Worst selections

[supersaints]

No such thing as Tanking " Andy" told me.

The AFL will suddenly decide there is such a thing as tanking , the Saints as "Sepertankers" will no doubt be the club taken to task. We will be fined much more heavily, than the Demon " non tankers" were fined for not tanking.

Further the AFL will stand tough and fold the club and give all of our players , draft picks , money allocations to the Essendon football club to help them rebiuld after their unfortunate player infractions.

Makes sense really......

[spert]

I'm sure AR has seen all he wants to see of the playing group now, and in the interests of making the team at least competitive for the good of everyone, it needs to be settled, so no more chopping and changing.

Settle on a backline, midfield and forward line for the rest of the season (injuries permitting), especially the forward line..and just persist with a group of players no matter how good or bad they play from week to week. Players who are in and out of the seniors this season should just go straight into the seniors and stay put until round 22.

Are we going to be any worse? impossible...it's already the worst Saints outfit I've ever seen in over 40 years of supporting the club.

All this nonsense about Roo playing up the ground should be abandoned- he has a big heart, but is near the end of his career with bad knees, and is no good below the knees..put him at FF. Milera and Dunell on the half forward flanks, Bruce at CHF, Murdoch and Saunders back in, and AR needs to be a bit more adventurous in his coaching..take it from there.

[Bluthy]

Instead of trying to stay as competitive as possible in the immediate term, we are instead looking to finish in the last few for several season in order to gain the cream that you need to be a top team.

Good post sRr, I think this is the reason that we will be very hard pressed to expect a priority pick any time soon.

Deliberately shedding All Australian stars and a decent ruckmen approaching his prime has really decimated our ability to compete… it's hard to cry poor when we have largely made these trade/FA moves on purpose.

The injuries we have suffered this year have meant that we have gone from a poor side to an uncompetitive side, but I don't think we can expect much sympathy really.

So how long into next year when we are being thrashed yet again do the media start seriously throwing the "tank" word around and what does that do to the morale of the club? What if a leak comes out like at Melbourne about the inner sanctum not really wanting to win? That almost destroyed Melbourne. If we trade our star players because we don't care much about winning now isn't that basically tanking? Its the systems fault. Lets put the goddamn system on trial!

It wouldn't be hard to argue that with our list profile in 2012, the only hope we had of challenging again in the next ten years was to sacrifice some older talent and recycle it into young talent.

If we'd kept Goddard, NDS & McEvoy, we would only be delaying our current predicament... Except we would have much less young talent coming through than we do now.

Strategic list management is different to throwing games on purpose. Pretty sure we aren't trying to lose, we just have the worst list in the comp.

I basically agree with the full rebuild process but I'm just starting to realise the dangers of how we've traded our stars away for high draft picks that apart from this year is debatable how judiciously we've used them. Even if we did something similar back in 2000 we had quite a few priority picks rather than trading up. If Monty or Gilbert are traded then the media may well start asking why a team being beaten by a minimum of 10 goals every week and often by 100 are not trying everything to be competitive. That then begins to feed on itself with players seeing the tanking headlines, questioning things at the club. The media then feed on itself and start investigating and our club leaks like a sieve, I'm sure they could get some kind of quote that could start an AFL bonfire. It can be a cancer that infects everything like at Melbourne. We have to be very careful. I'm hoping with less injuries next year we will be more competitive but if Hayes and others retire who knows. And I'm now for keeping Monty and Gilbert. Perception is reality.

[bozza1980]

We are managing our list.

No question we could have retained players and fought tooth and nail for a 14-16 place finish and found ourselves where we are now in a few years but without Riewoldt, Montagna and co to lead.

But none of this is news, the club has been extremely up front about it, ofcourse there's been the occassional "we aren't putting a ceiling on it", but for each of these there has been 10 "we will build through high picks in the draft" or "we won't pursue free agents in the next season or two" it doesn't need an advanced degree in investigative science to understand what this means....

Short term pain, (for hopeful) long term gain...

[saintsRrising]

I remember an interview at the start of this season where it was outlined that we would not be chasing any high profifle Free Agents for at least two seasons.

[gringo]

I remember an interview at the start of this season where it was outlined that we would not be chasing any high profifle Free Agents for at least two seasons.

They never said they wouldn't try to lure gws and gcs kids with money and opportunity though.

[plugger66]

I remember an interview at the start of this season where it was outlined that we would not be chasing any high profifle Free Agents for at least two seasons.

They never said they wouldn't try to lure gws and gcs kids with money and opportunity though.

No they didnt but that isnt FA where the player must be at least 26 years of age which is to old for us at the moment.

[saintsRrising]

I remember an interview at the start of this season where it was outlined that we would not be chasing any high profifle Free Agents for at least two seasons.

They never said they wouldn't try to lure gws and gcs kids with money and opportunity though.

There is a difference between kids and ready to play established FA stars.

We need to be already about to push into the finals before you try and grab them.

[saintsRrising]

Super-tank confirmed:

While others within the industry have noted that the Saints chose to trade Brendon Goddard, Nick Dal Santo and Ben McEvoy and thus sped their own fall to the bottom, Pelchen said the club’s decisions were made to ‘‘accelerate’’ the recovery – in essence that the club wanted shorter, sharper pain.
‘‘A number of issues have contributed to the decline of our player list in recent years, but those decisions within our control have been made to accelerate the recovery," Pelchen said.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/s ... z37sQnXQ9u