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May 24, 2005
News Roundup - Tuesday 24/5
Its been a while since I did one of these but never fear I'll try and keep up to date as much as possible from now on. Anyway onto the round up and we begin with Garry Lyon's article in today's Herald on this season's "Surprise packets". For Swans fans he has quite rightly singled out the improved performances Luke Ablett so far this season.
With his penetrating kicking, and developing powers of concentration and discipline, there are good signs that there will be life after Paul Williams when the champion No. 10 decides his time is up.
Lyon is certainly right about that. Ablett, Kirk and Jude are certainly a good base to build a premiership winning midfielder from. Just need a few of the kids (Moore, McVeigh, Willoughby and Malceski) to develop into the players we hope they will become and maybe a matchwinner or two to fill in the pieces.
On to the Luke Vogels story and in The Australian there is an article that has Paul Roos claiming that they are more players out there like him who just need a chance.
Roos said the Swans had decided to tweak their recruiting strategy at the end of last year by looking for unwanted AFL players, VFL players and talented country footballers.
and
"I have no doubt there has to be more Luke Vogels out there, but it is very hard for clubs to take the more experienced players because you may only get three picks in the draft," Roos said. "There is no doubt in my mind there are a lot of players out there who could potentially play AFL football that are now 21 or 22."
Hmmmmmm somebody has been reading a bit too much Moneyball. Still very valid point to make. Just better not turn it into a major focus of recuiting, the Under 18 system is still the primary way to get the talented players into the club. The Vogels model (ie. putting them on the rookie list first) is a fine way to go about this process of mature aged players.
Finally we finish with Richard Hinds opinion article in the SMH, Swans must meet greater expectations. Now while the point he is trying to get across is correct (we MUST win on Saturday Night), I just think some of his reasoning is a little misguided and in some cases wrong.
The Swans have won their past three games without injured ruckmen Jason Ball and Stephen Doyle (and without Darren Jolly on Sunday)
While it is true we have won without Doyle and Ball, we also lost without them so they aren't a key performance factor and Jolly didn't miss Sunday's game - it was the Essendon game to begin with. The most important factor about the ruck he failed to note was Goodes moving back into the middle. That has played a KEY role in our wins of late. heck I think it was Goodes who turned the match in our favour in the second quarter by burning Mitch Hahn in the ruck and proving the point that no one in the league can match up to Goodes when he plays in the ruck.
with creative defender Leo Barry sometimes asked to play on opponents 15 centimetres taller and with Tadhg Kennelly struggling to find his best form
Leo has played on taller opponents for the best part of the last two seasons, him playing there has had an impact on our style of play since 2003, but in the 3 losses in a row he kept us in matches by the same token. With the Kennelly line, well that just wrong. Yes he was out of form up until 3 weeks ago, but since then his drive off half back has been important and against Port he was a major reason why we won, hardly struggling.
Now as I said I have nothing against the article, the topic is correct we need to win this week but the reasoning and lack of research turned a good topic into a poorly written article that hardly gets the issue addressed.
Anyway thats it for today.
Posted by robbieando at May 24, 2005 09:24 PM