There has been a lot of discussion about the state of our team list, the rebuild and the coach of late.
In an attempt to analyse/decipher what is going on at the club to explain last weekends loss and our performance overall in 2018 and what the future may look like, I have assembled what I believe our best team looks like, looking at our age make-up for the upcoming season (2019) and number of games played (2018). In the team list below the numbers in the brackets are (age at start of 2019 season, games played in 2018). as this is also looking ahead, I have not included our 3 confirmed retirees Spurr, Pearce & Johnson.
Fremantle
B Ryan Nyhuis (22,8) Joel Hamling (25, 17) Luke Ryan (23, 20)
HB Nathan Wilson (26, 20) Alex Pearce (23,20) Connor Blakely (22, 13)
C Bradley Hill (25, 9) David Mundy (33, 21) Stephen Hill (28, 13)
HF Michael Walters (28, 18) Brennan Cox (20, 15) Harley Bennell (26, 0)
F Cam McCarthy (23, 16) Matt Taberner (25, 8) Hayden Ballantyne (31,16)
FOL Aaron Sandilands (36, 11) Nat Fyfe (27, 14) Lachie Neale (25, 21)
B Sean Darcy (20, 6) Ed Langdon (23, 20) Adam Cerra (19, 20) Andrew Brayshaw (19, 17)
B-mantle
B Cameron Sutcliffe (26, 4) Griffin Logue (19, 0) Ethan Hughes (24, 4)
HB Shane Kersten (25, 8) Taylin Duman (19, 9) Darcy Tucker (22, 16)
C Tommy Sheridan (25,12) Bailey Banfield (21, 20) Stefan Giro (19, 10)
HF Sam Switkowski (21, 1) Hugh Dixon (20, 0) Brady Grey (23, 3)
F Brandon Matera (26, 18) Michael Apeness (24, 5) Luke Strnadica (21, 0)
FOL Scott Jones (23, 5) Tom North (20, 0) Mitchell Crowden (19, 9)
B Lloyd Meek (20, 0) TBA TBA TBA
As a list assessment, I think that starting 22 looks pretty good, with a good combination of speed, power and contested ball winning both aerially and on the deck. If we could play that team regularly we would definitely be pushing for a top 8 spot and i wouldn't put a top 4 spot out of reach. Here lies the issue though, in 2018 we only averaged playing 14.7 players from that 22 each week, meaning we were forced to play around 7 players from the B-mantle team every week, that is approximately a 3rd of our team every week not being our first choice.
There are some deficiencies in our list though, the fact that Balla still gets the nod ahead of Matera (and hence we have just signed him on for another year) is a massive slap in the face for Lloyd.
Once Johnno retires there is no back-up for Alex Pearce at all, our tallest back-up defender is Duman at 193cm who would get eaten by some of the power forwards of the comp.
Nyhuis gets the nod ahead of some others because he is the only "lock down" small/medium defender we have (interested fact, we've won 5 of the 8 games he's played this year),
There is still no Genuine power forward, however with the form of Tabs, development of Cox and having Dixon, Apeness and Strnadica waiting in the wings we have no shortage of options there (although for some reason we still went into some games with Cam Mac as our sole target up forward which just made my mind boggle, however I cannot put that on LLoyd)
The inability to get Zac Clark back on the ground and his subsequent de-listing seemed to send the spreadsheets flying and they made a massive overcorrection by bringing in two more ruckmen in Jones & Meek, so now we have 4 x 200cm+ Ruck or Ruck/forwards who cannot get a game in the big league (again when injury hit I am not sure why Strnadica didn't get a call up to share the ruck duties).
In the midfield we lack depth in having strong bodied mids. Fyfe and Blakely provide most of our grunt in the contests and the tackling of Brayshaw has been a revelation. without insulting him because he's had a great debut year, the fact that Banfield has played 20 games when he has clearly been struggling in the last month of so says more about our lack of options than his form. This leads me to believe the axing of Barlow et all at the end of 2016 was more of a knee jerk reaction than forward planning.
overall though I think, as stated earlier, that our best 22 looks good. IMHO the biggest problem with our list is that we can't get them on the ground regularly enough. There are numerous examples, however the aforementioned Zac Clark, who apparently has made a miraculous recovery under the watchful eye of a WAFL clubs medical team, is one of the most damning. seconded only by the fact we sent Brad Hill back out onto the ground in round 2 after he had apparently only bruised his knee which turned out to be a 10 week injury, Stephen Hills ongoing Quad injuries and of course the entire Bennell fiasco has me thinking that our biggest issues are in our fitness staff which as has been mentioned by others has been an ongoing issue dating back to the Harvey years and is possibly the most damning blot on the Bond regime.
That and signing Ross on for 5 years!
I have run out of time but the point is, If we were to clear out the entire football dept. and brought in a medical team that could keep our best players on the ground. Then I reckon a coach with an attacking flare could get this team competitive by this time next year.
