Interesting stat re blooding in young players.

[Harry]

Alot of people are using the argument of not throwing young players into the deep end too early for justifying frawelys decision for not playing young players.

Interesting stat on how conservative we are as a club when it comes to this. Baring Brisbane, Port Adelaide and Adelaide (who IMO are real flag contenders and are merely tweaking their playing mix), the following shows how willing the other clubs have been to throw raw youngsters into the deep end compared to us. By raw youngsters I mean players drafted at the age of 17-18 in the past 2 drafts;

Carlton are/have giving/en games to 3 players
Collingwood 3
Essendon 5
Fremantle 3
Geelong 6
Hawthorn 4
North 2
Melbourne 4
St.Kilda 7
Sydney 2
West coast 2
W Bulldogs 3

And Richmond last with 1 player - that being David Rodan.

Unless we are also tweaking our playing list for a flag, otherwise this rate of blooding in youngsters is not good enough. This policy will hold us back in years to come because if we don't win the flag in the next few years and the likes of Campbell, Cameron and Richo retire then we will be behind the 8 ball pretty severly and scratching our heads and wondering what went wrong - blaming the previous administration.

 

[iLoVeNeWmAn]

Good point Harry - ever considered journalism??? We'll persevere with Rogers, Petts, etc. - the big guns will retire and yep, you guessed it, these type of arguments will be a formality for years to come.

 

[TigerFury]

I am sure I've posted this somewhere yesterday...

In the past 2 years, aside from Rodan, we've also given games to Craig Ednie, Chris Hyde and Chris Newman who were all drafted as kids.

On top of this you can add Tim Fleming who was a mature recruit but still was untried at the top level.

 

[hutstar]

I think your criteria gives a misleading impression. I would include Krak, Newman as young blodded players, but aside from this, we just didn't pick up kids this year. I think you make a fair point, but generally our list is pretty young, and taking a stat out of context does not give a fair general impression.

 

[shawry]

Have you seen where on the ladder those teams you ahve mentioned are Harry? Give it a rest.
ADelaide, Port , Brisbane etc are top 4 teams and have no real need to bring in youngsters. When they do they are in a good position with a strong team around them to help ease them through it rather than put uneccessary pressure on them.

St.Kilda got high draft picks, first rounders should be playing in the first year.

West Coast 2 is real worthy of bring ing up too.

We have blooded in the last two years the following players: Rodan, Newman, Ednie, Fleming, Hyde. Year before that Coughlan, Pettifer, Krakouer, adn before that Mills, Fiora.

We dont do too bad in that department, maybe we do bring thenm in too early.