Yeti, unfortunately your response is much like many of your posts. Totally subjective and relying on unprovable variables as ‘evidence’ to support your minority views.
I never said Lyon had or has an elite group of players to work with. That’s usually the domain of the Lyon-haters to mitigate the success we achieved under him from 2012-15.
In fact, myself and plenty of others have pointed out many times that Lyon inherited a ‘working class’ list that he managed to extract maximum effort from in order to get us our maiden and only GF appearance and McClelland Trophy.
Since (and I’d argue, before) he’s became head coach, the List Management has been poor aside from the past 2 seasons and the fact that almost every player we’ve delisted since 2012 has disappeared from the AFL landscape backs that opinion up.
There are a few that have gone onto be good players elsewhere - Menegola, Roberton (home sick) & De Boer - and a few traded/free agents like Weller, Mayne & Crozier are going ok elsewhere too - but we’ve used their compensation/draft picks to bring in blokes like BHill , Wilson & Brayshaw - all improvements on what we had.
Out of 49 delistings since 2011, only 3, are still on another AFL club list. Another 4 (Broughton, Silvagni, Mzungu & Barlow) were picked up by other clubs but all those have since been let go.
From a trading perspective, we’ve traded out 5 players in that period and they have played a combined total of 102 games for their respective clubs - that’s an average of 2.5 games per season, per traded player. As an aside, 39 of those games were from last season trades Weller & Crozier.
So any objective analysis would suggest that the players drafted by us and subsequently let go are, in the majority, not up to AFL standard. That includes a first round draft pick (Simpson) and several second and third round selections.
Some will no doubt try and argue Lyon ‘ruined’ them for anyone else - and that would also fit into the MO of trying to make a personal opinion fact by proposing a hypothetical scenario that can’t be factually assessed.
I also used the term ‘fake’ supporter as a general term for those who I believe claim to be Freo supporters but who do nothing but criticise the club and pine for days or yore when losing playing ‘attractive’ footy in different coloured jumpers was better than winning playing ‘ugly’ footy in ‘rebranded’ jerseys. Go ask a broad cross section of fans if they enjoyed being 0-9 in 2001 more than 9-0 in 2015?? But if some feel slighted by its use - I guess if the shoe fits....
On a positive note, it looks like Gaff has committed to WC on a long term contract so the planning to exact retribution upon the soulless coward at the next Derby can now begin.
That also counts WC out of the race for one of Lobb or Kelly as they won’t have the draft picks to get both.
