Sandilands is three years older than Griffin, that's how my preference works. Griffin is also presenting as a legitimate forward option this year as a resting ruck. His marking looks much surer to me this year.The statistics in the past few years (and again supported by tonight) show that when Sandilands plays, Freo's midfield usually win the important midfield stats. That is, they win the HitOuts, the centre clearances, clearances and inside 50s.
Anybody with half an ounce of football knowledge who can read and interpret match statistics knows just how important Sandilands is.
Cripes, he was even named in Freo's best players in the match report. He had 9 clearances himself which completely contradicts your insane statement that "he can't run the ball out of congestion" never mind the fact that he took more contested marks than any other Freo player in 2015 (equal 4th for the entire AFL competition).
Some of the totally uneducated criticism of Sandilands that I see, especially from supposed Freo fans totally bewilders me. It's Tall Poppy Syndrome on steroids. If Sandilands was 205cm tall and producing the same match statistics, he would be lauded as one of the greatest ruckmen in history. But just because of his size, some people seem to think that he deserves criticism because they think he should be able to do better.
In any case, if you want to give a young ruck a chance, then you would drop Griffin, not Sandilands (unless you had some totally unreasonable, illogical, unsupported and unjustified agenda against Sandilands).
What's the point of winning the hitout if the hitout goes to the opposition? Before third man up was a thing, the biggest criticism of Sandi was that while he'd dominate the taps, the opposition would either shark them or, as they did last night, let him win the taps and kill us in the contest with extra numbers. Now that third man is gone, we've gone back to that scenario.
I'm not blaming the loss on Sandi, but I think if we're rebuilding, there's no point persisting with him when we have options that are younger, compete, and give us more options around the ground. It's one area we could be better.