)FB: Attard Maguire L.Fisher
HB: Goddard S.Fisher Gilbert
C: Montagna Armitage Gram
HF: Schneider Riewoldt X.Clarke
FF: Allen Koschitzke Howard
R: McEvoy Dal Santo Ball
I/C: Van Rheenan Steven Hayes R.Clarke
IMO we are in a very good position right now, we have an almost perfectly balanced list and the development of our youngsters are becoming EXTREMELY important, I believe that we will maintain our core group, they seem to love the place and I doubt that any of them will wan to leave anytime soon...
What is truly important is whether or not Gilbert, McEvoy, Armitage and Allen can become the great 250+ players we need them to become...
We also need Van Rheenan, Steven, Raph and Howard to somehow force themselves into our starting 22.
This is a very significant time for our club in the long term, how the young players we have now will determine our success for quite some time.
Hyptothetical 1:
Our young players come good....
With the retirement of Gardiner, King, Harvey, Blake, Gehrig, Hudghton and Milne we are going to have a big turnover over the next few years.
IMO our team will be contenders for atleast the next 2 years, when we start losing players we will need players to step up, if these young players and the players we recruit in future pre-seasons can fill the void we should be competative for another few years, so we should be competative until 2013, this would be great for the club and it would put us in a position financially so that we would never have to move interstate.
Hypothetical 2:
Our young players are young duds....
We are still competative for the next 2 years, however when players start retiring we have no way of filling the void, this leaves us with a very weak team, one that would probably put us in the bottom 4, so we would get some good draft picks, however by the time they come good we would have lost our core group, so we would have to continue drafting and wait for that crop to come good.
This would leave us being contenders for the next 2 years and then in the rebuilding phase from 2010-2015, this would be terrible for the club, memberships and sponsorships would drop and the AFL would make us their bitch....
We really need to focus on developing these young players, they are so important to the club right now, we can only pray that our recruiting staff made the right decisions however there is nothing we can do about that now so we need to make the most of it, I would love to see the club bring down Hamill, Voss, Peckett, Burke and Leowe etc. to play a sort of mentoring role with our younger players to teach them what it is all about...
This is a crossroad for our club, Ross and his team must be aware of this, I just hope that they are doing what needs to be done...