These next few offseasons will be more about drafting for the retirements of our older guys; Bellchambers, Hooker, Hurley, Myers and Zaharakis will all need replacing within the next few years.
We also need to keep adding to our to our forwardline - smalls and talls.
Small defender is a good call, McNeice will likely be replaced with an Irish lad. But we do need some backup for McKenna and Saad’s linebreaking ability.
They’ll still need to be replaced even though we have their successors lined up.
We have a good balance to the list and when these guys depart we’ll need to maintain that by replacing them type-for-type, but you’re right they’ll be the backups for the current backups.
Yeah with all the shenanigans regarding McNeice and the lack of clarity with AFL rules it is hard to tell what is going on with Ben.
I’d hazard the guess that last year he was technically a temporarily upgraded from the CatB onto the CatA list - so this year would be his 3rd and likely last.
He is rated for his leadership so I think he’d be given a VFL contract, hopefully, Myers is also given the Hocking treatment too.
I decided to revisit the AFL restriction on trading future 1st round picks…now, it’s a slightly murky area because the AFL did such a poor job of writing the rule…but I THINK the following is true:
We can still trade our future (2020) first rounder in the upcoming trade period.
Fast-forward to the next trade period 12 months later, and we will probably NOT be allowed to trade that first rounder because Parish/Francis will have dropped off the list of first-rounders in the past 4 years (leaving just McGrath).
So…if this coming trade period was your only opportunity to trade that 2020 first rounder…who would you target with it?