damienc wrote: ↑Thu 28 Nov 2019 6:23pm
Sanctorum wrote: ↑Tue 26 Nov 2019 4:10pm
Following article taken from SEN AFL news, an interesting insight into the strategy to make some real improvement to the team, by any measure these are exactly the sort of bold moves the club needed to make to break the shackles of mediocrity both off and on-field that has seen the club go nowhere in the past 8 years...as I have mentioned elsewhere before, it is the very strong ruck division that the Saints will field next year that impress me the most, and will bring huge dividends in 2020.
"St Kilda list boss James Gallagher says the opportunity to bring in several big-name recruits was something the club couldn’t afford to pass up.
The Saints recruited Brad Hill, Paddy Ryder, Dougal Howard, Zak Jones and Dan Butler in the recently completed trade period.
As a result, the club’s earliest pick in this week’s AFL Draft is pick 51.
Gallagher said there was a well thought out strategy to fix certain aspects of their list, which matched up with the attributes of their five new recruits.
“Later in the year, some of the areas we wanted to improve were midfield, run, speed and kicking ability,” he said on SEN Mornings.
“Through his manager, we got an indication that Zak Jones may interested in coming back to Melbourne and this happened late in the year. We wanted to speak to Zak because we thought he can play a really important role for us.
“Dougal (Howard) did come up late in the piece but that had been really clear from our list strategy perspective that we needed to know who our key lockdown defender was going to be for five or six years.
“We’ve tracked him for a quite a while and I’ve been an advocate of his, but he was under contract and it felt highly unlikely. But when the opportunity did come up late, he became a priority for that position.
Gallagher said rather than baulking at paying for several recruits in one trade period, the club wasn’t prepared to let the unique opportunity of signing so many players within a short space of time pass.
“They all sort of bob up at different times and you just need to weigh up whether you’re prepared to pay what you need to pay both from a salary cap and trade perspective.
“If you’re not willing to pay with an early draft pick or a player then that’s OK and you can walk away but we made that decision that if you we bring all these guys in this year then let’s do it.
“It’s not every year you get an opportunity where a Brad Hill, a Zak Jones, a Dougal Howard, a Dan Butler and a Paddy Ryder say, ‘I want to come and play for your footy club’.
“You don’t want to knock back those opportunities when they come up.”
The Saints have also signed former Geelong ruckman Ryan Abbott as a delisted free agent."
I really, really hope you are right because I really, really want you to be. Quite apart from what Gallagher said.
Thanks damienc. With my 80th birthday looming I am not at all starry-eyed about my beloved Saints any more, have followed them forever and wherever I have lived and worked both in Oz and PNG - in the early days (1958 to 1963) I used to go out on patrol bringing with me a very large pre-war Crammond shortwave radio transmitter powered by a 12 volt battery that weighed a ton and required at least 3 carriers on my patrols through the heavily forested hinterland inshore from Saidor (Google it, it was a large forwarding air base during the liberation of New Guinea by the US forces in WWII), and on Saturday afternoons I would arrive at a village for the weekend and send a young local shinnying up a tree near the resthouse with the aerial wire so that I could listen to Doug Bigelow and Smokey Dawson on the ABC calling the VFL match of the day, with scores relayed from all the other 5 games. I would record all the scores in an exercise book and then calculate the percentages to work out the ladder. The Saints unfortunately finished 8th in 58 and 59 and didn't do much good until the early 60s.
That's by the by....so I temper my expectations for St Kilda, however the direction the club has taken since the start of 2019 by bringing in Brett Ratten as coach-in-waiting, the parting with Richo, and then the clean out of the playing list and bringing in some really seriously talented players, the unprecedented bolstering of the team's ruck stocks, a uncompromising focus on developing basic skills for the up and coming 21-24 players, all indicate to me that our footy club has finally, finally, started to head the club into the right direction, and thank God for that!
It has been observed that the current team lacks the star-power of the late noughties, also that the club should have stuck with endless drafting of young recruits. I contend that St Kilda have a good number of players that were early draft picks from 2013 onwards that have not yet been developed to their full potential - if the likes of Billings, Dunstan, Steele, Lonie, Long, Phillips, Paton Coffield and Clarke had been at one of the top clubs they would have by now become much better players and I am in no doubt that under Brett Ratten & Co that will now occur. If Max King makes a solid start in the pre-season he will more than likely play all 22 games and can be expected to kick a bag of goals in the process. Similarly, Jack Bytel is all class and at 189cm and a strong body he could well get a permanent gig in the midfield.
The 2020 St Kilda team will have a completely new line-up, out with the old, in with the new, can't help but feel a strong sense of excitement....