List Depth vs Sustained Success

[Otiman]

I believe the two are mutually exclusive.

On one side you retain players in the hope they come good, this is the low turnaround approach, and is what the saints have been doing in the past few years. Our depth is deep, but not very talented (imo).

On the other side, with a large turnover you can afford to try MORE players out, and cut them if they don't meet certain standards after a period.

Basically, have a top25 players, and have EVERY other player as a young and developing player.

Port Adelaide and Brisbane have done the latter, and things are working out well for them. St. Kilda, Freo, Richmond and Melbourne are doing the former, and I believe are struggling because of it.

[Saint Mik]

Tend to agree with you on this one

I think Rossy Lyon will have a decent clean out at the end of this year as he has only used a few players even with the injureis we have had there are some that have not even looked like getting more than the odd game.

Let them go and stop hopeing like hell that one day they might come good
will be interesting to see who stays actually.

[Oh When the Saints]

I believe the two are mutually exclusive.

On one side you retain players in the hope they come good, this is the low turnaround approach, and is what the saints have been doing in the past few years. Our depth is deep, but not very talented (imo).

On the other side, with a large turnover you can afford to try MORE players out, and cut them if they don't meet certain standards after a period.

Basically, have a top25 players, and have EVERY other player as a young and developing player.

Port Adelaide and Brisbane have done the latter, and things are working out well for them. St. Kilda, Freo, Richmond and Melbourne are doing the former, and I believe are struggling because of it.

An interesting post with hindsight from August Otiman ...

The development of Armo, Geary, CJ, Eddy, Steven, Allen and others seems to add some weight to your theory.

[mad saint guy]

I'm definitely for recruiting 5+ kids every year. We've had a few great success stories coming from cheap recycled players (Voss, Powell, Gram, Milne, King?, C.Gardiner?) but we've also ended up with a lot of average players with little scope for improvement. I would much prefer that we now focus on drafting the best available young talent (which should see 2-4 100+ game players recruited each year).

If we had have focused on youth instead of recruiting guys like Callaghan, Ackland, McGough, Mullins, Guerra, Rix, M.Clarke, Ferguson etc then we would probably have a few extra 20-22 year old guns running around for us.

I also agree that a player should not be kept if they aren't in the best 25 by their 3rd-4th season and don't have much room for improvement. I don't see why Ferguson and Rix are still on the list.

So I'm definitely for the second option. Try to have 25 proven senior players and the rest all kids (and usually 4 or 5 will be senior players by the end of the year).

[Otiman]

Our main concern from now, is to avoid a dearth of quality players once our next wave of retirements hits. This is Hayes/Baker/Milne/Blake and co. (27-28 year old currently)

After that, we will have another wave of Ball/Riewoldt/Koschitzke/Goddard/Dal/Goose, but that's not for some considerable time. That will be when the real dearth happens, imo.

Obviously we have a good/decent group of youngsters coming through, and we cannot recruit now for a Riewoldt replacement, unless we want to keep him on our list until he's 26.

It seems that we are recruiting in the national draft to replace people for retirement, and using the rookie list for a quick fix and backup incase guys like Howard and Allen don't come good.

[saintsRrising]

Over the last two years we have added 14 (15 if you inlcude M Clarke)players to our senior list who were not there two years ago...

So I don't thnk you can categorise us as a low turnover club at present. Indeed I would say that we have been high turnover.

However there has been a lot of "mature" age pick ups...

M Gardiner
C Gardiner
King
Schneider
Dempster
Birss...

However two of these in Charlie and King were basically a free pick up.....three if you add Dempster.

With attard and Jones RL has also showna liking for some fast tracked rookies...

But then again VR is an example ofa rookie who was always going to take years...

Similarly with McEvoy it will take a year or two.

Howard is another wh is a project player.

[Otiman]

I'm sure if you graph players and their projected peaks (and troughs), we will be pretty golden for quite some time. It's all speculative, but the more numbers you have, the more statistics will win out.