2004 / 2005 - The draft's that hurt us!

[saintsRrising]

However, take the father/son picks out of the picture, and their drafting record – given the picks that they have had and those they have blown – is far worse than ours over the same period.

All that terrible recruiting must have really hurt them…..NOT!! I’ll leave it to you to work out which club I’m talking about here.

How can you take their father sons out??

Admitedly they got a great boon from this...but if you going to exclude their father son pick ups and they have quite a number..... then you are taking out a great swag of other potential picks and hence players that they may have had.

A better comparison would be clubs who did not have this bias.


And you say that Andrew Mackie is a player who has never amounted to anything?

[meher baba]

sRr - fair enough about Mackie. I wrote the post in a hurry (I have to earn a living!). Looking back on my notes, I had categorised him as a problem player who had taken a while to make good and then mucked up with that. He became a top line player in 2007 (in other words, over a longer period of time than Raph has had, but never mind about that).

But that leaves us with 2 dud first round picks, six dud second round picks and 2 dud third round picks.

Our performance over that period was no worse and arguably a bit better, in that our only stand out duds were Watts, Brooks (x2 as he consumed two draft picks), Houlihan and McGough. There were then a number of grey area players like Knobel, Ferguson, Guerra, Raph and McQualter.

I don't quite get your point about the father/son rule. I was counting up the dud picks made by Geelong and comparing the situation to the Saints. As you can see, they were - if anything - even more inclined to make dud picks than we were. If they hadn't had the father/son picks, we can only assume that they would have used these same picks to recruit a mix of reasonable talent and duds on the same ratio.

But, if you like, we could look at, say, Port, the Hawks or the Swans: I doubt that the story would be much different at any of those clubs.

[To the top]

Let's get the facts straight.

It was not the top of the draft picks that have hurt us (comparative to other clubs).

It was our attention to the list overall, and our failure to turn the lower end of our List, embrace Rookie List players and generally search out every avenue for new, exciting talent.

Brooks, by example, was recruited as a potential long term ruckman, and his credentials supported that assessment, as did his development at North Adelaide and as did his games before suffering the knee injury he suffered.

He was a work in progress, and remained a work in progress after his rehabilitation - except he was not rucked - he played principally as a forward.

So where did the development go?

Watts was highly regarded by Craig, and was pencilled in as the CHF for Adelaide. He performed well at Woodville-West Torrens including kicking 10 goals from CHF in a Preliminary Final, in a far, far tougher competition than the VFL.

He ran to injury problems, and was discarded.

Raph Clarke has his future in front of him, has been decimated by injury and has had the impediment of playing out of position on players with more mature bodies than he has. - because of our dearth of "tall" defensive options.

So I have no problem with the recruiting of these players. I may have an issue in that Brooks and Watts were discarded one season too early but I have a bias toward a need for KPP/Ruckman type players as the core of any side - they do not grow on trees.

It is the fact that we retained players between 18 and 40 on our list, the types we recruited to "improve" the cailbre of that ranking and that we did not turn as we should have embracing youth - and we did not embrace the Rookie List.

We did not take the opportunity to build the depth of our list - and that is what is hurting now because if we had, and we had have embraced youth, we MAY have discovered just one or two players who would now be entrenched in our League side.

And that is all it takes.

Am I correct in recalling that Pfitzner (3 years) and McDonnell (2 years) were our Rookie List for a couple of years?