After taking a breath and letting the overly lengthy draft period wash over me, I want to have a closer look at the drawn-out, five-club ‘mega-deal’ completed to get Dayne Beams to his desired destination.
Obviously the Lions are laughing, being able to essentially use their first two selections at pick 5 and 25 in the draft to acquire a Collingwood best and fairest winner and All-Australian.
Already one of the elite midfielders in the competition, at 24 Beams should be coming into his prime. The Lions were the beneficiary of the ‘go-home’ factor which saw them lose a number of players last year.
Jack Crisp, while a solid young player, had his limitations and his inclusions in the trade with Collingwood is similar to the proverbial set of steak knives.
The other big winner on the surface appears to be the Cats, who managed to shuffle out flanker Travis Varcoe and bring in a potential game-changer in Mitch Clark. Obviously this is a gamble for a club in desperate need of a second tall forward, as Clark has battled serious foot and personal issues over the past few years, but at his best he is a match winner. Clark and Hawkins can take the Cats back into premiership contention, which slipped toward the end of 2014.
While Varcoe does provide dash, turning 27 next year and with so many past injury setbacks you wonder if his body will hold out.
The only issue for the Cats is that having also lost Allen Christensen (another great trade for the Lions) they have lost a lot of pace and will head to the draft with that in mind.
In the middle are the Demons, who on the surface are losers having lost the services of their one-time star. But, given his time away from the game, they have done well to receive anything in return. So acquiring a hard-running senior back man from the Pies in Heritier Lumumba seems like a shrewd piece of business.
However if reports are true of a $2 million deal over four years, they have paid significant overs for him. Secondly, and more importantly, Lumumba is a polarising figure who seemed to end his time at Collingwood having got an entire club offside with behaviour which had long been tolerated rather than accepted by the club.
Is he the sort of figure the Demons are looking for to fill the void of older leaders? I hope for the Demons and ‘Harry O’s’ sake the fresh start is a winner for both player and club.
In regards to the losers, firstly the Kangaroos seem to have gone for broke this off-season, poaching older players to help push them from top-four to premiership contender in 2015. In doing so they assumed Levi Greenwood’s re-signing would be a straight-forward task, it proved anything but.
In the end, having been pushed down the salary cap food chain, the Kangaroos lost their inside grunt man to the Magpies for a mid-20s second-round pick, which seems under his current value. Whether his season was a one-off or he builds on it will determine how badly the Kangaroos feel Greenwood’s loss, but it’s a trade they could have avoided with better player management.
Finally to the Magpies and any team which loses a young All-Australian is going to feel some pain and they did well to try and salvage their loss by playing hard ball well into the second week of the trade period.
Eventually they gave up Beams, Lumumba, pick 25 and pick 67 (though this would not have been used) for three players (Crisp, Varcoe and Greenwood), along with pick 5. Obviously the number five draft pick is all speculation at this stage but given the talent you would expect a class player to come from it.
Of those three recycled players, Crisp is more a hopeful punt, with Varcoe brought in to fill the Lumumba void, while Greenwood should provide support to Scott Pendlebury and Steele Sidebottom. On the surface they haven’t done to badly but the issue Nathan Buckley and his recruiters have failed to rectify is the squad’s poor skill level by foot.
All three players kicking skills are below the AFL average and in Crisp and Greenwood they have been recruited to take Luke Ball’s position, something Taylor Adams was brought in to do last year. Varcoe managed 23 games in 2014 – the most since his break out year in the Cats’ premiership of 2011 – yet did not obtain a top-ten finish in the club best and fairest, which should be a concern on how highly the Cats rated him.
Buckley has certainly reshaped the club and has orchestrated great picks which have obtained some quality youngsters for years to come. But the concern is that with the dismantling of the much famed ‘rat-pack’ he has not properly addressed the areas which required improvement, something which again has not been achieved in the 2014 trade period.
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