Travis Cloke?

[Mofra]

Not everyone wants him to stay (a couple of weeks old now):

Dear Travis,

I’m going to keep this brief, as wasting any more oxygen, emotion or brain cells on you than I already have will end up the same way as a paedophile attending a Wiggles concert. Not so good.

You have 256 peers that, like you, have played all four matches from rounds fourteen through seventeen. Defenders, midfielders, forwards big and small, first-gamers, mature-aged recruits, players new to the sport from overseas, players returning from injury, players rotated an inordinate amount of times, players that spend a lot less TOG than you, players affected by the red/green vests etc. 256 players. Of that number, you have touched the ball more times in the last month than only 8% of your peers. Eight per-cent. From watching you in the media throughout your career, I understand that maths may not be your strongest suit, hell, anything remotely academic past year eight is probably not your bread and butter, so I’ll try and make things easier for you. Grab eleven mates. Join them and line up against a wall in order of best to worst, from first to twelfth. Currently Travis, you are twelfth, you are the worst.

And it’s not as if the entire 92% above you is made up of your Swans, Abletts, Thompsons, Boyds and Stantons. No, veterans like Carlton’s Matthew Watson (10 games), West Coast’s Jacob Brennan (11), Bulldog Christian Howard (13), Gold Coast’s Charlie Dixon (17) and Port’s Andrew Moore (20) are all getting more of the pill than you. Let’s not even mention the teenagers who have been getting more touches, names like: Greene, Ellis, Hampton, Treloar, Bennell, Caddy, Atley and Dahlhaus.

“It’s not all about possessions”, I hear you plead. OK, I’ll cut you some slack. You’re a key forward, a marking forward, a power forward. You’ve taken fourteen marks (eight contested) in the last month. Again, almost three-quarters of the league have snaffled more marks in that time, so you’ll struggle to hang your hat on any marking-related stat.

Goal-kicking? You’ve kicked six in the last month, at 1.5 per game (down even on your 1.57 career average). But in reality, are you even a goal-kicker? Let’s chew on that for a moment and compare your career stats versus your (positional) peers – key/leading/power/marking forwards in Franklin, Podsiadly, Brown, Pavlich, Riewoldt (x2) and Roughead. Hell, I’ll even throw the tip-rat Milne into the equation, as even he has managed to pants you over 250+ games the little bugger. That’s you against eight others. I’ll highlight a handful of categories with the leading player’s stat, the second-worst (or 8th of 9) stat and yours. Here goes:

Goals Per game:
BEST – Franklin 3.22 from 156 matches.
8th of NINE – Roughead 1.90 from 151 matches.
CLOKE – 1.57 from 165 matches.

Goal-Kicking Accuracy (never mind Out Of Bounds!):
BEST – Milne at 64.3%
8th of NINE – Franklin at 57.6%
CLOKE – 53.4%

Bags of goals (5+):
BEST – Franklin with 43 x 5+ goal matches
8th of NINE – Podsiadly with 11 bags (from only 54 matches)
CLOKE – 9 x 5+ goal matches

Frequency of kicking a bag of 5+ goals:
BEST – Franklin with one 5+ goal haul every 3.6 matches
8th of NINE – Milne at 1 every 14.0 matches
CLOKE – 1 every 18.3 matches.

So it turns out you’re not really a goal-kicker of any note either.

You’re not taking marks, therefore you’re not getting touches and as a result (not surprisingly given your very average career stats) you’re not kicking goals. Yet Daddy thinks you’re worth $1m+ a year? Let’s re-visit the blokes that sat below you in the stats count recently.

There are twenty-two players that have racked up less than your forty-one touches over the last month. Six of these players have been wearers of the green vest in Lovett-Murray and Campbell (3), Young and Newman (2), Patrick and Harper (1), so it would be unfair to bundle these blokes alongside you due to reduced ground time. Jack Darling (9), Lindsay Thomas (9), Ahmed Saad (7) and Robbie Tarrant (6) have kicked as many or more goals than you have, so they get a tick. Nathan Wilson, Sam Day and Jamie Elliott are still teenagers so it would be unfair to judge them harshly at this stage of their careers. Nick Duigan and Paul Puopolo, in only their second seasons, can be excused using a similar judgement. That leaves only seven blokes (of 256) that you can fairly say you are going better than:

Mike Pyke – a Canadian import whose output includes 22+ hit-outs per match
Matthew Lobbe – a 17-game veteran holding his own with 18 hit-outs per match
LRT and Andrejs Everitt – part of a team that’s gone 4-0 in that period
Matthew Warnock (key defender in a side that gets smashed), Jared Rivers and Justin Koschitzke.

Not too many Brownlows, Colemans or All-Australians in that bunch. Just good, honest toilers. Yet I’d hazard a guess that Daddy is trying to get a contract signed that earns you as much as these seven blokes combined. Yes, you’re a massive unit. Yes, you have a tank that allows you to run all day. Yes, you’ve had one good year (hell, so did Allen Jakovich and Adrian McAdam). But what you have allowed to happen by letting Daddy handle your affairs has been sad/comical/farcical to watch unfold.

I hope you kick twelve against GWS and beat up on them like a flat-track bully. I hope that performance will push to one side the on-field petulance you have shown increasingly of late. I hope you finish the year with a Collingwood flag, but will not be holding my breath on the last one. I also hope that your actions (and Daddy's) this year either see you squeezed out of the club, or forced to take 'unders' like the majority of the Collingwood squad already has.

Actually, I'd prefer you to go to Carlton.



Jack

[azabob]

Mofra that is gold!

Where did you find it?

[Mofra]

E-Mail doing the rounds, also on BF

Pretty hard to argue with

[bornadog]

Cloke signs with Pies for 5 years.

[Mofra]

Cloke signs with Pies for 5 years.

That puts a few possible moves on the table - Q Lynch to Carlton, Wellingham to anywhere.

[SlimPickens]

Little surprised collingwood buckled and gave him 5. This will put stress on them keeping some of their young guns Wellingham and Goldsack particularly.

[LostDoggy]

Got no time for Goldsack, fumbles a lot imo.

[Remi Moses]

Collingwood buckled.
Totally derailed their whole season