I think the bigger picture for Cerra is - if I want to go home, where am I likely to end up??
I can’t see the club capitulating like they did with Jeff White and accept a low ball offer from his destination ‘club of choice’ (we only got pick 21 for the future Melbourne club champion and AA of 2004). Certainly not after the way we dealt with Weller last year.
Cerra is worth a top 3 pick all day so that means if he wants to get to a contending Vic team and not a basket case like Carltank or the Deaf Cheats - those contending clubs will have to trade up to get a pick to satisfy us. Otherwise, off to the draft he goes and into a crap Vic team. Or worse, he goes up to Queensland.
If he is, as it seems, an intelligent young man - he would know this.
We’ve given him a level of games in his first year that he simply would not have got in a top line side.
Davies-Uniake was taken before Cerra and has only played 4 games.
Building a tank on young players takes time - and in particular - game time. You hear it all the time that no amount of training compares to the intensity of an actual game.
In a perfect world Cerra would have been put on ice weeks ago - but we are far from being in a perfect world so they keep pumping games into the kids. If they only improve 1% each game, whether that be through their own development or by learning off other players, that’s worth the short term pain of poor results, IMHO.
This year was always going to be a hard slog and so it’s turned out to be. Should we be putting in the sort of performances of yesterday at this time next year - then that’s a different story altogether.
