Originally Posted by
Xie Shan
BRB, I was going to reply to your earlier post about Roos not playing the youngsters, it's a valid point, because the issue was not that the youngsters on our list didn't have talent, they just didn't get enough games in the seniors for us to see if their talent would translate to the big time. And this is the predicament we are in right now, because guys like Hannebery, Johnson, Reid who you would expect to be the nucleus of our team in the years to come are still very inexperienced in terms of number of games played. You're exactly right, there's a big gap between the over 28s and the good young players.
I think your reasoning does suffer a little from hindsight bias though, because I remember in around 2005 on 2006 we were lauded for having the most number of players who had played every game in the season (or something like that?) and the ability of players like Jude, O'Keefe et al to play through injuries and contribute their experience during the finals was a huge factor in us winning the flag. One of the reasons why Geelong have been so good in the last few years is that they had a very stable line-up in that time which allowed their players to rack up a lot of games playing together, under the same game plan, and develop an understanding of how each other plays. It was similar with us in '05-'06, we were nowhere near as talented as the Cats but because our players had played a lot of games together they knew each others' games intimately, which gave us a massive edge come finals time because we were so well-drilled.
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