The W-Train must be kept in the side!

[The Redeemer]

Why does Blake get Roughead? He was out-muscled and out-positioned a few times by Matthew Bate for christ sake...

Beau Wilkes is obviously a good set shot for goal. But one would argue Kosi is better.

Kosi is a better contested mark too although Wilkes is a little quicker and can possibly put more pressure.

Kosi for mine by quite a fair bit. Wilkes looked shaky in defence in the NAB Cup although he could have simply been a bit jittery due to playing his first competitive match for a new club in a little while. It is perfectly reasonable.

If he does not play against the Hawks then he would probably get a shot at the Eagles ironically enough as they have numerous quality talls and Jason Blake cannot take them all *that was a joke as Jason Blake will get killed by any of them

[AnythingsPossibleSaints]

Riewoldt in the backline would be interesting.

Support height wise for backlinw'
Opportunity for Stanley&co to grow away from Riewoldt's shadow.
What do we have to lose?

Agree. I don't believe we're in premiership contention as we are, so as you said, we have nothing to lose in trying it and seeing how Wilkes, Kosi and Stanley, who are all in form, plus Milne, Milera and co., go as a unit up forward. Plus it would make our defence about 100% stronger if we had Roo marshalling the troops back there and taking mark after mark, cutting off the other side's forward forays. We've seen him do it numerous times late in quarters, or close games (go back into defence, to help out) and has shown that he reads and marks the ball just as well back there as he does for us up forward.

Basically from the weekend, it would be Kosi into the forward line in place of Rooey and Rooey into the backline in place of Blake (or Gilbert, who is horribly out of form). I also reckon Kosi would step up with the added responsibility, as he has in the past.

One thing that made us so strong 2-4 years ago was that we had so much marking strength down back, especially intercepting marks from the other team's kicks forward. Gilbert, Fisher and Blake in particular would just take high mark after high mark (the ultimate example of this was probably the final against Collingwood in 2008 I think it was, when the three of them all took about 12+ marks each for the game), but now Gilbert has dropped right off in that department and Blake is not going as well as he was, so it's pretty much only Fisher who is doing that much now. Plus we have a "rookie" back there in Simkin. Adding Roo down there, especially if he largely played loose, would give us that marking strength there again and give us the chance to see if Wilkes will do a Heatley, or Podsiadly and hold down full forward.

He looked terrific while it was dry the other night (before the match became a slippery scrap) and even once it got wet he ended up kicking 3 goals in just 53% of game time, so there's every chance he would have kicked 4 or 5 as it was, if he'd stayed on for the whole game. Are we really going to drop someone who was on fire when we subbed him off and could have quite easily kicked 4 or 5 for the match? Are we really that good? Was it a Carlton, or West Coast in Perth, or Sydney in Sydney, that we just struggled to beat, or Melbourne, who have been thrashed all year? If it had remained dry and he'd played the whole match there's no reason he couldn't have kicked even more than 4 or 5, the way he was looking.

We've shown in the past couple of years that we can win without Roo in our side at all, so we can certainly win with him helping out and taking lots of marks in our backline and with these extra forward options that we have now playing forward.

I'd much rather we roll the dice and do something like this, which could put us in contention again, than just go on to make up the numbers in the bottom of the 8 this year, by doing "same old same old".

[God_Nel]

Anyone remember this? Roo is a natural backman!

[bigcarl]

Wilkes deserves to stay in as a forward.

Kosi is a ruck/forwrd whose form has been better than usual.

it's an awkward slection dilemma best left to the guys paid to make the tough calls.

[Dr Spaceman]

TooT TooT !!!!!

Don't you mean "Ding Ding"?

[philtee]

It's the Big Dubbleyer...

[saint6709]

think wilkes needs to be forward

[on the outer]

Could Riewoldt do a Richo and play on the wing with his size and pace he would be a handful, might prolong his career if he can get away from the crash and bash in the forward line, play Kosi, Wilkes and Stanley in the forward line.

[dragit]

Don't want sound grumpy but, he's going to need a better nick-name than W-train if he is to gain 'cult' status…

Double U, Just doesn't work like G… I think it's the 3 syllables…

Wocket?