You say that the Crows have great players all over the park, but I don't really agree. The reality is there are waaay too many passengers on our list. Matthew Clarke deserves some of the blame for sure, but not for not getting enough out of the payers. Rather, he deserves blame for not having refreshed our list. The last time we drafted a player who is making a significant impact on our current side was Zoe Prowse back in 2021. Every draftee since then has either been a bust, or a depth player at best. Admittedly it's been tough to do with state-based drafts and Port having been given access to all the best SA talent for the last few seasons, but hey, it would be pretty rich to complain about that after we built a triple premiership list out of the same access ourselves.
The Crows have an exceptional core group. Marinoff/Hatchard/Jess Allan in the midfield, Biddell/Prowse/Sarah Allan down back, Gould/Ponter up forward, and Randall all over the ground. That is an elite group which compares favourably to any top nine players from any team in the league. They have carried us through the last couple of seasons, albeit Hatchard, Ponter and Sarah Allan have all been well down this season. But once you get past that group, it's pretty slim pickings. Thompson, Newman, Charlton, Kelly, Goodwin are all decent but not great. That still leaves us needing to select at least seven of our depth players, and so it's been a rotating cavalcade of Boileau, Martin, Munyard, Kustermann, Varnhagen, Mueller, Levy, Smith, Waterhouse, Tarlinton, Boyle-Carr, Ballard and Tonon, none of which should really be getting games in a top 4 side. The injuries to Jones and Allen haven't helped, but most teams have more injuries than that.
Clarke's response to this situation has been to just leave our bottom four players on the bench for the majority of each game, not even trusting them to be on the park unless absolutely necessary. In the match last night we had four players receive less than 50% game time. Levy with 42%, Kustermann with 32%, Martin with 30%, Tarlinton with 20%(!) in a match where every North player played at least 53% game time. Other than Kustermann who managed 8 touches with her sliver of gametime, the other three players had essentially no impact on the game at all, and swallowed up a bench spot that could have been used to freshen up our better players. Almost 2/3 of all our bench time for the match went to those four players. Unsurprisingly, our best players were all spent by the end of the match.
You mentioned Libby Birch, which is a great example. North needed an extra quality defender, so they went out and got one. It has been clear for several seasons that we desperately need another quality forward, but the closest the Crows have gone to getting one has been to bring back a long-past-it Yvonne Bonner. Meanwhile we've lost Phillips, Scheer and Woodland from our forward line.
The Crows drastically need to bring in some genuine talent to replace the list cloggers. Fortunately, all of their core group other than Randall are still 26 or younger, so there is time left to do it. Not losing the best handful of players to Port each year will help matters, although it's less relevant now that the draft isn't state-based anymore. But the worry for Crows fans is that Clarke and co don't seem to have recognised there is a problem. Or if they have, they're doing a damn good impression of not having done so.
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