True Believer wrote:I think that people need to thing bigger picture and longer term, not just next season.
Just maybe our brains trust saw enough from Pierce by the end of the season to decide he would go past Stanley within the next one to two seasons, which makes Stanley dispensable, particularly if he has currency. Make no mistake, we need to get young talent into our list, and plenty of it. The only way to do that at an accelerated rate is to gain extra picks, and there are limited means to gain extra picks. One of the main ones is to trade existing players for picks and in that department we have very little currency that we can afford to part with, and I would guess that Stanley is unfortunately considered the currency we can most afford to lose, particularly if the brains trust thinks that Peirce can replace soon enough and the pick we get for Stanley can be tuned into a desperately needed midfielder or key backman....
I agree. Our trading strategy last year (and this year) is with an eye on four years down the track, not next season. At the moment we have four players on our list that can play ruck, plus the club still has high hopes for Holmes.
It might be viewed that one of them is surplus to requirements and if we get a good deal we'll take it.
While pick 21 might be an unknown to us, the club would know which one of four or five players would be available with that pick. Same as last year with picks 17 & 18. The recruiters would have had probably five or six player who they thought would be there. It's not entirely guesswork.
Opinions are like arseholes, everybody's got one.