I think judging a recruiter’s performance on the strength of the list excludes factors outside of his control: like what assets he had to work with, how the players applied themselves, what luck they had with injuries, how the club developed those players, and how easy it was to get free agents and trades to walk through the front door.
Blaming someone holding a bunch of late-first round picks for not finding a once-in-a-generation player like Pav seems a bit harsh. Blaming someone for not spotting certain rough diamonds in the WAFL for the rookie draft also seems harsh when in Lloyd’s time Freo found Matt de Boer, Clancee Pearce, Michael Barlow, Alex Silvagni, Lee Spurr, Sam Menegola, Matt Taberner and Bailey Banfield in the rookie draft, and plenty of gems late in the national draft.
It would have been interesting to see how our team looked if some of our first-rounders had panned out.
Morabito (#4) is 26 years old
Jayden Pitt (#20) is 25
Josh Simpson (#17) is 24
Michael Apeness (#17) is 23.
Those players should be part of the core of our team, but didn’t pan out. Mora was a great pick until his body gave out, Pitt might not have been anything but it was too early to judge. Simpson didn’t work out, but I thought it was a good pick, and Apeness has never got a clear run at it because of injuries. That’s not so say any of them were bad picks (although Pitt probably was), given the ‘first rounders’ were actually second-round picks in disguise. Still, how much better would our team have been if the Sutcliffes and T-Bones of the world were squeezed out by Morabito and Simpson? We’ll never know.
He’s put in 11 years at Freo, I’m sure he’s worked hard, he’s not been given the arse, and another club thinks enough of him to give him the job of making sure a club legend (Silvagni) doesn’t bugger up the place. Thanks for everything Brad. I’m not sure if you were any good at Freo, but I hope you suck at your next gig.
