Likelihood is that he will ‘suck’ if we draft him.
Has to be what he is being offered when decision is being made. So if you lowball a player and he leaves then you get less compensation
Free agency has nothing to do with clubs, its there solely for the players - to enable them freedom of trade after being drafted to a club.
With Kelly and Heppel gone we are light on for defensive flankers. There is an argument given our defensive efforts that a fast defender with good kicking skills might be a bigger priority than a tall forward
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I think Saad El Hawli could be a good option from HB.
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Yep for sure.
Roberts, not sure on his defensive awareness/skills (haven’t seen enough) but he from a kicking ability could be one too.
I keep thinking back to a couple years ago when Langford trained the whole pre season in the backline, then we must have had injuries or something and he went forward and yeah smashed it. His composure and ability behind the ball could be amazing. Tom Stewart like. But then you lose the forward…
If we end up finding more small forwards, what about Guelfi?
Yep spot on a roberts saad backline instead of Heppell and kelly will make us much faster
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Would love to see us somehow get into the first round with an additional pick and enough points for Kako.
Pick 1: Sam Lalor/Jobe Shanahan/ Murphy Reid
Pick 2: Kako
Pick 3: Xavier Lindsay
Forward options accelerated in pick 1 to go with Kako. Start building around Caddy, Kako and our first pick.
Xavier Lindsay start to add foot skills out of our wobbly turnover prone backline. More to then add to the backline footskill quality from there
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The compensation is there to protect cellar dwellars, if the rules are changed so a player can be traded to another club without having to agree nee direct where they go then fine open it all up more, gorth would be able to use draft and salary capital more but its hard when players can nix deals, if they want professional benefits like FA, deal with professional consequences too
Basically every single time Langford has gone behind the ball, we’ve seen why we were fortunate this was never considered as a full time move.
He’s a forward only because he cannot work out defensive positioning. End of.
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He seems a little too smart a footballer to not be able to figure out how to play a cog in the backline if given a full preseason to learn the game plan/defensive setup.
Feels like you are selling him short.
Cannot be worse than Martin who he would be replacing in said theory.
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Martin was in defence for run and distribution. It didn’t quite work as he got too much ball deep in defence and didn’t calibrate his risk taking/execution well.
We still need that, and Langers won’t provide it.
We need Roberts and El-Hawli to come on then marto gets released again.
We need Ridley Redman and McGrath to pull their fingers out and play consistently well instead of once every month.
The defence has been terrible but I think the capability is there if they get their heads and attitudes right.
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Recruit two gun small forwards and cannon all the ones we currently got
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Shanahan has had a much better junior career. Calsher Dear being this good this quickly has been kinda crazy… he really wasn’t great last year. He came on a fair bit towards the back end of the season but prior to that was extremely inconsistent… would have games where he may as well not have played, but to be fair to the lad, his dad had just passed away and I imagine he was going through some stuff.
Dear was extremely raw. The one thing you could say is that he always showed a willingness to throw himself at contested marks, and when he was playing well he had sticky hands.
Its one thing that I’m still a little concerned about with Shanahan. I like my key forwards to be competitive animals, and I don’t see that a lot from Shanahan. He’s got the right package of traits for sure, and can take a contested mark, he just doesn’t have that kind of confident swagger. I was a teenager when Wayne Carey was at his best so I guess that’s always been my exemplar of what I want a key forward to be.
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