Well I'll put my hand up as one of those who was critical of Roly. I was also very critical of the steves for the unprofessional way they handled Harvey's departure. It was incredibly unprofessional for a bunch of blokes who were trumpeting a new era of professionalism at Freo, but there's ad men for you.
Roly was quite correctly criticised (in my view) for putting too much emphasis on defence to the point where offence was almost irrelevant. I would still see that criticism as being relevant today albeit he is belatedly trying to address it. Reality can be bitch some days.
Its similar to my criticisms of our list management policy as drafting 'best available' instead of drafting to fill identified needs. Again, there's that problem with reality that keeps making life hard.
As I said a few years ago, football requires a number of things to be balanced and we haven't been getting that balance part terribly correct for a while now.
That said, can Roly successfully address these issues. Dunno. I suspect nobody else really knows the answer to that as well, including Roly I would think as he's never built a list or formulated a fast movement game plan that requires a high level of skills and now he's required to do both.
We have to hope that he can though. We booked the guy for the next 5 years and the alternative makes for an uncomfortable train of thought. Also, if we give him the flick, what is the alternative? Who do we replace him with?
I mean there's always Malthouse if we want to burn the club for the next 20 years but I'd rather gouge my own eyes out than go there. Show me a realistic alternative otherwise, we have have to hope that Roly can do what he promises.
