2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

[Remi Moses]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

You keep bringing up Mulligan and Hooper and fair enough they turned out pretty bad. I can add possible future effect of Goodes, Fuller, Darley also speculative.

I'll give you Goodes and Fuller, but Darley is still a kid though.
I think the diluted drafts we've had has thrown up issues for clubs.
We've had teams pick up speculative state league players knowing that there is a tsunami of talented players coming through the new clubs. We all know the forward half is an issue, but in the 1st half we won the ball through the middle and missed chances

[GVGjr]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Do you think Stevens and Young are in trouble GVGjr?

Happy with both of them. They are around the best 22 mark and both have already played vastly better for us than they did with their original sides. They should keep improving. Young was okay yesterday

[always right]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Amongst the wreckage today was one bloke who made perhaps the best player ever to have graced the field look decidedly average. Commentators constantly infer Picken plays either outside the rules or right on the edge. I have hardly seen him do anything that justifies this sort of commentary other than play tough close checking football. Anyone agree?

[G-Mo77]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Amongst the wreckage today was one bloke who made perhaps the best player ever to have graced the field look decidedly average. Commentators constantly infer Picken plays either outside the rules or right on the edge. I have hardly seen him do anything that justifies this sort of commentary other than play tough close checking football. Anyone agree?

Agree. The golden boy got beat today instead of praising Picken they chose the other route bagging the tagger. This is pretty common among the commentators. We needed Lingy on special comments.

[Yankee Hotel Foxtrot]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Amongst the wreckage today was one bloke who made perhaps the best player ever to have graced the field look decidedly average. Commentators constantly infer Picken plays either outside the rules or right on the edge. I have hardly seen him do anything that justifies this sort of commentary other than play tough close checking football. Anyone agree?

He is the consummate team player. He isn't overly blessed with skills, but he will never be accused of not doing what his coaches and teammates ask of him. Does he go beyond the rules at times? Yes, but no more than any other tagger worth his salt. And for what it's worth he cops his dues from the umpires with pretty good grace. He never whinges, or complains and I've not seen him do anything that is beyond being tough and unrelenting. I've not seen him do anything that I as a football fan would be ashamed of.

I don't think he gets an inordinate amount of bad press. I think in actual fact most commentators on the game admire his toughness.

[Scorlibo]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Amongst the wreckage today was one bloke who made perhaps the best player ever to have graced the field look decidedly average. Commentators constantly infer Picken plays either outside the rules or right on the edge. I have hardly seen him do anything that justifies this sort of commentary other than play tough close checking football. Anyone agree?

Spot on AR. Picken is one of the fairest taggers going around and demolished Little Gaz, may have even squeezed the 2014 Brownlow Medal out of him.

[Hotdog60]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Video has caught GAJ giving Picken a elbow to the face. I wonder if he will get cited for rough conduct.

[G-Mo77]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Video has caught GAJ giving Picken a elbow to the face. I wonder if he will get cited for rough conduct.

Who Picken? Probably.

Head butting someone is a filth thing to do. Picken was trying to hurt Ablett's already injured arm with his head.

[Bornadog]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Video has caught GAJ giving Picken a elbow to the face. I wonder if he will get cited for rough conduct.

He may be a great player but what a little sook

[Bornadog]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

I bring up the players that could easily be forgotten but here is some other names : Hahn, rookied because we couldn't make the hard call. Eagleton, 2 years too long and once again couldn't make the hard call. Akermanis, one year too long. Harbrow pick used on Sherman. There were plenty of others as well.

You talk about speculative picks but the topper for me is that we signed the highly speculative talent in Mulligan to a long term deal because we we thought the new GC club would take him only to sit on our hands for an extended period and quibble over a few dollars with the known commodity in Ward when there was actually a real threat with GWS.

I'm certain we will cut our losses with the guys you mentioned after two season which won't create the gulf in the list we have experienced. Just have a look how they quickly corrected things with Lower.

We just need to keep drafting and developing players

Let me re-phrase my point, I am sick of hearing about past mistakes in drafting. We have the current drafting and there are mistakes galore as well, forgot to add in Stevens, Young, Lower to Goodes, Fuller and maybe I am harsh on Darley at this stage.

We have to move forward with what we have and I hope the above haven't created another issue going forward as 5 players is hard to make up.

[GVGjr]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Let me re-phrase my point, I am sick of hearing about past mistakes in drafting. We have the current drafting and there are mistakes galore as well, forgot to add in Stevens, Young, Lower to Goodes, Fuller and maybe I am harsh on Darley at this stage.

We have to move forward with what we have and I hope the above haven't created another issue going forward as 5 players is hard to make up.

I'm not attacking the drafting under Eade, Clayton, Dalrymple and Fantasia as there will always be hits and misses. It's actually you who is vigorously challenging the current drafting of players who in fairness haven't been given the fullness of time to be accurately judged.

I am however, questioning the list management over that time because I think it does explain a lot of the questions you are raising.
As you would also be aware I called out our passive list management execution over that period as well stating that we would pay for it later.

In my opinion we have drafted and traded the way we have to try and score an interim fix and I'm not prepared to put a line through the likes of Stevens and Young which is just the easy response after every loss as they are both already better players and more physically ready than when they first arrived at the Whitten Oval.
In an ideal scenario we would just keep drafting young players in batches each year but you can only have so many players on the development path. Our resources just aren't that deep.

[The Bulldogs Bite]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Harsh on Stevens BAD.

He is still inconsistent, and certainly didn't have a good game today, but I think he has shown enough to suggest he can become a good AFL player. Still young - 22?

Not sure why he gets judged so much more critically. He has some areas he needs to address, but he also has some impressive attributes (gut running ability, big bodied, good overhead, solid finisher).

[jeemak]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Stevens, Young, Fuller and Darley are all still chances to be 14-26 players for us though BAD. Like you I'm not a fan of the Goodes selection, and while I can see why he was picked I don't think I ever want to see him play for our team again. He can do more for us at Footscray than he can in the senior side (though, from all reports he probably did deserve a game today).

The Lower pick was fair enough too. We needed a player of his type for a short time and as soon as we thought we'd moved on from his usefulness we cut him.

A couple of losses at the draft/trade table over the past two or three years doesn't come close to what happened before that, and when you're trying to develop a list with young players for the most part it's going to take time and you'll have some misses along the way with that talent, and the older players you bring in to supplement gaps on the list.

[Remi Moses]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

The issue is do we have to many of the same type?

[Remi Moses]

Re: 2014 Game Day Round 10 - Gold Coast Suns V Western Bulldogs

Stevens, Young, Fuller and Darley are all still chances to be 14-26 players for us though BAD. Like you I'm not a fan of the Goodes selection, and while I can see why he was picked I don't think I ever want to see him play for our team again. He can do more for us at Footscray than he can in the senior side (though, from all reports he probably did deserve a game today).

The Lower pick was fair enough too. We needed a player of his type for a short time and as soon as we thought we'd moved on from his usefulness we cut him.

A couple of losses at the draft/trade table over the past two or three years doesn't come close to what happened before that, and when you're trying to develop a list with young players for the most part it's going to take time and you'll have some misses along the way with that talent, and the older players you bring in to supplement gaps on the list.

Very good points made. Some might be "sick of hearing about past mistakes" but it shouldn't be dismissed as an issue.