WayneJudson42 wrote:meher baba wrote:
However, Lyon and the club hierarchy were of a similar mindset to some of the sillier posters on this forum and were therefore happy to see Harves go (and perhaps - although I hope this was not the case - they were already looking to bring Cousins to the club and thought that they wouldn't need both Harves and him).
What silly mindset do you refer to? That the current coahing team has made decisions based on long term success? Or that an over reliance on one player to be in your top 5 is unhealthy?
Herein lies the problem. People have stated that Blight would have ripped the soul out of the club had he stayed on... yet maybe, some tough decisions like he took in Adelaide might have seen us win a flag by now.
No single player is sacrosanct IMO. No matter how good.
Like it or not, we had to prepare for life after Harvey. Where do you draw the line?
With a high output player of Harvey's type, I would draw the line at the point at which either his form does not justify his selection in the top 22 (and that wasn't the case during 2008) or when he confirms that he has had enough.
I read post after post on here about "clearing out the dead wood", "getting rid of the players who will never take us to a premiership", "taking the tough decisions", etc.
Then I look at our actual list after the massive number of delistings and retirements under Lyon (20 odd in the space of 2 years) and - as I said in my earlier post - I see barely 30 guys of genuine AFL standard.
In the games in which he played fully fit during 2008, Harves contributed far more than Jones, Eddy, McQualter, Geary, Armitage, Allen, Begley, etc. will ever contribute. As a veteran, Harves had a minimal impact on our salary cap.
As far as I am concerned, he could have stayed on our list for another 5 years. If he was fit enough to play, he certainly would have been good enough. For more than a decade, he has provided a superb role model for every young player joining the club.
AFL is not cricket or soccer. It is a game which requires 22 fit players each week and where there is a relatively high injury rate. Competition for spots in the top 22 at most clubs is not particularly intense for most of each season. Over the course of over 4 decades of watching AFL, I have seen, on average, only 1 player where I've thought "why has it taken him so long to make it to the seniors" for every 100 where I've thought "this guy isn't ready/will never be ready to play AFL".
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
- Jonathan Swift