Macrae is good but is he play in 2 positions at once good?
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Smith to debut
Bailey Smith will make his AFL debut when the Western Bulldogs open their 2019 AFL campaign against the Sydney Swans.
Senior coach Luke Beveridge announced the news at a team meeting prior to training on Tuesday afternoon.
The highly-rated teenager joined the Bulldogs with pick seven in last year’s NAB AFL Draft.
After an interrupted pre-season, Smith featured in both JLT Community Series, playing a half of football in each game and collecting nine touches against Gold Coast and 12 against St Kilda.
On Saturday night, the 18-year-old will fulfil a lifelong dream.
“I’m still on cloud nine, I’ve got no words really,” Smith told westernbulldogs.com.au.
“It got announced in the meeting, I didn’t have a clue – I was just shocked. As I said in the meeting, without everyone at the Club, I wouldn’t be where I am today and I’m so grateful.
“To run out in the red, white and blue, with so much history that the Club has is just an honour and something I don’t take lightly.
“I’ll do my best to do the jumper proud.”
A more than pleasant surprise for the fans given Smiths interrupted pre-season.
I wonder if there might be another surprise on Thursday night
With the fantastic news Smith is going to make his debut and the news Naughton will play forward, I have updated my team:
B: Crozier, Trengove, Wood
HB: Williams, Cordy, Daniel
C: Suckling, Macrae, Hunter
HF: McLean, Schache, Lloyd
F: Wallis, Naughton, Gowers
R: English, Bontempelli, Liberatore
I/C: Dunkley, Duryea, Smith, Dickson
Unfortunately Richards misses out due to a bit of a disappointing JLT series.
It would be a brave call to play Trengove as a backman when he doesn't seem to have spend a minute there during the preseason (even early, the boys on instragram joked about his shin pads so he started the pre-season as a ruck too).
We're likely to play short in the backline which means we might be erring on the side of a shootout which would not be in our favour as our forwardline is still a work in progress.
I still see Young as a work in progress - he can play an intercept role but not a KPD role, and we already have Wood & Crozier playing intercept.
I don't mind Roberts but Reid is athletic and Buddy is... Buddy. We might just be forced to roll the dice anyway on a shorter backhalf.
Hasn't he had an interesting career? Was his last AFL game the 2016 grand final?
It is interesting when you think about our structure that day. Hamling and Roberts effectively played 'twin post' roles down back with Wood and Morris also down there...so for all our concern about lack of run and carry from defence, look at the foundation of the group that won us the flag?
I understand the move of Cordy to the d50 - he is not a natural forward - but we have been very quick to throw away Roberts who was always a limited but quietly effective player...IF he does play this week, it would almost be as a replacement for Morris and would (to me at least) make some sense in terms of the structure of the side.
Would that leave us with a back seven of:
Wood, Crozier, Cordy, Duryea, Suckling, Daniel and ROBERTS?
If so, how does that look across the other lines? The forward seven would be:
Naughton, Schache, Lloyd, MacLean, Wallis and...
And the on-ball group (eight) would be:
English, Bont, Hunter, Macrae, Liber, Dunkley (holy hell, that is first class), Richards, Williams and Smith?
I'm still two short...I guess that ONE needs to be Trengove (though I think we just got very big and slow) and I would like to think Dickson is the other??