News Laidler promoted and five delisted

[BigBadCam]

It will be interesting to see the way it pans out. For us to drop McKenna & Simpson , it would suggest that the recruiting team think they can replace them even with our late-ish picks. This may give credence to the Pods rumour. If we do pick up Pods as a MAR would we then get another young KP forward as well? Does the club think that West can play forward? People at the club seems very confident that Brown will be the stuff , add Hawkins and how many tall spots do we have to fill?

If the rumours are true, Pods will be a stop gap type player for this season in case the worst happens. As has been suggested in another thread, given his injuries and that he missed out on such a large amount of footy, although Brown is expected to come good eventually, he can't really be expected to do anything next year.

West is an interesting one. I don't know that the club has a whole lot of confidence in him. His skills around the ground are adequate, but not good enough to compete in the ruck with the AFL's premier mobile ruckmen, as evidenced by his poor showing statwise in his senior games. Likewise, he's competitive in the ruck, but not good enough to compete with the AFL's better ruckmen. Since we decided to stick with him, I wouldn't be surprised if we tried to reinvent him.

As far as the rucks goes Im not sure there is any obvious kid that we must get with our first or second pick that will give us immediate impact. They might find their is so little between the talent on offer we might as well wait and use a rookie pick on a kid that will give us the option to promote him in either 2010/2011 in place of an ultra late pick.

Good big men often take a long time to develop. I haven't seen enough of Simpson to suggest whether he'll be able to make it or not, but most who have suggest that he's out of his depth. Maybe with a bit more size to his big frame though he'll come good. Cox and Sandilands were both rookie picks, and with the shortage of talls in this draft, I wouldn't be surprised if Wells and co. pulled some smokey out of the draft and sat him on the rookie list for a few years. I'm a bit worried about our ruck stocks atm with Ottens failing body, but fingers crossed we don't have the same bad luck with injuries in '10 as we did this year.

With the addition of Drum we have also sured up our backline stocks , so that Drum , Gillies , Mackie , Taylor gives us options even with Harley gone and Dasher not to far away.

Don't forget Laidler!

So in other words I don't think there is any gapping holes in our list that we must fill. It will allow Wells to focus on the best long term talent rather than any one type. Who knows , we may end up with 4 mids and try to balance it in the Rookie draft

Wells often goes with the best available. We've done well out of the rookie list in recent times so I'm excited to see what we do this year. I'm guessing that Pods might not be the only mature age player that we look at this year either.