Most of us, including me, are feeling a deep gloom about our current prospects and future. The chance that we will slide even further down the ladder, probably win a spoon in 2020, is even being discussed.

This isn’t about trying to be positive or pollyannaish for the sake of it, but... if we went back in the time machine to 2014, even allowing for our realisation that Mcartney wasn’t the right coach, did any of us think our list was in good shape and that a flag was only two years away?

We would have said we lacked quality key position players ... BUT we won a flag with a forward line which only had Stringer as a genuine tall (albeit one who was lucky to be in the team and at 192 cm, not the size of the ‘gorillas’.) We got amazing contributions from a former tagged, two 19 yr olds, and a guy with three busted knees.

At the other end of the ground, no one was raving at the prospect of a backline held together by three former rookies, including two blokes over 30, one who wasn’t a defender and who some thought should retire or head back to Frankston seconds. Fletcher Roberts and Joel Hamling, even in Sept 2016, were nobody’s idea of quality talls, we would have hoped Talua would be That Guy.

We weren’t thrilled about our ruck stocks, never having been too excited about Roughie and not foreseeing that our GReat White Hope of the Forward line, Tom Boyd, would not play a traditional forward role in our premiership but would ruck instead.

If we’d have been told our most naturally talented player Bob Murphy wouldn’t have been out there our disbelief would have grown even further.

I don’t know what’s going wrong at present, but we still have 3 premiership midfielders still very much in their prime (Bont, Macrae, Libba) and two who since then have played midfield (Dunkley, McLean). The sort of genuine tall you could build a team around in Aaron Naughton, and the best young midfielder I’ve seen since Bont in Bailey Smith.

So is our list any worse or less unbalanced than the group from 2016 or were they exceptionally well coached and motivated? How come the versatility idea for some of our lesser lights (Picken a forward, M Boyd a defender, Z Cordy a defensive forward etc) all worked back then? Can’t the ship be turned around again quickly, with some hard conversations and honesty from coaches and players alike? Are things not as bad as they seem?