Hey guys, cool your jets.Gil and his corrupt mates no doubt will come up with some crap on-the-fly ruling to disqualify any top-ups that may help us and so minimise our chances of any small success this year.
Remember who said: “Leave out the bits we don’t need”.
I would put my house on it.
Or as Ivan said “OK maybe I would not put my house on it but you get the drift”.
I am curious about this too Albert, if the AFL side continue to finish strongly and start winning games with very few top ups and then most of the top ups qualify for the VFL finals, it may be deemed a bad look if the top ups are used to bolster the VFL side, which was never the primary intention of the top ups.
While the top ups were always a stop gap solution for the seniors, they are pretty much a pantheon of the best non AFL players available, and our reserves have also been playing well without many top ups with only 3 having played enough VFL to qualify for the finals so far.
I remember when we were banned from the finals in 2013, we didn’t bother bolstering the VFL finals side with any qualifying senior players, despite the fact they weren’t playing. We may choose to avoid the controversy of including too many, given that this will be the time when the 12 banned players can return to training.
Imagine the outcry if we field a side where there could be 17 EFC players on the field who have played senior football in 2016, out of those who have qualified there are already 12, and Francis, Crowley, Simpkin, Grima, Stokes could be added, acknowledging that Kelly and Dea won’t qualify given they have already played too many AFL games.
The problem is even if it is in the rules, if the AFL don’t like it, and they won’t if it causes bad media and lots of talk back complaints (don’t worry it would), they will get us back in other ways at a time we don’t want to be gotten back. I think of how they stopped Sydney from trading when they put Buddy on a 9 year contract, that wasn’t against the rules and they made them pay by a means that wasn’t in the rules.