Originally Posted by
SimonH
Totally agree SOH that player management plays a huge part. 'Success' or 'failure' at the ND (or in a trade) is hardly a closed book at the time when the name is called out or the deal is signed.
GWS in 2011 and thereabouts mostly went down a disappointingly one-dimensional path towards building a list. The rules of their establishment gave them the perfect platform to pick the eyes out of mature state league players, and go in with a pretty competitive unit, balancing lots of young exciting talent with some size and maturity, in round 1, 2012. In reality, they signed Tim Mohr, Jonathan Giles (both successes) and Steve Clifton (failure) and that was about it. They put themselves in the position of having to manage an improbable number of young kids, almost all living away from home, without a good number of players across a spread of ages to act as informal mentors, and so of course some were and are going to flee as well. They will have a very very good team in 2016, don't get me wrong. But rather than GWS pushing other sides into accessing state league players by overloading on yet another half-a-dozen 'gunna be a megastar' skinny 18 year olds, GWS should have been accessing more of them itself.
Even though hard data tells us that 18yo is too young, the fact is that there are (going back a generation) kids like Tim Watson who started their VFL careers at age 16 without long-term disaster, and quite frankly there would be a legal challenge if an 18yo was prevented from playing AFL, and the AFL would never run the risk because it fears that the whole draft could be declared illegal. 'Increasing' the draft age relies not on preventing clubs from picking 18yos, but clubs using their common sense to recognise that picking 18yos may not be in their best interests. Common sense is pretty slow coming for some!
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