Remaining competitive

[MC Gusto]

The fundamental premise of maintaining the old brigade on our list was to remain competitive whilst blooding youth.

Clearly not working...do we rethink what this means come trade time?

Discuss

[dragit]

But we have been 'competitive' in nearly every game so far… this was the first week that I can remember us not being able to win it going into the last quarter.

[MC Gusto]

i see competitive as winning a few. sorry i should have clarified. Eg competitive means finishing above the bottom 4. we are clearly a bottom 4 side and therefore not 'competitive'!!

[dragit]

I know membership can suffer when a team wins less than 5 games a year, but personally, if we can remain viable financially I would prefer to see us be bottom 4 for 3 years to get some genuine A grade talent into the list… sitting 10th - 14th for the next 5 years by adding a few more mature B graders will not help us to compete for a flag IMO.

At any rate, I don't think we have much choice, someone has to finish bottom 4 every year, by the looks of our list, it is our turn. Can't see us improving as much as GWS or GCS in the next 2 years, Dogs, Port and Lions a couple of years in front of us.

Even if we landed Frawley next year, Fisher, Dempster, Roo, Milne, Lenny, Dal, Joey - still our current best players, are at the very end of their careers, no trading is going to fill that void.

[Beno88]

Yesterday was our biggest loss since the 2004 Qualifying Final. We've stayed pretty competitive for a long time.

After 1/4 time yesterday it was 72 to 59. I'd say we've been competitive in all but about 4 quarters this year.

[paddy]

Our big issue is that we have missed our opportunity to trade any of our big names anyway...

Lets say we put Roo on the trade table (for arguments sake only, in no way am i suggesting we trade him out)

Would any club be willing to offer up anything decent for him?

Yes he is in amazing form, but that could come crashing pretty quickly, and at best he will play for another 2 seasons...

It is an extremely low yeild, for a team to offer up something of worth...

The only thing we have an excess of is small forwards, but none of them are impressing enough to get any interesting trade bait, so my guess is we will simply be looking at recruiting through the draft.

Possibly be able to trade farran, but wont attract much interest....

I am sick of trading draft picks for other players, lets just have faith in our recruiters, and pick up some real talent this year.... No point in looking to plug holes, pick the best available in the draft and get games into them, plugging holes is what you do when you are in contention, our priority should be getting the best players out in our colours as possible...

Rant over

[Con Gorozidis]

We need to know what the eff is going on with Fisher .

Is he injured? Everytime I heard him interviewed last year he dropped hints he was carrying some long term injury but its never been discussed openly.

He has had some games where his stats have looked ok this year but overall he is a shadow of his former self and really only 20% the value of 2009/10 when he was a true superstar of the competition.

Is he injured or disinterested? Because he seems pretty much done.

[Con Gorozidis]

Our big issue is that we have missed our opportunity to trade any of our big names anyway...

Lets say we put Roo on the trade table (for arguments sake only, in no way am i suggesting we trade him out)

Would any club be willing to offer up anything decent for him?

Yes he is in amazing form, but that could come crashing pretty quickly, and at best he will play for another 2 seasons...

It is an extremely low yeild, for a team to offer up something of worth...

The only thing we have an excess of is small forwards, but none of them are impressing enough to get any interesting trade bait, so my guess is we will simply be looking at recruiting through the draft.

Possibly be able to trade farran, but wont attract much interest....

I am sick of trading draft picks for other players, lets just have faith in our recruiters, and pick up some real talent this year.... No point in looking to plug holes, pick the best available in the draft and get games into them, plugging holes is what you do when you are in contention, our priority should be getting the best players out in our colours as possible...

Rant over

]

gilbo nds and maybe macca are the only players that we could possibly trade. And it seems highly unlikely.

[MC Gusto]

fish? dal? gilbo?

[Con Gorozidis]

we have been ok most of the year. we had one shocking quarter.

we aint that bad.

[whiskers3614]

We need to know what the eff is going on with Fisher .

Is he injured? Everytime I heard him interviewed last year he dropped hints he was carrying some long term injury but its never been discussed openly.

He has had some games where his stats have looked ok this year but overall he is a shadow of his former self and really only 20% the value of 2009/10 when he was a true superstar of the competition.

Is he injured or disinterested? Because he seems pretty much done.

If injured rest him for as long as it takes.
If jaded maybe throw him forward for 1 or 2 games, he couldn't be much worse there than some of the others playing forward.